Mothers of incest survivors : another side of the story /

Johnson's book is based on six ethnographic interviews of mothers of incest victims. As is typical of this genre, the work is very readable. The approaches used in analyzing the women's lives are sociological, feminist, and symbolic interactionist. The book is more descriptive and less analytical than S. Forward and C. Buck's Betrayal of Innocence: Incest and its Devastation (1978). Similarities and differences among the women, demographically and behaviorally, are presented. Johnson also discusses the impact of keeping and revealing the secret, as well as the mothers' responses. She offers explanations and some conclusions but the small sample raises questions about whether these can be generalized. The book is part of the author's doctoral dissertation in social work, begun in the late 1970s. The endnotes do not include year and publisher, forcing the reader to consult references. Bibliography and index are standard. General; undergraduate. Y. Peterson Saint Xavier College

This slim treatise seems more like an outline than a finished project. A professor of sociology and social work at Immaculata College (Immaculata, Pa.), Johnson refutes many generally accepted theories about mothers whose daughters are sexually abused by fathers or stepfathers (i.e., that the mothers are somehow absent, or that they fail to protect their daughters from the abusive fathers). However, as Johnson herself acknowledges, the small size of her sample group--only six mothers--makes it difficult for her to draw any conclusions. Her interviews with these women do bring forward many poignant revelations; for example, one woman admits with embarrassment that she had never heard of incest before it occurred in her own family. Since she has not set out to draw any general conclusions from her research, Johnson is able to paint an individualized portrait of each woman and avoids twisting their stories to fit some theory. Her discussion of the mother-daughter relationship is particularly varied, showing that some of these relationships were extremely close, while some were less than loving, estranged or rivalrous. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved