Abstract
“I just did what he told me to do,” declared Irma Viljoen (pseudonym), a white South African incest survivor who was sexually abused by her stepfather from the age of 8 to 13. Irma, now 25 and recently divorced, has attempted suicide eight times. She was 13 years old when she first tried to kill herself. Her stepfather, Piet Viljoen, succeeded in silencing her until she was almost 16—three years after his marriage to her mother broke up. This is how Irma described his method of silencing her:
He threatened to hit me if I ever spoke about it. He used to sit there in the afternoons with his gun and threaten me. At a later stage when I went to boarding school, he threatened to kill me. When I was about 10 or 11, he made me watch two movies and then do what the women did in them. In one of the movies a lot of men raped a woman and did whatever else they wanted to her. The other movie showed a woman being cut up alive after the men had sex with her. My stepfather threatened to do the same to me if I told anyone what he was doing to me. That is why I would rather have died than tell anyone. The movies pumped into my head that “this is my life.” (Russell, 1993a, p. 10)
This chapter is an edited version of a keynote speech delivered at the World Conference on Trauma and Tragedy held in Amsterdam in 1992, and sponsored by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. For this reason, there is a greater focus on the authors own work and less documentation than is customary for papers specifically prepared for scholarly publication.
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Russell, D.E.H. (1995). The Prevalence, Trauma, and Sociocultural Causes of Incestuous Abuse of Females. In: Kleber, R.J., Figley, C.R., Gersons, B.P.R. (eds) Beyond Trauma. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-9421-2_10
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