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The Best Kept Secret: Sexual Abuse of Children

Florence Rush, Alice Miller (Editor)

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A study which shows that sexual abuse of children has an extensive history and has been - and still is - condoned by society. The author is on the board of New York Women Against Rape and works with Women Against Pornography. Her commentary is coupled with the testimonies of victims.

GenresNonfictionPsychologyFeminismAbuseHistorySociology

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

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Florence Rush

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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews

Rhonda Rae Baker

396 reviews

June 18, 2012

This is infuriating, not because of the way it is written but because society is so messed up...I'm pressing on through and feel that everyone should read this. Will continue to reference this important book. I am not shocked but extremely upset at the realities of this world we live in. So many of us are numb to what is going on all around us and it's been happening since the beginning of time.

Holy Crap...the best-kept secret is right...a tragedy!

I cannot express how important this book is...how the truth needs to be exposed and children protected. They are not guilty of anything...it is the adults that have continually usurped athority over them and tood advantage of the little ones.

A more detailed review may be coming soon. For now, trust me, please get a copy of this and dig in...we can change the world if we are willing to face the cold hard facts of truth...(-:

abuse dysfunction educational

Fran

337 reviews132 followers

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June 16, 2025

Victorian section of this is absolutely insane and has confirmed for me that my instincts about the period were always absolutely on point, despite the 7438901247389210 "it wasn't that bad" copers in my ear at all times. Sitting here seething with rage. Rush does an amazing job of compiling first-hand accounts straight from the mouths of the predators themselves, which curiously are ~lost to time~ when alluded to in many academic publications on the topic published today. Turns out we actually have a shit ton of information not just about Victorian men fetishizing children, but also about how they got off on the pain they inflicted when they raped them. Viewer discretion advised: there are some absolutely sickening passages in this that blatantly discuss human trafficking of children, sexual abuse of children, rapists self-reporting their sadistic thoughts about their victims, and so on.

abuse dissertation-research feminism

Lore LongSoulSystem

243 reviews487 followers

July 14, 2024

No leer si se está con tendencias suicidas o tendencias de quemarlo todo.

2024 gender lgbt

Rosie

454 reviews40 followers

June 28, 2024

This was a fantastic book. Also, a lot of the time I came across passages that were included in Women against violence against Women, which was surprising but made sense, since this book was at first a paper presented at a conference (and Women against violence against Women is a collection of conference papers). I learned a lot of new information, and it was really fascinating, though horrifying. One thing that stood out to me (which surprised me the most/I had never ever heard of) was how, during the witch burnings, the women and children who said they had “copulated with the devil” had been RAPED/sexually abused and didn’t have a reference point for that so attributed it to Satan! I have NEVER heard of that (which I suppose makes sense, as I haven’t read any book which focuses solely on the witch burnings rather than mentions them in passing or in one particular chapter, but then I also suspect this isn’t the kind of thing that would be mentioned in a non-explicitly second-wave feminist book on the witch burnings), and it is logical and makes perfect sense, in a depressing and terrifying sort of way. Also, I thought the whole section of the book discussing Freud was really well done and interesting, and, though I, in the past, read a book about Freud’s seduction theory, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory, there were some facets of the story that Rush presented which were new to me or which were only brushed over in the book – one example being Freud’s sexual dream about his daughter alongside his realization that his father was implicated by Freud’s developing seduction theory. Or maybe they were mentioned? It’s been a little while since I read that book, so my memory is foggy. I think the author might have avoided going over the thing about Freud’s daughter in any detail, since he was working at Freud’s library with permission from Freud’s daughter Anna Freud, and eventually he lost his position due to what he was uncovering/writing about, as the library and everyone disapproved of his research/didn’t want to hear about it. I would recommend that book, actually – it’s very well-done and informative. But back to this one – it’s just great. The length is good, too – basically 200 pages of dense, painstaking information. What I would really like is an update, written in the 2010s or 2020s! All of the book was so illuminating, but it’s annoying to not know how things have changed, and the internet is not cooperative with my hyper-specific Google searches!

Quotes:

“The fact is that child molesters rarely understand that they have done anything wrong. An incestuous father is surprised to learn that his behavior is punishable by law because he believes that sexual access to his children is his right. And this right is reinforced by the media in films, advertising and pornography, which constantly eroticize children, and by professionals who endorse father-daughter incest and adult-child sex. Offenders find further support in history, where our Hebrew, Christian, Greek and Roman forefathers sexually used male and female children. Indeed, men can point to a past in which little girls became brides at age ten, and argue that marriage and cohabitation between men and children is still common in certain parts of the world. In Lepcha, for example, old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight and nobody minds. The fictional prototype pedophile, Humbert Humbert, justified his interest in Lolita by pointing to Dante, who fell in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, and Petrarch, who fell in love with his Laura when she was twelve.” (14)

“Witches are generally envisioned as ‘old, lame, bleary-eyed, foul and full of wrinkles.’ But since sex was integral to witchcraft, those charged were young, in their prime, and within the age range of sexual activity. The progeny of witches were considered to be automatically contaminated, for ‘how else could it happen that . . . tender girls of eight have raised up tempests and hailstorms unless they have been dedicated to the devil under such a pact by their mothers . . . which is the way all witches begin.’ Jean Bodin, sixteenth-century law professor and Carmelite monk, in order to root out this heresy established that the usual legal measures were not applicable. Little girls at age six (legal age for sexual consent in France) were of an age to copulate with the devil, and therefore old enough to stand trial. Bodin found burning by fire too swift (half an hour from beginning to end) and preferred the extended agony of cautery by a hot iron for both children and adults.

Henri Bouget, a prominent lawyer of the same century and nationality, reasoned that once in Satan’s clutches, the reform of children under twelve was impossible. He systematically tortured eight-year-old Loyse Mailley until she named accomplices and thus created the basis for a mass witch hunt. Nicholas Remy, demonologist and Inquisitor, found ‘no lack of examples to prove that their age does not restrain children from committing deeds of witchcraft.’ In England, Jennie Device, age eight, after incriminating her mother, burned with her as a witch. In the same country both Mary Hicks, age nine, and her mother, Elizabeth, were burned at the stake. In America, five-year-old Sara Good was found capable of ‘casting an eye’ and was imprisoned in chains with her mother. In Luther’s Germany, in 1628, Anna Rausch, age twelve, Sybille Lutz, eleven, and little Murchin, eight and a half, all confessed to having had sexual relations with the incubus (male demon). Sybille and Anna were put to death, but Murchin and some other children were remanded to their fathers for reformation. In a letter to an unidentified friend in 1624, the chancellor to the Prince-Bishop of Wurtzburg stated that ‘there have been 300 children of three and four who are said to have intercourse with the devil. I have seen children of seven put to death.’

In Mora, Sweden, in 1669, authorities claimed that the devil had hundreds of children in his power; fifteen were burned and thirty-six between nine and fifteen were condemned to be scourged at the church door weekly for a year. In the Hague at the close of the seventeenth century, eight youths under age fifteen and one girl age twelve ‘confessed’ to fornication with the devil and died at the stake.

In a society where sexual abuse went unhampered and people believed in evil spirits, it was not difficult to attribute a sexual offense to a supernatural spirit . . . Victims of sexual abuse, without a recourse, found it simpler to blame or even believe that spectral demons rather than flesh and blood men had violated them [emphasis mine].” (38-9)

“The image of the innocent child emerged during the eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in all media forms, but her virgin-whore demeanor created ambivalence in the noblest of men. Even the pious William Wordsworth, torn between reverence and desire, poetically subjected his ‘darling child’ to an ‘overseeing power to kindle or restrain.’ The lyric poet Ernest Dowson dedicated a series of sonnets to little girls, and to be assured of their constant purity occasionally condemned them to an early grave. In ‘The Dead Child’ he ordered a young beloved to ‘Lie still and be forevermore a child.’ Unlike Wordsworth, however, Dowson stepped beyond poetic fantasy and at age twenty-seven courted Adelaide, a twelve-year-old waitress. He proposed marriage to her before her fifteenth birthday but, under close parental control, she refused. Dowson, heartbroken, found gratification elsewhere. In a letter to a friend, he confided that he was compelled to give up underaged ‘tarts’ because England had raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen and ‘le jeu ne valait,’ or ‘the game is not worth it.’ Edgar Allen Poe also killed off his child love in verse when a wind came along, ‘chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.’ But at age twenty-six, his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia was all too real. Charles Dickens moved two continents to tears with accounts of the angelic, immaculate ‘Little Nell.’ He too prevented any possibility of corrupt maturity by sending her at fourteen to a pristine grave. After a marriage of twenty year, Dickens left his wife and eleven children and set up the eighteen-year-old Ellen Ternan as his mistress. John Ruskin, the greatest art critic of his day, was positively foolish when it came to little girls. While appraising a Kate Greenway illustration, he went into raptures over one child whom he said was ‘just three days and a minute too old for me’ and mourned two other tiny ones because ‘I think they already have lovers.’ At thirty-nine, Ruskin fell madly in love with his nine-year-old pupil, Rose la Touche. He never stopped pursuing (and tormenting) her until this sicky, deeply disturbed child died in her mid-twenties.” (58)

“Despite continued evidence, Freud never again, after the 1896 presentation, publicly promoted his seduction theory. True, his theory was poorly received, and Krafft-Ebing ridiculed it, but Freud’s reticence was hardly the result of adverse opinion; even then he was prepared to create a disturbance. It was Freud’s own faltering conviction that prevented risk of further exposure. Though staunch on sexual trauma as the cause of neurosis, he was extremely unhappy with the idea of father as seducer, and though able to name him in the privacy of the Fliess correspondence, he was unable to do so publicly. Consequently, his 1896 papers were weak on identifying the perpetrators of the sexual trauma; he cited almost as many categories of sexual abusers as he cited actual cases, and created a series of unlikely contradictions. The grownup stranger as sexual abuser was the most infrequent offender, he said; nurses, maids, governesses, teachers and near relations were more often responsible. But children of the same age (or very close) and of the opposite sex, such as brother and sister, most frequently created sexual trauma. This large category of predominantly female offenders did not fit the illness in question. Hysteria was primarily a female affliction (a ‘male hysteric’ was hard to find), and the sexual assaults Freud mentioned were heterosexual. Furthermore, in general discussion of sexual assault and hysteria, he always referred to the abuse of children by adults. Suddenly to claim that the largest number of offenders came from among children of the same age was a contradiction. The only credible abuser was the ‘real relation,’ whom Freud mentioned in passing but did venture to say ‘initiated sexual intercourse’ more often than one thinks. That Freud’s inconsistencies reflected his need to protect fathers was substantiated as more than a possibility by the editors of the Standard Edition (a collection of Freud’s work). They noted that in his 1896 papers on hysteria, Freud intentionally omitted and suppressed the role of fathers just as he had in the earlier Studies on Hysteria . . . The subjective reason for Freud’s cover-up was revealed to him (and us) when he began to explore his own disturbing and complex reactions to his father’s death . . .

As he traveled further into his past, he found that his desire for his mother had stirred hostility toward his father, and when he looked at this complex of infantile sexuality—desire for his mother and hatred for his father—he understood his own extreme anxiety as guilt resulting from an unconscious paternal death wish. Conscious now that he harbored deep paternal aggression, Freud confided to Fliess in an unpublished letter (dated February 11, 1897) that the number of fathers named by his patients as sexual molesters had truly alarmed him; with the father as prime abuser he had ‘inferred from the existence of some hysterical features in his brother and several sisters that even his father had been thus incriminated.’ But when it was later revealed to him in a dream that he was feeling overly affectionate toward Mathila, his daughter, he wrote to Fliess: . . . I do not want to do any more work. I have laid even dreams aside.” (89-91)

“With the elimination of the seduction theory and the adoption of the Oedipal complex in females, Freud had come full circle. The seduction theory incriminated incestuous fathers, while the Oedipal theory insisted that seduction was a fantasy, an invention, not a fact—and it incriminated daughters. When Freud replaced the seduction theory with the Oedipus complex he relieved himself of his ‘neurotica’ and, as we have seen, vindicated fathers but implicated daughters. However, one must remember that when Freud arrived at the seduction theory, he did so by listening carefully and intently to his female patients; when he arrived at his Oedipal theory, he did so by listening carefully and intently to himself. His monumental Interpretation of Dreams (1900), the result of self-analysis and the basis for all his later theories, came from his memories, his dreams and his experiences, and, unfortunately, his theories strongly bear the stamp of his personality and his time, sex and class. The value of certain Freudian insights is not here denied, but in his attempt to shape a particular personal conflict into a universal mold, he reverted from a cultural to a biological determination of neurosis. This shift was damaging to the female, for it was she, not the abuser, who bore the brunt of her own seduction. This so-called ‘seduction fantasy,’ this myth of incestuous wish for the father, became integral and inevitable to the woman’s nature, and therefore, even if she had been actually assaulted, the problem was not the assault but the result of her innate compulsion to possess a penis.” (95-6)

“Despite the enormous importance psychotherapy places on sexual experience, I was taught as a social worker never to deal directly with the sexual abuse of a child in treatment. Annie, age twelve, had been in an incestuous relationship with her father for two years before she came to the Bloomington Home. The father was in prison, not for incest, but for robbery, and Annie’s mother, in deep depression, was hospitalized. The children knew that the social worker had access to case records, and I made it a point not to pretend I knew nothing of their past. I told Annie that I was aware of her relationship with her father. She hung her head, but when I suggested she talk about it or not, she moved on to other things. I reported the interview to my supervisor, a psychiatrist, who was appalled. ‘She can’t talk about it. She’s too guilty and ashamed,’ he exclaimed. I had thought I might help her to understand that her father was the guilty one, and he was the one to be ashamed. But my supervisor would have none of that. The actual event did not shame her, he continued. It was her deep, unconscious, incestuous wish for her father that made her feel guilty. One must listen carefully, he went on, be sensitive to the nuances of the child’s fantasies, and at the right moment help her to understand that her shame evolved from her own deep sexual desires.” (100)

“Because of a general reluctance to establish the sexual abuse of children as a serious offense and a tendency to forgive the molester and blame the victim, the law and its agencies have made prosecution of sexual offenders against children so difficult that they are almost never apprehended, convicted, sentenced or imprisoned. In a study of 256 known cases of sexual abuse of children involving 250 offenders conducted by the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, parents and family found the police process so trying and frightening to the children that 76 cases were dropped, leaving 175 cases eligible for prosecution. Once charges were officially made, the number of interrogations and court appearances resulted in such trauma to the children and their families that another 77 were so discouraged that they too dropped the charges. This left 97 cases. Of this number, 39 offenders either absconded, were acquitted or left pending, leaving 58 to be tried. Of this number, 49 pleaded guilty in order to take a lesser charge such as assault rather than rape or incest; 4 were found guilty as charged, and 5 were committed to mental institutions. Of the 53 found guilty (excluding the 5 sent to mental institutions), 30 escaped from jail sentence by suspension or fine; 18 were sentenced to jail from six months to a year, and 5 received indeterminate sentences.” (156-7)

“As the 1970s began, it was estimated that of all reported cases, one boy was molested for every ten girls. This figure has now jumped to three boys for every ten girls. Some studies project that as 25 percent of all females will be molested before age thirteen, 10 percent of all males will experience a sexual encounter with an adult in childhood. Currently there has also been a growing awareness of father-son incest.” (175)

“The purpose of a revolution is to unseat an entrenched political power. But no sooner do some of us, women and men, begin to expose and challenge the male abuse of sexual power than this effort is co-opted and dissipated as it is swept under the ‘sexual liberation’ umbrella. From D.H. Larence to Hugh Hefner, it is Lady Chatterley, the superbunny or the bachelor girl who insists that the offer of her body plus a bottle of wine is ‘downright upright,’ who is projected as the model of the liberated woman. Similarly, the little girl who is said to be free of sexual hangups will giggle at the flasher because he’s ‘just plain silly,’ understand that Uncle Teddy touched her all over because he is ‘friend sick’ and will not be disturbed when Daddy crawls into her bed and fondles her. In this male utopia, men will never be burdened by emotional traumas, veneral disease, pregnancy, commitments, responsibilities, charges of rape, stautory rape or child molestation as the consequence of their sexual behavior.” (193)

feminist-studies

sára pudu

53 reviews

May 27, 2025

such an amazing, informative, important book.

Madeleine

20 reviews3 followers

December 19, 2019

Un libro di straordinaria importanza.
Un percorso che non si propone di lasciare il lettore illeso, ma di scuoterlo, di risvegliarlo - d'altronde niente che abbia una reale importanza può permettersi di essere facile da digerire, così da non turbare le coscienze.
I brividi sono cosa buona e giusta, quando si solleva il velo della violenza lungo migliaia di anni, e si vanno a ricercare - e si trovano - le cause intrecciate alla trama del passato e del presente.
Per cambiare strada bisogna prima saper riconoscere i meccanismi del problema, per saperli riconoscere bisogna avere coraggio e perseveranza nell'ammettere di aver bisogno di aiuto.
Un pezzetto alla volta si può migliorare il mondo, si può imparare a proteggere chi va protetto, si può imparare a non lavarsene le mani, a non pensare che non ci si possa far più di tanto.
Questo libro non è un libro che si possa dimenticare; è destinato a restare nella mente del lettore, e destinato ad essere ripensato e rielaborato, così che forse, tutti coloro che hanno incrociato questa strada, possano a loro volta portare nel mondo un po' del cambiamento che questo libro ha iniziato in loro.
E che il cambiamento sia, dunque - dopotutto è proprio così che hanno origine le rivoluzioni: di bocca in bocca, di mano in mano, di gentilezza in gentilezza.
Forse un giorno vedremo un futuro davvero più limpido e dolce, e di tanta guerra sarà valsa la pena.

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