In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Le Berceau des dominations. Anthropologie de l’inceste, Livre 1 by Dorothée Dussy
  • Amélie Charruault
Dussy Dorothée, 2013, Le Berceau des dominations. Anthropologie de l’inceste, Livre 1 [The cradle of domination. Anthropology of incest, book 1], Marseille, La Discussion, Familles, genres, générations, 268p.

The anthropologist Dorothée Dussy here describes the practice of incest in French families – a practice prohibited and condemned in our society. At the time of writing, incest was not mentioned as such in French law, though being a close older relative or having a position of authority did and does constitute an aggravating circumstance in cases of rape or sexual violence. Since then, incest has been introduced into the penal code by way of Law no. 2016-297 of 14 March 2016 on child protection.

This book, the first of three volumes, focuses on incest perpetrators. The second will study victims and the third, legal trials involving incest. Drawing on an ethnographic survey conducted with 22 men aged 23 to 78 serving prison sentences in the Grand Ouest region of France for rape of a child or children in their family, Dussy reveals how incest contributes to the process of producing and reproducing dominant persons (incest perpetrators) and dominated ones (victims). In addition to this fieldwork, she questioned family members of prisoners whenever possible, interviewed adults who had experienced incest, attended trials for the crime of incest and collected investigation files used in them. She has also been active for the last five years in mutual assistance associations for incest victims in France and Quebec.

The first two of the book’s seven chapters present an overview of statistical knowledge on incest and sexual abuse of minors, as well as perpetrator characteristics. The next two plunge us into the destabilizing world of the incest perpetrator, while the last three focus on the history of sexual abuse in families, the freedom to speak – or lack thereof – within families, the general silence about incest, and last, how the judicial system and society at large deal with cases of incest.

Dussy observes that incest perpetrators are not “extraordinary” individuals or “psychopaths” but rather people who are “well integrated in life”. Most are men (father, older brother, cousin, uncle), which explains why there is a much greater amount of scientific literature on male than female perpetrators. In fact, this work provides no information on women perpetrators because according to the anthropologist, no reports accusing women of incestuous rape have ever been filed in France during the period under study.

In retracing the family histories of the prisoners interviewed, Dussy reveals that “incest occurs in a context where it exists already”. The majority of the 22 men interviewed in prison reported being aware of other incestuous situations in their family. Though they refuse to think that they acted in a way that imitated their past, seven men also reported having been sexually abused in childhood. The author remarks that there are a great variety of incest configurations and that there can be no single “typical portrait or even profile of an incest perpetrator”. It would be useful to corroborate this statement statistically by analysing family [End Page 577] characteristics (age difference between spouses, kinship tie between perpetrator and victim, number of perpetrators implicated, etc.) and checking whether other types of domestic violence associated with incest (intimate partner violence, voluntary negligence, verbal, psychological or physical violence against children, etc.) also occurred. Moreover, though the profiles of the convicts in the author’s sample vary widely, she shows that all the cases have points in common: the exercise of domination, the victim’s silence, the perpetrator’s lying, not to mention possible complicity of other family members.

Child or adolescent victims are always younger than their aggressor and “do not necessarily think of incest”. As the author explains, there is no possible comparison with one’s friends’ experiences, no space of dialogue or support (a film, a story) that would enable the child to express the abnormality or seriousness of the experience. In other words, “the practice of incest is protected by the absence of words to describe it”. Some victims only reveal to their...

pdf

Share