Second, dominance feminists commit a logical error when they argue that if incest were as commonplace as they contend, that would be evidence that most claims are valid. On the contrary, absent some objective corroboration, the overall incidence of incest tells us nothing about the composition of actual claims. Today there are perhaps hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of women struggling with the question of whether in the distant past they too were the victims of incest. Tens of thousands have confronted their fathers, often in their therapists' offices, and a thousand or more have brought civil lawsuits. There are major problems with any such decision to remain agnostic about, or tactfully silent with regard to, a politics that proclaims that men are socially constructed as sexual predators and advocates that ever-broader categories of male behavior be curbed by strict legal sanctions.
Neutrality is a terrible guide for political action.
For another, litigation often has a detrimental impact on the protagonists themselves. And my personal experience as a litigator on behalf of discrimination victims over the past two decades has almost uniformly been that participation in the legal process, even if vindicated at trial, is more likely to inflict further trauma than to heal. If I turn out to be half the clinician my therapists are, I'll be very happy. All rights reserved. Please do not reproduce without permission.