WE FOUND OUR VOICES:
Some Reflections by Women Who Were
Sexually Abused by Their Brothers

        Many of us in Sexual Abuse Anonymous (SAA) who were sexually abused by our brothers have been frustrated in our attempts to find reliable, well-researched information on brother-sister incest.  Some of the sparse literature that does exist is couched in complex psychoanalytic theory, or suggests that brother-sister incest is usually consensual, enjoyed, and of little consequence to its participants.  We have found such literature not to be true to our experiences and feelings.  Unfortunately, this type of literature and the general lack of information on brother-sister sexual abuse coincided neatly with our tendency to deny its effects.

Some of us sought help through therapy.  Feeling we’d found someone we could trust, we shared the dark secret of incest, only to find that we were not taken seriously.  Our chemical dependency counselors and other therapists often did not recognize the significance of the incest experience and urged us to tuck it away in a corner so they could take care of the other more pressing and “primary” issues first.  Thus they minimized our incest, saying that it had little to do with our present problems.  So again, we minimized and denied the reality of what our brothers did to us.

All incest victims tend to deny and minimize their victimization regardless of who abused them.  Those of us who were abused by our brothers had some unique ways of doing this.  Many of us thought that incest by definition meant father-daughter sexual contact, or that brother-sister incest didn’t “count” as much, or that it wasn’t as “bad” as father-daughter incest.  Our brothers themselves often made light of the incest and tried to convince us that we were “just kids playing around”.

Society as a whole was filled with messages that caused us to deny our incest.  The media, through; advertisements, television, movies, books, magazines and pornography portrayed girls in compromising situations with men and boys.  Most of us learned that it was our role to please boys with our bodies, to be attractive to them, to make them feel good and to keep them happy.  Our brothers, although they were almost always older than us, were our male peers, and when they made their demands on us, some of us responded by playing the role we’d learned from the media.  In doing so, we denied that it was incest – we were just doing what we were expected to do.

Religion was a significant influence on many of us whose families belonged to authority-based churches.  We were taught to submit, to say yes, to sacrifice, to forgive, to avoid conflict and to respect authority.  And who had authority in the church; First God, who had a male image and then men in the church.  This authority carried over to our families and gave our brothers, especially if they were older, power over us and more rights and privileges than we had.  In addition, we learned that women were to serve, to take care of people, particularly men, and to keep their families together.  Most of us learned our lessons of male authority and female service well – so well that we weren’t able to care for our own needs over our brothers’ demands.  Again we were just doing what we were “supposed” to do, and we denied the impact incest was having on us.

Through the help of our SAA friends and some enlightened therapists, we finally recognized that our brothers had victimized us, that brother-sister incest existed, was significant, and that many of the feelings we were having were related to incest.  We learned that the emotional scars of incest have no relationship to who abused us, but rather to the abuse itself and how we experienced it and reacted to it.  We hope that sharing our experiences will help validate other women’s feelings about their brother-sister incest experience, and help them recognize the effects it has had on their lives.

Although each of our families was unique, we have found that they often shared some common characteristics.  Our families generally didn’t have good patterns of communication, especially about feelings and sexuality.  Often, we grew up surrounded by puritanical ideas about sex, and most of us lacked any real sex education.  Many of us, as we have mentioned, came from strict religious backgrounds.  Others of us came from families that weren’t very religious or from families where there was a “loose sex culture” in which sexual acts were openly displayed in front of the children and were openly discussed in obscene terms.  Often other physical, verbal and emotional abuse was going on in our families as we grew up, in addition to the sexual abuse by our brothers.  Alcohol abuse was common to many of our families, with one or both parents being

alcoholic.  Some of us abused chemicals too, and we have noticed that many of our brothers who sexually abused us are chemically dependent now as adults.

For most of us, the sexual contact with our brothers began when we were between five and 10 years old.  Generally our brothers were older than we were, usually by about three years or more.  Some of us experienced sexual contact with more than one brother, or with someone else in addition to our brothers, such as our fathers, cousins or our brothers’ friends.  We have found that many of our sisters were also abused by our brothers.

How did the sexual contact start?  For some of us, it began as mutual interest sex-play.  Others of us were bribed.  And still others of us were over-powered or threatened, or we felt the implied threat of our brothers’ greater size, strength and authority.  Some of us were being sexually abused by our fathers, and our brothers thus had “permission” to sexually abuse us too.  Many of us simply felt that we were supposed to go along with older or male persons’ wishes.

The sexual contact we experienced included a variety of acts, both verbal and physical.  For most of us, it was not enjoyable, but we felt powerless to change what was happening.  We felt embarrassed, ashamed and guilty, and at that young age, most of us didn’t have the words to describe what was happening; generally we kept the abuse a secret.  Some of us were threatened with retaliation by the abuser if we let the secret out.  And often we felt so “dirty” that we didn’t want others to know, or we felt we might be punished, as if we had done something wrong.

We reacted to the abuse in a variety of ways.  Some of us became super-achievers in school, while others of us acted out our feelings with problem behavior such as running away, abusing chemicals, or developing eating disorders.  Many of us had poor relationships with our parents and were very angry at them for not protecting us.  We often felt that our brothers were favored over us, or somehow given permission to abuse us, such as when our fathers abused us too, or in  situations in which our parents gave our brothers authority over us or left them “in charge” when they would be gone.

Some of us became sexually promiscuous; others of us avoided sexual contact or found it difficult to have sexual relationships that were satisfying to us.  Some of us were confused about our sexual identities or had problems accepting and expressing our sexuality, whether it was with men or women.  Generally, we had poor self-concepts and a tendency to stay in unsatisfying or abusive relationships.    It seems that without exception, we were angry at our brothers, and often we wanted revenge for what they had done to us.

We have found that, as adults, most of us do not maintain relationships with them, nor do we wish to do so. Many of us find our brothers disgusting and repulsive but, even so, there are those among us who want (or feel obligated) to forgive and love them, and to be close to them in healthy ways.  This has proven to be difficult to do.  Many of us still carry around our old fear of our brothers, and many of us fear them because they are violent men.  We often fear that they will sexually abuse their children or others with whom they come in contact.  Some of us talked to our brothers about the sexual abuse, and generally we found that they tried to deny or minimize it.  Some of them took responsibility for the abuse and said they were sorry it had affected our lives negatively.  If they only knew!  For some of us, that is also a problem – we don’t want our brothers to know how their behavior affected us, because we would then feel more vulnerable to them.  Many of us feel that they could never understand what we are saying about the incest anyway, and do not want to spend our time and energy talking to them about it only to be frustrated in the end.  For these and other reasons, some of us have not confronted our brothers; some of us do not intend to do so, but others of us have it as one of our goals.

Many of us would like to have better relationships with our parents and other family members, and we are working on that.  Some of us have talked to our parents about the abuse, and their reactions were mixed.  Some tried to minimize the abuse, particularly if there wasn’t “intercourse”, but others were very supportive of our efforts to recover.  Some of us have been forced to realize that our families aren’t healthy and that one of the best things we can do for ourselves and our recovery is to have less contact with them.  That realization often involved a great sense of loss for us.

As we who were sexually abused by our brothers look back over our lives, we find that although we had a lot in common, we also had lots of differences.  We each experienced and reacted to incest in our own unique ways, and we have come to value our own perceptions as well as those of others.  If you were sexually abused by your brother, you may or may not see yourself in what we have shared; in either case, we want you to know that as you travel the road from victim to survivor, you do not travel alone.

c 1984, Sexual Abuse Anonymous
PO Box 405 St
Cloud, MN 56302