On April 17, 1971, the idea of fathers as sexual predators was inscribed on the feminist agenda. A group called the New York Radical Feminists held a two-day conference on rape at which social worker Florence Rush declared, "The family itself is an instrument of sexual and other forms of child abuse ... the sexual abuse of female children is a process of education that prepares them to become the wives and mothers of America." [/siz]
In the latest issue of The Women's Quarterly from the Independent Women's Forum, Rael Jean Isaac writes of the conference as a turning point. Radical feminists had not really considered child abuse because, as Andrea Dworkin commented, "we never had any idea how common it was."
How common is it? In her sensational and influential book Father-Daughter Incest (1981), the psychiatrist Judith Harman estimated that victims of incest numbered "in the millions." Is this a reasonable estimate? The answer calls for some rough math.
According to a 1999 study on child maltreatment conducted by the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect, the female child population that year was 32,617,720. The sexual abuse rate is given as 1.6 for every 1,000 girls. Assuming that every attack was incestuous, this means 52,160 girls were sexually assaulted by family members.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics basically supports this number. Its report, Sexual Assault of Young Children, indicates that 50,700 (or 1.56 per 1,000) girls were sexually assaulted by adult male family members during 1996 — presuming a constant population.
If true, this means that about 2.9 percent of women were incestuously assaulted before the age of 18. In a population of 130,000,000 women, about 3.7 million women would be victims.
These figures are probably inflated, if only because they assume that every incident involves a new child and is not a repeat attack. Nevertheless, Herman's estimate is plausible ... and horrifying.
Feminists should be applauded for shedding bright light on the sexual abuse of children. But they should be deeply ashamed of how they have used this information. Feminists have attached the pain of children to a political agenda of their own.
Herman's book bluntly states that the rape of daughters is "an inevitable result" of the "patriarchal family structure." That is, the traditional family with gingham curtains in the kitchen and a father who comes home after work each day results in the rape of daughters.
