Juliet Drouar is a therapist and co-author of a collective work The Culture of Incest * published at the start of the school year, the objective of which is to denounce the extent of incest practices in our society. In this book, the authors refute the idea of an “incest taboo” formulated by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, but on the contrary denounce its practice as a cultural fact in its own right in our societies. Incest is not, from their point of view, out of the ordinary, nor a monstrosity committed on the margins, but the consequence of a social functioning by domination and in particular by patriarchal domination.
In this book, you make incest a collective trauma, that is to say?
If we look at the figures and in particular the Ipsos survey of November 2020 for the association Facing incest, this is no exception. Nor a monstrosity, in the sense that it would concern one in ten French people. Our objective is also to bring back the victims, sometimes relegated to the rank of monstrous exceptions too, in our common humanity. The real taboo of incest is not doing it. It’s taboo to talk about it.
One person in ten is and would have been a victim of incest in France, why is this subject so absent from the debates of our society?
There are many attempts to speak out from the people concerned. But they are not relayed. On the contrary, they are extinct. This silence keeps it going. Because the people who are victims do not always have the means to designate what it is. The victims of incest are often very young. In 2020, police figures establish that half of the victims were under 4 years old.
At this age, the question of memory inevitably arises…
Indeed, who, at that age, can be able to remember what happened? So if there is no information circulating about incest and what it is, how can we put words to what we are experiencing or what we have experienced and suffered? This is also why incest is a relationship of power and profit from a situation of vulnerability. Sokhna Fall, who wrote the chapter “A memory subject to the law of silence”, specializes in the management of psychotrauma. She worked on forgetting and the mechanism of dissociation, that is to say survival, when the brain picks up to endure. But also of forgetting as a response to the social and family injunction to forget. She also talks about the expression of memories by the body, by the emotions. The body remembers, the behavior remembers.
Is it for this reason that we must qualify and define incest?
First, there is the law which reintroduced the notion of incest in the Penal Code in 2016. It is an overqualification of already existing offences: rape and sexual assault. The definition of incest of the AIVI (International Association of Victims of Incest) is the most precise because it qualifies any conduct whose intrusive nature is felt in the more or less long term by the victim as an attack on his limits. and his personal integrity. This is the most precise definition both on the family level, including the adoptive family, but also on the level of acts. For example, making your child watch a pornographic film is incestuous conduct, as is excessively intrusive or frequent toileting.
How is the family not a space of protection?
Minors do not have access to the exercise of their rights and parental authority is often maintained, even in cases of proven abuse. Minors are in a state of absolute dependence. The discourse around the family is very moralizing and misleading because it defines it as a place of protection and love as Tal Piterbraut-Merx writes. Minors who are abused find themselves in a dilemma: to speak is to break the pact. And even in the family, there are abused people and witnesses, as Camille Kouchner’s book shows The Grand Familywhich is not without consequence on one or the other.
At the heart of the reflection that articulates your work, there is the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss around the taboo of incest. You demonstrate that by making incest a taboo, paradoxically, all power is given to the dominant group.
For Claude Lévi-Strauss, not marrying certain members of his family is the foundation of human culture. But, in fact, what Claude Lévi-Strauss poses as a norm is not the taboo of incest, but the fact of not marrying family members, which has nothing to do with it. Incest and sexual violence then pass completely out of scope. Because as long as the rule laid down by the group is respected, it is possible to reproduce domination and to initiate the reproduction of dominations, as Dorothée Dussy shows in her book The Cradle of Dominations.
You also denounce a romanticization of incest…
In our culture, incest is romanticized, as Iris Brey shows in a chapter of our book entitled Eye-popping incest. This is the case in Game Of Thrones, where brother-sister incest is very present. Our culture in its representations allows incest to happen again. And even allows the construction of an image of consenting victim, as in lolita, in Stanley Kubrick’s film. In porn, one of the most searched hashtags is #stepmom [belle-mère], as if all sons-in-law dreamed of sleeping with their mothers-in-law… Yet incest does incredible damage to lives. However, all these representations erase the annihilation that is incest in a life.
Do you measure in your practice as a therapist?
What I hear in particular is if I speak, I will kill the person who incested me. The stigma turns back on the victim. Incest and paedocriminality are a continuum (the same logics and the same effects). For example, disabled children are overexposed due to their dependency and confinement, including in institutions.