Some people have memories of being sexually abused by their mother. Isn’t it rare for a mother to perpetrate sexual abuse on her children?
Prior to the 1970’s very little was written about child sexual abuse in psychiatric, psychological, medical, and sociological journals. Any professional writing on child sexual abuse, especially incest, was dominated by skepticism of the victim and incest was considered rare. 30 There is a strong probability that in the second half of the twentieth century, and now, in the twenty-first century, professionals have traded in the myth that incest and child sexual abuse is rare, for the myth that same-sex parental incest is rare. It is difficult to know how prevalent it is. Most victims of this kind of betrayal are too full of shame and the fear of not being believed to talk about it openly, much less report it to authorities. Many victims of mother/daughter and father/son incest are probably even repressing or dissociating from the abuse because of a deep denial, and because the violation is much greater than it is with opposite-sex parental incest. Society wants to think that mother/daug
