`Now Mom can believe me'

Fri., January 14, 2005 Shvat 4, 5765

By Ruth Sinai

Both victims and perpetrators of incest are treated at Jerusalem's Shiluv Institute. Here, the abusers learn to take responsibility for their actions and help remove the guilt from those who were abused.

The film, "Gilui arayot - mi'tehom letikva" ("Incest - from Abyss to Hope") was the initiative of the unit for the treatment of families that have experienced incest, which was established six years ago at Shiluv, a nonprofit association that has been involved in family and couple therapy for more than 30 years and trains therapists in these fields. The film was produced, directed and edited by filmmakers Dan and Noit Geva, and it documents therapy sessions with three families: in one, the brothers abused their little sister; in the second an older brother sexually abused his younger brothers, and they all abused their sister; and in the third, a mother and her three daughters were raped by the mother's brother.

According to the director of the institute, Elanah Wernik, there is a shortage of therapists who are willing to treat both the victim and the perpetrator of incest. She herself remembers her feeling of revulsion the first time she saw a colleague, Judy Katz-Charny, shaking the hand of a father who had sexually assaulted his daughter. "I didn't understand how she could do it," recalls Wernik.

"The reactions are understandable," says Katz-Charny. "Therapists usually want to rescue the victim. It's hard for them to identify with someone whom they consider to be a monster. But in the course of therapy, one discovers that only few of the perpetrators are real psychopaths. I treated a family in which the father who assaulted his daughter was called `the tzaddik' [righteous person]. He came to therapy during a leave from prison. I saw quite a nice person, who was willing to reveal what he had done, knew that his actions were wrong, said that it was a little bit like addiction and that he deserves to sit in prison. When we left the room I shook everyone's hand, including his."

`Feeling of family pride'

According to international statistics, one out of every seven women and one of every 11 men have experienced incest in their families. This fact appears in an introduction to a collection of articles edited by Dr. Zivya Seligman and Prof. Zahava Solomon, which was recently published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad and the Adler Research Center at Tel Aviv University, under the title: "Critical and Clinical Perspectives on Incest." But only a small percentage of cases are discovered, it seems, and only a handful of victims undergo therapy.

Most therapy in this realm in Israel focuses on the victims, and a small proportion, on the nonabusive mothers of people who have experienced sexual abuse in the family. There is almost no treatment of the entire family, with the participation of the perpetrator, except at Shiluv.

"Our work is based on a belief that in spite of the horrifying betrayal of the daughter or son in the family, tremendous therapeutic powers can be drawn from the family, to restore the victims' sense of confidence, to rehabilitate them and to restore their sense of belonging to the family," explains Katz-Charny. "Treatment of the entire family is the most effective way of minimizing the danger that the victim will harm his own children in the future."

One reason why family therapy is not common is the therapist's difficulty in penetrating a family in which incest has been revealed: "In effect, it has undergone a catastrophe," says Wernik.

"The family therapist is forced to deal with very strong feelings of anger, disgust, hatred and confusion in the family and in himself," says the institute manual. "The therapist has the task of a juggler: He has to impose full responsibility on the perpetrator, to investigate patterns of family dysfunction that made the abuse possible, to make sure that the secret is discussed openly, to encourage expression of sorrow and remorse, to construct methods of mending and monitoring in the family."

As one of the therapists explains in the film, the treatment is designed to "consolidate the family. After the terrible shame, we try to create a feeling of family pride."

Due to the complexity of the therapy, the therapists work in pairs, with each concentrating on different family members, and they are assisted by the rest of the staff for consultation and guidance.

Family therapy, which sometimes lasts for several years, is carried out in various arrangements: Some sessions take place with a few children separately, sometimes only with the children, sometimes with both parents or sometimes with only one, and sometimes they are also attended by another relative, like a grandfather or an uncle, who can support and advance the process.

The therapy is always accompanied by individual therapy for the victim, who can choose whether or not to participate in the family therapy, and at what stage. Usually, the sessions are recorded with a video camera, an important tool that enables the victims to see the behavior of the family in the therapy room, without being present, and to keep track of the process undergone by the family - from denial to confession and the expression of remorse.

In the case treated by Hayim Cohen, for example, the younger sister observed an early session in which her brothers absolutely refused to acknowledge the fact that they had abused her. "It's true that she's only a girl, but she's a prostitute, too," said one of them. She also observed later video clips in which the therapist insisted that the brothers spell out in detail exactly what they had done to her. This detailed description is an essential part of the therapy, which is designed to force the perpetrator to take responsibility for his actions - not only so that he himself can be rehabilitated, but so that the victim will stop feeling that she is to blame for the incest, a feeling that is typical of many daughters, both young girls and women. "The perpetrator has to recall where he touched, how he touched, what he did, where he entered. It drives the perpetrator crazy, and then he gets very angry," explains Cohen in the film.

In an article about treating families who have suffered from incest, which appears in the anthology, Katz-Charny and therapist Anat Goldstein explain that the purpose of the actual description of the assault is not only to make the perpetrator assume responsibility, but also to encourage him to show empathy for the suffering of the victim - empathy that will replace the disbelief in her story, the anger at her for revealing the secret and causing great shame to the family, and the blame placed on her for the fact that her father or brother were sent to prison.

The therapists say that usually fathers say that they don't know what their daughter felt when they thrust their fingers into her genitals. "I didn't notice," "I would have stopped if she had asked," "I shouldn't have given her that pleasure," are typical answers to the question. Only after a number of conversations can a change in this attitude be observed, they write.

Request for forgiveness

In one of the cases documented in the film - where one brother abused the other brothers, and all of them abused their sister - the older brother explains that "What spurred me on was a matter of not caring. I didn't think I was harming her." He was also tortured by the thought that now that he is a father, he is liable to harm his son, and that other children that he may have may be abused or abusive. In the film, therapist Cohen is seen trying to arouse empathy within the family by encouraging one of the brothers to tell about a good thing that he did for another member of the family.

One of the most important aspects of the therapy is rehabilitating the relationship between a daughter who was abused and a mother who didn't protect her from the sexual assault - because she didn't know about it or because she chose to ignore it because of her own limitations. This process becomes possible in family therapy when the victim sees and hears the perpetrator admitting his actions, on video or in person. "Now Mom can finally believe me," says one of the victims in the film.

Toward the end of the therapy process, the daughter participates in a family session in the therapy room and is seen holding her mother's hand. "I'm sorry, I'm angry at myself for sleeping on Shabbat when it happened," her mother tells her. "Since then I have been punishing myself by not sleeping on Shabbat." The brothers are also asked to express remorse or to beg forgiveness. "I'm sorry if I hurt you," says one. The therapist intervenes: "`If' you hurt her?" And the brother corrects himself: "I'm sorry that I hurt you." In the last session presented in the film, the members of the family are seen laughing together when the daughter asks to continue the family therapy to work out other issues in the family's functioning, unconnected to incest. Cohen admits that the request moves him, and wipes away tears.

But not all the therapy sessions have a happy end. The therapists emphasize to the victims that they are in control. They have a right not to forgive the abusive father or brother, and many are in fact incapable of forgiving.

"Someone told me that her father will never be her father again, but on the other hand, she didn't want to cut him off from her life, from the family," says Katz-Charny. "In one instance, I recorded the abusive brother asking for forgiveness, after a great deal of pressure, but his sister didn't want to listen to the tape. I'm keeping it in the drawer in case she changes her mind."

The therapy, which is offered by the Shiluv Institute to families of limited means at a greatly reduced price, is also designed to help members of a family who haven't been directly harmed by incest, but who suffer from its results - for example, from the fact that the father of the family was sent to prison, but nobody explains to them what he did because of the shame. There are families who use the excuse that the father became entangled in debts; in one family the child reported in kindergarten that his father had murdered someone.

Even when families turn to Shiluv, or are referred to it by the welfare or health services, there are sometimes family members who are unwilling to participate. One of the most effective ways of forcing the perpetrator to participate is through legal threats. Sometimes the father's prison furloughs are conditional on his willingness to take part in therapy sessions, an arrangement that is reached through the incest committee of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. The committee includes a representative of the Israel Prison Service, the family's social worker and a representative of the parole board. The committee convenes when the perpetrator is about to go on his first leave and accompanies him until after his final release from prison to ensure the welfare of the victim. Another means of getting the perpetrator to participate is via Youth Law welfare officers, who receive an exemption from a special committee from reporting a case of incest to the police, on the condition that the perpetrator agrees to therapy.

"I was astonished to discover that incest usually takes place inside the home, and to what extent it's the perfect crime, because nobody is interested in exposing it," says Katz-Charny. In an article she wrote with Goldstein, she quotes a father who noticed his daughter's distress. After being asked repeatedly, she told him that her elder brother had abused her sexually, and it turned out that another sister had been abused as well and that the brother himself was a victim of sexual abuse by the neighbors. During the course of the therapy, the father said that "before the conversations in the institute, we used to live as though we were in the cellars of the Shin Bet security services. Nobody told anyone else what had happened to him."

Usually, therapists emphasize the family's dysfunction, said Katz-Charny. "But without minimizing and denying the problems, one can also look for the positive things in the family - the caring, the desire to keep the family together. The attempt to awaken people's ability to heal is a tremendous challenge."