FROM CHILDHOOD TO ADULTHOOD, THE ENDURING TRAUMA OF INCEST:LESSONS LEARNED FROM FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONS IN TURKEY AND INDIA

WORKING WITH SURVIVORS OF INCEST

Paper presented at the XIX. International Society for Preventionof Child Abuse and Neglect (ISPCAN) Congress, Istanbul, Turkey,

September 11, 2012

by

AKANKSHA MISRA

MA Cultural Studies

Sabanci University

Orta Mahalle, Universite Caddesi No: 27

34956 Tuzla, Istanbul, TURKEY

Phone: (90 212) 292 4939

Fax: (90 212) 252 3293

Email: amisra@sabanciuniv.edu

Abstract

In recent years, incest and child sexual abuse has been gainingincreasing media and civil society interest in countries of theGlobal South like Turkey and India. Yet the real “voices” of themany children and adult survivors continue to be lost andsilenced in both these countries and the academic analyses oftheir experiences and their struggle against incest continue tobe scarce.This paper forms a part of a larger ethnographic study analysingthe workings of three feminist organizations: Mor Çatı and KAMERin Turkey and RAHI in India, and how they challenge the existinggender discourses in order to break the silence surroundingincest and provide support to adult women survivors. This paperhighlights how all three organizations make striking connectionsbetween childhood and adulthood when bound together within theexperience of incest, and how focus on education and familystructures may reduce the occurrence of incest in children’slives, that eventually impacts their adulthood.The paper begins by grounding incest in the prism of feministanalysis that views incest as a form of violence and challengesthe family discourse of denial around an abuse that causesirredeemable effects in adulthood and the way adults perceivetheir childhood. It then defines genuine survivor discourse thatcan truly challenge this issue and empower survivors, beforemoving onto the need of changing existing education structures inthe way they train children around gender and violence. Only byrevamping these structures can an alternate discourse on home andfamily in societies like Turkey and India be created; one thatinteracts more comfortably with the existing Human Rightsdiscourses of the Global North in reducing the occurrence of thisabuse.

Keywords: Incest, India, Turkey, Feminism, Organizations

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Anuja Gupta from RAHI, Feride and Fatma from MorÇatı, and Nebahat Akkoç and Kamuran from KAMER for granting me theopportunity to interview and learn from them—the modest result ofwhich is this paper. My husband William, as always, acted notonly as my constant supporter but also helped proofread thispaper for me. I would like to dedicate this paper to my sonRuhan, who is my greatest achievement and a constant reminderthat children have the right to a beautiful life, untouched byabuse; a life which should lead onto a wonderful and satisfyingadulthood.

Introduction

High incidence of incest in slums: Survey

- December 21, 2001; Times of India (Lucknow), India

Rise in sexual abuse of minors in Turkey sets alarm bells ringing

- June 07, 2008; Today’s Zaman, Turkey

It is not uncommon to find such headlines, especially over

the past decade, in countries of the Global South such as Turkey

and India. As a matter of fact, there has been a recent

proliferation of news items, articles, movies, literature,

research reports, and internet blogs in both Turkey and India

regarding incest and Child Sexual Abuse (henceforth CSA). In the

more recent articles on the issue in the two countries, there has

also been more emphasis on the fact that both CSA and incest

occur in “normal” families as well and that they are a regular

problem and not an anomaly. For instance, the highly publicized

Mumbai incest case in 2009 (Ahmed, 2009), where the younger of

two daughters from a regular, middle-class family in the

outskirts of Mumbai accused their father and a family friend

“Godman” of raping her and her sister in collusion with their

mother’s support. In Turkey as well, the incest report released

in 2009 by the Population Association1 based in Ankara in

collaboration with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA),

1 Tr. Nüfusbilim Derneği

1

clearly states the prevalence of incest in the country as a

significant issue that is mostly swept under the rug (Çavlin-

Bozbeyoğlu, 2009). According to one report, 250,000 “minors” in

Turkey have been sexually abused in the past decade, with most of

the abusers being either “first-degree relatives or other close

of kin.” (Pakkan, 2011, p. 1). In India as well, a 2007 study by

the Ministry of Women and Child Development revealed that across the

country 53.22% children were sexually abused and 50% of those

abusers were people known to them (Kacker, Varadan, & Kumar,

2007). The figures are staggering indeed.

While it is becoming increasingly possible to find

statistics of sexual abuse and other such “data” from countries

of the Global South, academic analyses of the experience of

incest, the struggle against it, and the conditions that foster

it continue to be scarce. As much as the media has helped in

bringing incest out to the open, one is forced to question

whether such media and civil society interest has really brought

any relief to the victims and survivors or have they been mere

scandals that have attracted attention for some time and then

subsided? In this paper I aim to highlight the importance of

survivor discourse in healing, empowering and, most importantly,

based on my research with three organizations in Turkey and India

that work with incest survivors, analyze discourses generated by

them on family and education structures. I propose that it is

only by seriously studying these discourses and proposing changes

2

in the way we look at families and provide education in these two

countries can we curb incest.

Incest, Feminism, and challenging the “Family”

Traditionally, academic models in anthropology and

psychology have focused on incest as a taboo and as a phenomenon

of human psyche, respectively. For instance, social structural

explanations by Lévi-Strauss claim the incest taboo as the basis

of kinship and society (Lévi-Strauss, 1949/1969), biosocial

explanations by Westermarck talk about the natural occurrence of

the taboo against incest due to affinity experienced in family

structures (Westermarck, 1891/1903), and, in contrast, the

psychoanalytical argument proposed by Freud assumes incest to be

inherent in human nature (Freud, 1924/1961). I have chosen to see

incest as an act of sexual abuse and to see it as exactly what it

is: an issue, a problem. Incest is the sexual abuse of children

in the hands of the people they trust most and more often than

not in their own safe haven—their home. It is a gross physical

violation of a child’s body, but worse still an act that

irrevocably scars one’s childhood and adulthood. Incest leaves

abused children and adult survivors incapable of completely

hating or loving their abusers, who also happen to be the very

people they were meant to trust. Incest is thus the greatest

breach of trust and a severe trauma.

Thus incest needs to be viewed as a form of violence—

domestic violence—and more specifically gender based violence. It

3

is the more powerful, usually men, who use and abuse the less

powerful, usually women and children, that they consider their

property. Therefore, it is impossible to look effectively at

incest as a form of CSA without a feminist perspective. After

all, it was feminism in the Global North that first brought out

the reality of domestic violence and made the personal political

in the 1970s, spreading to countries of the Global South like

Turkey and India in the form of the second wave feminist

movements in both countries in the 1980s (Purkayastha et al.,

2003; Sirman, 1989). In this paper therefore, I look into the

workings of three organizations2 in Turkey and India—all of whom

identify themselves as feminist organizations. Mor Çatı or “Purple

Roof Women’s Shelter” based in the urban center of Istanbul was

established in 1990 for victims of domestic abuse; KA-MER or Kadın

Merkezi (“Women’s Centre”) was established in 1997 in Diyarbakır

in Southeast Turkey to fight patriarchal oppression in a war-torn

region; and RAHI or “Recovering And Healing from Incest” based in

the capital city of India, New Delhi established in 1996, was set

up to provide healing support and services to adult (mainly)

women survivors of incest. Due to their origins and foundational

philosophies, Mor Çatı and KAMER in Turkey have more activist

leanings towards the issue of incest and although they provide

support to women and children approaching them, their more

voluble contribution has been fighting for legal rights for

victims of CSA. RAHI, established specifically as a healing

center for adult survivors has a more mental-health approach, and2 All interviews were conducted between December 2010 and April 2011

4

it is only off-late that it has been involved in the creation of

a draft bill on the prevention of sexual offences against

children by the National Commission for Protection of Child

Rights (NCPCR) in association with the Union Law Ministry of

India. All three organizations, however, have been crucial in

creating media awareness of the issue and in doing so have

brought in a critical feminist perspective to it by openly

attacking the law, family, state, and other such patriarchal

institutions.

A comparison of Turkey and India presents an interesting

scenario because of the interesting common elements of both

nations’ situations. To begin with, feminism itself has a strong

history in both the countries. Whereas Indian feminist movements

had more political party-based beginnings than Turkish ones

(Kumar, 1999), both movements shifted focus from the state to the

personal, familial as sites of violence against women and

children (John, 1996). Politically speaking as well, both nations

emerged as independent republics in the early half of the

twentieth century and women played a major role, both as markers

of the new and “modern” nations (Arat, 1997; Burçak, 1977;

Chatterjee, 1993; Davis, 1986; Devji, 1994; Exertzoğlu, 2003;

Jayawardena, 1986; Simon, 2002; Somel, 2001; Young, 2001) and in

their respective freedom struggles (Jayawardena, 1986; Nussbaum,

2009; Sirman, 1989). As a matter of fact, women and children

continue to claim high priority in both Turkish and Indian

agendas where their “emancipation” still signifies major

5

development efforts of these two rapidly developing economies of

the world to join the ranks of the more “developed” nations. At a

more social level, the nuclear, middle-class, pious, and

bourgeois family ideal that emerged in both nascent Indian and

Turkish republics (Chatterjee, 1993; Donner, 2010; Jayawardena,

1986; Kumar, 1999) in many ways remains as strong as ever and

results in denial of issues like CSA within the family ideal,

along with the tendency to push them outside of the realm of this

family to poorer, more “backward” parts of the country occupied

by desperately impoverished or sexually depraved people

(especially women). For Turks, such backward regions are

invariably “Southeast Turkey” and for Indians it’s the slums and

ghettos in the metropolitan cities and other rural areas. The

region is never urban, never one’s own home.

Such emphasis on family sanctity in both countries obscures

the reality of incest which by its rampant existence, conversely,

is constantly shaking the sanctity of the family. In such

sacrosanct families the position of women and children is pre-

defined: Women remain closely tied to the “sacred family” (Kapur

and Cossman, 1999) and stand as important signifiers of familial

honor (Çavlin-Bozbeyoğlu, 2009; Gilligan & Akhtar, 2006). Women

are the good wives and mothers, while children are supposed to

revere their elders and all their rights are subsumed under the

umbrella of family, duty, honor and obligation. As a matter of

fact, seeing women and children as bearers of rights doesn’t

arise in the first place since the male patriarchal discourse on

6

family sanctity denies them the very privilege of being subjects

with human rights. All the women I interviewed complained about

how the emphasis on families undermined the rampant existence of

incest; and how the focus on the present, corporeal reality of

incestuous abuse ignored the future mental and emotional scars that

it leaves that require far more attention than the physical

abuse. Nebahat Akkoç, the founder of KAMER, in a speech on incest

delivered in Hakkari, Turkey at the Kurdish Women’s Congress in

2009 talked about how sexual crimes like incest are not just a

reflection of the injustices against women and girls, but

something deeper. It is about how women and children are made to

obey their families to such an extent that anything they do—which

includes the revelation of gross injustices against them such as

incest—is perceived as a threat to familial honor and unity (“Her

dört evden birinde”, 2009). In response to the reduction of

prison sentence of a man from Samsun, Turkey who in 2007 had

raped his 10-year-old daughter on the alleged grounds that she

didn’t suffer significant psychological distress (!), Mor Çatı

released a statement mentioning the impossibility of there being

little or no psychological trauma in a case of incest where

psychological effects usually appear in various, manifest forms

later in adult life (Gündüç, 2007).

Thus, it is time that we rethink our idea of a “family” that

focuses on family sanctity and honor and sees abuses like incest

as a violation of this family sanctity. When one turns one’s

attention to the people who make a family rather than just the

7

space or home that makes one and see them as bearers of rights,

incest is clearly a physical and mental abuse. This shift from

the present and physical violation that the abuse entails to the

future and mental scars that it leaves is a crucial one because

only such a view recognizes the severity of the abuse and

acknowledges children and women as individuals with feelings

rather than simply bearers of familial pride and honor. And yet,

once again, it is not easy applying such Human Rights discourses

of the Global North to societies like Turkey and India where

family structures are strong and offer security and love to women

and children in return for obedience to its ideals and where the

presence of the strong middle class nuclear family discourse

vehemently denies the existence of such an abuse. Thus,

empowerment of women and children is key.

But how does such empowerment happen? The answer lies in

survivor discourse that truly enables people to talk about their

abuse as children and politicizes the issue thereby strengthening

them and in the revamping of education structures that challenge

the patriarchal structure of families and create awareness.

From Surviving to Thriving

Incest is a virulent abuse, not just for the horror of the

abuse itself inflicted by a family member or a trusted person on

a child, but also because of the indelible mental and emotional

scars it leaves in the lives of adults abused as children. No

other abuse forms such a strong link between childhood and

8

adulthood as much as incest does. A gross physical abuse by a

family member on a child leaves indelible impacts on not just the

adult survivor’s body, but also her3 mind and soul. Most of our

impressions of childhood are retrospective perceptions of our

own. If one has experienced incest, one can only see childhood as

a time shrouded in dirty acts, silences and secrecy. As RAHI’s

publications illustrate, the most cruel and gruesome lesson that

incest teaches to a child that she maintains as an adult is that

all love—or what the child thinks of as “love”— is condition to

the will of the abuser that subjects a child to satisfy his

desires in exchange for attention and presents (Ailawadi, 1999;

RAHI, 1998) .

There is therefore great need for survivor discourse that

truly talks about incest and breaks the hegemonic silence

surrounding this issue in our societies, for language, just like

incest, is a link between our childhoods and adulthoods. Of

course one needs to be careful of the kind of “expert-mediated”

survivor discourse where incest survivors sit in talk shows

across the world either openly or with their faces covered, with

the host probing them for sordid and emotionally re-traumatizing

details and more often than not an “expert” psychologist speaking

on their behalf about their behaviors and giving justifications

for the same (Alcoff and Gray, 1993; Armstrong, 1997; Naples,

2003). Such discourse only re-victimizes them as the public views

them as victims and not as survivors. Mor Çatı is especially3 My use of the pronoun “her” over “him” in no way indicates that boys don’t get abused.However, in interviewing feminist organizations, most of the victims of abuse coming tothem are female.

9

critical of such shows and refuses the media when they approach

them to send women and children to their shows.

Speaking has to happen in the survivor’s own voice and the

survivor’s story must be viewed as an entire narrative embedded

in the context of existing social injustices instead of a mere

report on sexual assault. We also need to think of speaking

incest as an act that publicizes the private by politicizing it:

in the form of liberation and activism, blaming the accusers,

changing general power structures in the society, and working on

legal and social reforms on the issue, instead of simply creating

a media and public spectacle of the same. To that end, it doesn’t

even need to happen on a “grand” public scale—just talking to a

friend, a family member who understands, or a small group of

other survivors can be incredibly liberating and strengthening

and move one from being a once victim to a survivor and finally a

“thriver”: one who has not just survived incest but has moved

beyond it and fights against it. “Through the language of

childhood”, the voice once silenced in childhood that bore

witness to painful acts, but a voice that now speaks, “struggle

travels from one soul to another, from one person to another,

from one world to another.” (Nagar and Singh, 2010, p. 24).

Therefore speaking helps form a very important connection between

the childhood experience of incest abuse and its perception into

adulthood and it is through that connection that survivors can

confront their abuse, move on, and in the process create public

awareness of it in ways that really helps other survivors too.

10

The existing ideologies of childhood (Kitzinger 1988), so

upheld everywhere in the world, but especially in societies like

Turkey and India, where children are seen as personifying

innocence in the form of ignorance, as can be seen in Turkish and

Indian cinema, need to be questioned as well. If there is

anything that personal experience and my research with the three

organizations has taught me, it is that children may be innocent

in terms of worldly experience, but they are not ignorant.

Children know when they are being abused and they know it’s

wrong. Feride, the psychologist from Mor Çatı put it most aptly

when she said that the very reason children question incest

instead of questioning other physical acts they are exposed to,

for instance feeding on their mother’s breast, shows that deep in

their hearts children know that they are being violated. It is

precisely because children know that they are being violated and

yet feel the need to protect the people they love, people who are

supposed to love them in return, that they experience conflicting

emotions of love, blame, and forgiveness.

Organizations around the world that deal with CSA operate on

a diametrically opposite set of principles that is dictated by

the Human Rights language from the Global North (Merry, 2006)—the

discourse on child protection. So whilst the ideological discourse on

innocence renders children incapable of experiencing evil in the

form of abuse because they are “innocent”, “asexual” beings, at

least the child protection discourse recognizes the vulnerability

of children to abuse and the need to protect them. One must note

11

that this in itself is a vast improvement over the ideology of

denial of child abuse for, as the history of feminist struggles

has shown and in the experience of everyone working with victims

of domestic abuse, including Anuja Gupta, the founder of RAHI, “…

families, big families don’t mean protection of children…women

and children are known to be most unsafe in families”. Thus a

Human Rights discourse that recognizes children and women as

individuals with needs and rights to bodily and emotional

integrity and points the finger at the abuser is crucial in the

battle to curb incest and CSA.

And yet—is protection of children enough? Is it enough to

simply teach children about sexual abuse and tell them that when

someone touches them a certain way they should say “No”? Is it

easy for a child to say no in an abuse like incest where they

often really love and in most cases fear the abuser? Such

complexities of incest itself and the kind of family ideals of

innocence and respect that children in countries like Turkey and

India grow up in makes a simple execution of Human Rights

discourse and child sexual education difficult. We need to re-

think our basic education structures themselves where we do not

just train children about sexual abuse but about the very issue

of power differentials and gender strife and peaceful techniques

of dealing with problems, in order to really break our social

systems that thrive on gender inequalities, power differentials

within families based on gender and age, and violent means of

problem resolution. According to Feride from Mor Çatı, education

12

(on an issue like incest) goes beyond trainings and awareness

creation. It has to begin with the society, at the school level,

and even then it is a special kind of education about power,

patriarchy, domestic violence, and abuse that needs to be

imparted to children. As she says:

…I am doing my Ph.D. now, never in any of my classes have weever talked about violence or what it means or that weshouldn’t be violent...except in Ph.D. and Masters classesyou know, sometimes we have group discussions but it’s neverpart of the curriculum…we are talking about being trainedand educated in gender specific issues…If we think ofchildren, nowhere are there educational programs directedtowards teaching children to use non-violent ways to solveproblems or non-violent conflict resolution...I mean someschools have individual programs but these are notgeneralized.

Even within the realm of creating sexual abuse awareness, we

should utilize more effective strategies. For instance, both Mor

Çatı and RAHI have peer awareness programs where children and

young adults create awareness of the issue within their

respective age groups instead of just having expert psychologists

do so. RAHI’s “Peer Education Program” or PEP includes college

girls and educates them on incest and disclosure and how to

handle the same—and these girls then further educate more groups

of students, which helps in “spreading the word4”. Education and

awareness creation is very important, not just amongst children

and women who are in most danger of being abused, but also

amongst the general population. RAHI’s efforts to create

4 More information can be found at: http://www.rahifoundation.org/Student-Community-Education.html

13

literature in the Indian context in the initial year of its

establishment, such as the pioneering Voices from the Silent Zone

(“RAHI”, 1998), a survey that proved the rampancy of incest in

middle and upper classes in India; and The house I grew up in (RAHI,

1999) where five women survivors talk about how incest has marred

their lives—literature in people’s own cultural context—is a

significant step in this direction.

However, in order to move beyond just protection and

awareness creation, our education structures themselves have to

intrinsically change. Education on power differentials and gender

awareness should become a part of our existing school and

university curriculums, in order to truly break the existing grip

of patriarchy in the society under which such horrendous issues

can occur in the first place. In addition to education at schools

that talks about gender, power, and non-violence, making women

and children believe in their own value as human beings and

individuals through dedicated programs and workshops can help

them become more aware of power differentials and injustices

within their families and societies and give them the strength to

fight them. Both Feride and Fatma from Mor Çatı and Kamuran from

KAMER identified power or rather power differential as the main reason

for any kind of domestic violence and abuse, including incest.

RAHI, working on feminist principles as well, agreed with the

imperative need to empower women and children.

The feelings and physical safety of children has to be

prioritized over the preservation of the family unit when incest

14

occurs. All the people I interviewed concurred with this view.

Feride put it very clearly when she said: “Just because people

live in a building…among four walls and because they carry titles

that relate them to each other doesn’t make them a family.” So

just the space, the home is not family. A family is based on

mutual trust and love and when incest happens, that trust is

broken and the family effectively dies. According to Feride, Mor

Çatı tries to strengthen the rest of the family—the woman and her

children—“financially, socially, emotionally, in every way”, so

that a new family can be created; one based on mutual love and

trust. We need to realize that it takes mutual love, care and

most importantly, trust for people—women, children, and men—who

can come together in any possible combination and way—to form a

family. It is not some mythical ideal of a “family” that binds

people, especially women and children to it, in spite of abuse.

No end in sight and yet…the Will to Thrive

So can careful appropriation of Human Rights discourses,

genuine survivor discourse, and rethinking education and family

structures, all of which empower women and children, bring an end

to sexual abuse of children in their own homes? Of course,

complete elimination of incest is not possible. As long as human

beings exist, power differentials in the society and other

biological and psychological factors will prevent the complete

eradication of incest—a fact that all three organizations also

alluded to. This is precisely the reason why as Anuja from RAHI

15

says that thinking of patriarchy, power, the way men are trained

around violence, and women and children are subordinated and

sexualized, as a key set of “conditions” instead of “reasons” why

incest occurs might be more helpful. Since incest cannot be

eliminated in any case, maybe focusing on conditions instead of

reasons, and working on them through education and empowerment

can help alleviate them and consequently the occurrence of

incest. But ultimately what remains clear is that we cannot even

begin working on this issue without completely revamping our

education structures and family ideals and empowering those

traditionally most subdued: women and children. Only then can we

have individual, free-thinking agents who in spite of believing

in families based on love and trust and in spite of being active

social actors in the intricate web of relationships that only

living in our societies can bring about can still be agents of

their own happiness and liberty.

At the end of the day, we all turn back home. Home—that

space—that should be and is in common discourse that “safe haven”

for all children which should guarantee them unconditional love,

comfort, and security. And yet this space gets transformed into

the most terrifying and disgusting aspect of a child’s life when

subjected to incest—the space of home where patriarchy can exert

its power in the most unfettered, horrendous form. According to

Michel Foucault, all spaces are the loci of the exercise of power

and domination and yet the same spaces can be used as sites of

counter-domination, resistance and “practices of liberty”

16

(Foucault, 1993). For Foucault no site or space or institution

guarantees liberty—it is a practice that is achieved by action

(Foucault, 1993). Children and even adults can only be the

spearheads of such action when they are aware of the injustice of

abuse and have the powerful will to not only resist it in their

lives but fight against it at a more macro level. This awareness

can only be created by being exposed to opportunities in

educational, familial, and social structures that teach them to

question bigger issues like gender and power and to generate

their own discourses. Resistance at home by women and children

who challenge gender roles can make a difference to the (abusive)

practices of this home space and grant them liberty. Ultimately,

as much as organizations like Mor Çatı, KAMER and RAHI are needed

in breaking the hegemony of silence around incest and supporting

survivors, it is the will and liberating practices of survivors

themselves that are key—not necessary just to survive, but thrive

—in a world beyond the clutches of abuse.

17

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About the Author

Akanksha Misra is a graduate of Sabanci University, Istanbul,where she completed her Masters in Cultural Studies in June 2011.Although she was born to Indian parents, she spent the initialyears of her childhood in Malaysia and later on moved back toIndia where she procured a degree in Electronic Engineering andworked for Philips Software in Bangalore. She then left Indiaagain and for the past 10 years has traveled extensively acrossAmerica, Europe, and Africa. She currently resides in Istanbul,Turkey, with her husband and son and works as a ProjectsCoordinator at a private high school.