The Pain Of The Last Taboo

My name is Roseanne and I am an incest survivor. That is the nasty little secret that has taken all my energy and all my courage to keep." More than 1,000 survivors of childhood sexual trauma crowded into Denver's Montview Presbyterian Church to listen to the shaky, tearful testimony that echoed thousands of anonymous confessions in therapy sessions around the country. As anyone with a TV set now knows, this speaker was anything but anonymous. She was Roseanne Arnold, formerly Roseanne Barr, the TV celebrity who had just adopted her husband's name in a rejection of her allegedly abusive family.

It's easy to be cynical about the spectacle of celebrities stepping forward to confess the most excruciating details of their private lives. The American public is at least as interested in titillation as being "helped" by such confessions. Even so, the claims of childhood sexual abuse by Roseanne Arnold, Oprah Winfrey, La Toya Jackson, former Miss America Marilyn Van Derbur Atler and others amount to more than just fresh perversion for the tabloids. They are among thousands of people only now confronting a searing childhood pain-abuse inflicted not by strangers (or kids playing doctor) but by parents and older relatives. Experts caution that some of these stories are delusions. Still, by any standard, breaking the ancient taboo against incest is now recognized as a fact of life across America.

Among recent autobiographies coming to bitter terms with the problem is "Dancing With Daddy," in which writer and Harvard graduate Betsy Petersen accuses her now deceased father, a respected doctor, of having sexually abused her from the time she was 3 1/2 until she was 18. In June, Mount Holyoke professor Carolivia Herron published "Thereafter Johnnie," a novel she claims was based on her own shocking experiences of rape by a male relative when she was 3. He vehemently denies the charges, calling Herron "crazy as a bat."

Statistics on incest are hard to come by. Most studies lump incest in with all sexual-abuse cases, whether committed by an adult family member or not. But because childhood sexual abuse generally does take place within families, the figures suggest how widespread the problem is. Most researchers agree that the best available figures on sexual abuse come from a national survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted in 1985 for the Los Angeles Times by psychologist David Finkelhor and his colleagues. The scientists found that 27 percent of the women and 16 percent of the men disclosed a history of some kind of sexual abuse during their childhood. (Sexual abuse by an adult is defined as the touching, rubbing or penetrating of genitals.) Even discounting contact with nonrelatives and nonsiblings, this is still a startling number of children victimized.

The number of incestuous sexual-abuse cases is either growing rapidly or being reported more often-probably both. In 1986, all of the nation's child protective agencies recorded 83,000 complaints against people responsible for the child's welfare. By 1990, the number had leapt to 375,000. Because many cases of abuse still go unreported, the actual number of victims--who come from all social classes, races and religions--is probably much higher. Whether it reaches the one in five Americans suggested by the Finkelhor study is pure conjecture.

In any event, incest survivors say that as long as they keep quiet, their numbers will increase. "This is a disease that can only thrive in silence," Arnold told NEWSWEEK. "I have a social and moral obligation to speak out." Arnold's story-and the manner in which it first surfaced in her conscious mind--is typical of many such cases. Two years ago, she says, her husband, Tom Arnold, phoned her from his drug treatment-rehabilitation program and told her that he had been sexually abused by a babysitter when he was a child. After she hung up the phone, Arnold says, she began to shake and sweat. "I started to see little scenes or pictures," she says. "Little flicks of memory. And then they kept coming and getting bigger and bigger. I knew I had been physically and emotionally abused and I spoke of it often. But I didn't remember the sexual part until two years ago, when my head burst open. It was like bad memories times 10." Her father, she alleges, told her to play with his penis in the bathtub. (He could not be reached for comment.) "I repressed it for 36 years," she says.