Customer Reviews

The Secret Trauma: Incest In The Lives Of Girls And Women, Revised Edition

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Since first published in 1986, this work has been the most representative social survey on experience of sexual violence. It is a classic!

Russell describes her monumental study in five parts: study, problem, victims, perpetrators, and families, which involves all the relevant aspects. And each section is rich with case examples and very readable. What fascinates me most is the way she approaches these individuals. This should be a reference for all of those working with violence survivors.

Though method of analysis seems a bit out-dated after 15 years, but that is what you expect in classics. Likewise introduction for 1999 edition is not at all concise. You don't need all the details of what happened since the first edition. Because the classic remains the same regardless of time.

What is the sound of an axe grinding? Open this book to any random page and you'll hear it. It's there in the ridiculously predictable way Russell bends over backwards to interpret the data in the way most favorable to her thesis. (Which is, in a nutshell: it's not just that men commit basically all sexual abuse, it's the *fundamental* nature of their sexuality that leads them to do it. In other words: men are beasts. Got that?) It's there in her perpetually slanting adjectives. And it's *so* there in my favorite chapter heading: "Female Incest Perpetrators: Why Are There So Few Of Them?" Gee, maybe because Russell deliberately excluded all men from her survey? Or because, even when one of her female subjects describes incestuously abusing her younger brother, she blandly admits, "[The brother's experience] wouldn't have been counted in our survey because our methodology was only designed to collect experiences where the woman was the victim - not the victimizer." (Read that sentence again and tell me this is a work of science.) Don't feel too bad for that kid though. Russell is quick to assure us that people abused by women are less traumatized by the experience. And besides: those female perpetrators were usually victimized by a *man* in the first place!

And guess what? All four blurbs on the back cover of the book are from other female academics. Anyone want to bet on what model axe *they* use?