Father-Daughter Incest: How Common is it, What Help is Available?

Incest or Oedipus complex? In psychoanalytic theory, is a group of largely unconscious (dynamically repressed) ideas and feelings which centre around the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex.The complex is named after the Greek mythical character Oedipus. 
 

I remember when this came out on the cover of People Magazine.  Here is her site with some videos of her and the work.  http:// www.missamericabyday.com

  Here is a review form About the Book In this long-awaited book, Marilyn Van Derbur, a former Miss America, tells the story of how she was sexually violated by her prominent, millionaire father from age 5 to age 18. She was 53 years old before she was able to speak the words in public, "I am an incest survivor." She opened the door for tens of thousands of sexual abuse survivors to also speak the words, many for the first time, within their own families and communities.
Marilyn describes, in detail, what specific "work" she did on her journey from victim to survivor. After learning of a woman’s rape, Marilyn heard a close friend say, "It was a bad 20 minutes." In the hope that rape and sexual abuse will no longer be as easily dismissed or minimized, Marilyn writes for the first time about what her father did to her and what the impact has been on her adult life.

Using her story as the scaffolding, she shares knowledge and insights she has gained through speaking personally with adult survivors across the country. Marilyn has been in personal contact with more survivors than anyone in America. She has personally answered over 8,000 letters and spoken in 225 cities. Survivors line up for two to three hours to tell her their stories.

Marilyn’s major motivation in writing the book came as a result of hearing these words, literally thousands of times: "When I was 7 and my brother was 13…" Only the ages changed.

The most frequently reported age when sexual abuse begins is between 5 and 6 years old and common offenders are older brothers and teenage baby-sitters (both male and female). 14 -year-olds comprise the largest number of sex offenders of any age group.

With her extensive research on the long-term impact of trauma and her belief that prevention is the best weapon for keeping our children safe, Marilyn urges parents to talk with children, as young as five, and provides suggested guidelines for important conversations that will, hopefully, evolve into continuous dialogues.

Knowing that vulnerable children are targets, she gives unique ways of building children’s self esteem.

Read how she responds to: "This happened decades ago." "How could you forget?" "Are there really ‘false memories’?" "Can ‘just fondling’ cause as much trauma as rape?" "Did you forgive?" "How did you develop a satisfying sexual relationship?" The major theme that ties the book together is how her marriage continued to thrive during her darkest years of recovery.

In 2003, Miss America 1958, Marilyn Van Derbur, publishes "Miss America By Day", her account of growing up as a victim of sexual abuse.  The revelation that a tremendously respected former Miss America had been the victim of incest is met with a huge outpouring of public sympathy - and a flood of contact from women across the country with similar stories.  Overnight, Van Derbur becomes an advocate on the issue and an inspirational model of hope for sexual abuse survivors worldwide.

Thanks for posting but this is awful. A daughter should be a forever friend and some people betray this innocent relationship.

The beautiful Rita Hayworth was repeatly abused by her father while they toured as proffesional dancers US and Mexico in her youth she confessed the story to her husband Orson Wells and such event produce such a psychological effect that her memory became so fragmented that she became ill with alzhaimers at a realtive young age.

Thank YOu mariadevonkamp.  Yes Rita Hayworth last years were tragic and now we know also her early ones were too.  The list of stars is long.   Sandra Dee came out late after her son was grown before she told her story.  She passed at 62.

Here are some details of the hell she went thru;

 ..Both stars can be read as a metaphor for the cultural schizophrenia surrounding female sexuality in the fifties. Dee's star persona is made up of oppositional qualities much like Monroe: She is both sexy and innocent, demure yet vivacious, fearful yet sensual. Dee thus embodies the cultural dichotomy of the fifties, the contradictory qualities existing simultaneously in one person that personify the sexual tensions that ran through the ideological life of the decades. Grease requires two characters, Rizzo and Sandy, to portray the oppositional characterizations of good girl and bad girl, but Dee did both all by herself. Sexual ambivalence is reconciled through the body and persona of Dee.

FROM ALEXANDRA ZUCK TO SANDRA DEE

Dee was born Alexandra Zuck in Bayonne, New Jersey, on April 23, 1944. For years, her birthday was reported as 1942 to make her appear older. Her parents divorced when she was five. Her mother, Mary, worked as a secretary until 1950 when she married Eugene Douvan, a real estate investor and her boss. Part of the mythology of the Dee image was his oft-cited remark, "I'm not marrying your mother, I'm marrying both of you." Unfortunately, Douvan really believed that, and his sexual abuse of Dee began while he was still dating her mother. Dee accompanied them on their honeymoon and was forced to sleep between her parents for several years. Douvan began having intercourse with Dee when she was about eight years old, abuse that Mary Douvan never acknowledged. When Dee began menstruating and developing breasts at nine, her mother had her bind her breasts and tried to deny Dee's sexual maturation.(20)

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3687/is_200101/ai_n8945326/pg_4/

 1960 and 1964, Sandra Dee was one of the top 10 film stars in the US after the successes of The Reluctant Debutante, Gidget, A Summer Place, the Tammy series and Come September. But before her film career even began, she was already an experienced anorexic.

Concerned by her rail-thin physique, make-up artists would try to bribe the young star by offering to give her lipstick if she'd drink a malted milk, but their pleas were to no avail. In fact, while on set filming her first picture, Dee became so bloated as a result of her "lettuce diet" that her pants split. "I looked like an elephant from the waist down" is how she later described it. She was diagnosed with acute oedema - the tiny star was so malnourished from lack of protein that her renal system shut down and she was unable to urinate, causing the shocking bloating.

But while her eating disorder was physically evident from the start of her film career, the sexual abuse that Sandra Dee had suffered from the age of five was better disguised.

John Saxon, Dee's co-star in the 1958 film The Restless Years, said she'd often make cryptic remarks about her stepfather. "Every once in a while, Sandra would say something seemingly out of context that I didn't understand, " he recalled. "For example, 'I hated my stepfather so much, I couldn't even go to his funeral. ' I didn't know exactly where that was coming from until many, many years later. "

"Gene didn't molest me only in the mornings, but during the day, the night, whenever he wanted to and there was an opportunity, " Dee revealed in a 1991 interview. "He'd say, 'Let's snuggle', and I never fought back - I was too small. Too young. " The abuse finally ended just before Gene died, when Dee was 12 and on the verge of stardom.

Dee always believed that her mother had known what was going on but refused to acknowledge it. Every morning, Mary sent her daughter to say goodbye to her stepfather in the couple's bedroom. On her return, Dee would ask her mother to button up her open blouse in a silent plea for help.

She was so adept at hiding her pain that when crooner Bobby Darin met her in Italy, on the set of the 1961 hit Come September, he thought she'd never even been kissed. Entranced as soon as he saw her sailing into port on a yacht, Darin proposed. Showing her quick wit, Dee replied, "Not today. "