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Feminist Resources

Incest

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Of the women who call Vancouver Rape Relief for being victims of sexual assault or rape, 27% were sexually abused in their childhood. Of these 27 %, 47% were victims of incest, meaning that the abuser was an adult family member.

September 9, 2022

When large numbers of girls are targeted for sexual abuse by men who are supposed to love and care for them, and who are in positions of both trust and authority, this forms a key component of the male violence against women and girls that creates and sustains the intersecting inequalities of sex and age. In other words, the patriarchal family structure facilitates and shields from view fathers who sexually abuse their daughters

By Janine Benedet & Isabel Grant
2020

“The spring I am nine years old I learn I am a thing, I learn girls cannot act. Somebody might save me. If I am lucky. I know I can’t save myself.”

By Stacey May Fowles
November 2014

Time to focus on the offenders In reality, prevention can only be achieved by an insistence on naming, by keeping the focus on who is doing what and to whom and why.

By Louise Armstrong
2003

To heal from the trauma of incest or early sexual abuse, we need to tell our stories to people who understand what we have experienced. Talking with others in counseling or in special support groups for women with a history of incest breaks the silence, helps us to gain perspective and know we are not alone, eases the pain and helps us feel healthier and stronger.

Incest, the sexualization of children cast in Procrustean form, has been transmogrified—hijacked. From a political issue framed by feminists as one of male violence against women and children—a sexual offense on the part of men, for which we demanded accountability, and censure—incest has, in these years, been coopted and re-formulated by the therapeutic ideology, as an illness in women, to be treated. In children, it is a prediction of illness to be treated.

By Louise Armstrong
1994

We correctly identified the permission for men to molest their own children as a method by which girl children learned, at a very tender age, their sexual vulnerability, their status as sexual objects for male gratification.

By Louise Armstrong
1990

Child sexual assault in the family is a widespread phenomenon that appears from most indications to be perpetrated primarily against young girls by their fathers or male guardians.

By Claudia Wayne and Laureen France, Feminist Alliance Against Rape
1980

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