Fathers who abuse: "I've seen Evil from Almost Every Angle" (Germany)

Interesting intereview with Austrian psychiatrist Heidi Kastner on fathers who abuse children. It's published in Der Spiegel, a German newspaper.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,656697,00.html

Fritzl Analyst
'I've Seen Evil from Almost Every Angle'
By Frank Thadeusz

Austrian psychiatrist Heidi Kastner has spent her career preparing expert opinions on fathers who abuse their children, including Josef Fritzl. In a SPIEGEL interview, she discusses her new book and her experiences researching fathers who abuse their children in horrendous ways.

SPIEGEL: Ms. Kastner, you write about cruel and extreme acts of violence against children. Who would want to read this sort of material voluntarily?

Kastner: I don't know. I am confronted with these cases regularly. Perhaps I have lost, to some degree, my awareness of how this affects others. Someone who works as a garbage collector eventually gets used to the stench.

SPIEGEL: Your book is filled with stories of psychopaths, frenzied attackers and other maniacs. Aren't you overstepping the mark a bit?

Kastner: It's true that I only describe the truly tough cases of paternal abuse. But I am a forensic psychiatrist, and I've been working in this field for 12 years. I don't exactly deal with people who slap their children on streetcars.

SPIEGEL: What interests you about the cruelty of fathers?

Kastner: I'm mainly interested in the motivation of the offenders. That motivation has hardly been studied in the so-called family tragedies, for example, in which a man kills his wife and children. When I was preparing for this book, I found only three studies on this subject, and one of them was from the Fiji Islands.

SPIEGEL: What did you discover?

Kastner: When I examined the cases more closely, I found that the men who had run amok in their own families had one thing in common: Their lives had fallen apart at two levels. Their partner had left them and, at the same time, they had lost their jobs or were in serious financial difficulties.

SPIEGEL: The same thing can happen to women.

Kastner: Yes, but then we tend to see mothers who become so depressed that they commit suicide and take their children with them. Among the men, I encountered almost no cases in which depressive illness was the underlying cause. Narcissistic disorders are more likely in these cases.

SPIEGEL: You describe how a woman regularly abused her 10-year-old son. In another case, a woman with sadistic tendencies held her daughter down while her boyfriend raped the child. Are the mothers just as guilty as the fathers?

Kastner: I never claim that only men are violent. With women, I have always had a problem with the notion of their looking the other way. This excuse that "I would be lost without him, which is why I couldn't do anything about it when he abused my child" is complete nonsense -- especially today, at a time when therapeutic and financial resources are made available to anyone. It makes my blood boil. The children suffer from the mother's betrayal almost as much as from the abuse itself. Our criminal laws pay insufficient attention to the moral culpability of mothers.

SPIEGEL: Isn't it possible that the mothers don't notice anything?

Kastner: When the mother says: "I didn't notice anything, because I was never home when it was happening," it's difficult to prosecute her. But it's preposterous to claim that a wife wouldn't notice a child being abused for four years in a 40-square-meter (430-square-foot) apartment.

SPIEGEL: You write about a generation-spanning tradition among fathers who exercise the "right of the first night" against their daughters ...

Kastner: Indeed. I encountered such cases again and again, in all social classes. The father believes that the daughter is his property, and that he is as entitled to her as he is to the biggest piece of meat on the table. And the mother covers it up. When a daughter comes to her and says: "Father did strange things to me," she replies: "Oh don't make such a fuss about it. My father did the same thing with me."

SPIEGEL: What's it like in these kinds of families? Can there be such a thing as normal life within the context of the inconceivable?

Kastner: There are these one-time rites of passage that are considered part of becoming an adult in some families. But there are also families in which a daughter is routinely abused for many years, and yet life in these families seems astonishingly normal. The child completely isolates the perverse things that are happening. I've spoken with many victims who said that they would simply lie there as if they were not even present. And when the right time came, they would switch back to reality. By compartmentalizing in this way, it was possible to go fishing with the father or go on family outings, and even to like him.

SPIEGEL: Isn't there something liberating for the women in the family when, after several generations, one of them finally stands up and defends herself?

Kastner: No, on the contrary. In these families, it is often the case that everyone joins forces to oppose the child who reports the father to the police. In this sense, female victims are now more emancipated than male victims. There are certainly many abused boys who rarely go to the police, because it's even more difficult to reconcile sexual abuse with the male self-image.

SPIEGEL: You became known as a result of a particularly repulsive case of incest. You wrote the psychiatric report on Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for almost 24 years in a cellar. Wouldn't it have made more sense to write a book about that case?

Kastner: The Fritzl case is also a burden for me, because I am often associated exclusively with this case. Besides, do we have to satisfy every questionable voyeuristic interest? No one will become a better person by knowing how often Mr. Fritzl changes his socks.

SPIEGEL: In Fritzl's case, did you have the feeling that you understood him?

Kastner: Yes. What the Fritzl case boiled down to was that although I spoke to the man for 27 hours, I thought to myself, after the first five hours: I can understand and explain how he is wired.

SPIEGEL: So how is he wired?

Kastner: Based on his belief in an unlimited, sexualized exercise of power. He chased after girls in the park, raped a woman and locked up his daughter, and he always believed that he could get away with it. We are all familiar with this feeling to a lesser extent. It's a creeping feeling of self-corruption, based on the motto: Now that I've eaten the first piece of cake, it doesn't matter whether I eat another one.

SPIEGEL: Did Fritzl have any sense of guilt?

Kastner: He certainly knew that what he was doing was wrong. He once told me that it became more difficult every day to end the situation with his daughter. After a week, he thought that he ought to let her out, but then he asked himself: How will I explain this to my wife and everyone else? After that, he thought that he would have to wait until his daughter was so broken that he could be sure that she wouldn't tell anyone. But the longer he waited, the clearer it became to him that the best solution was simply to keep her in the dungeon.

SPIEGEL: In some of the media reports, it was suggested that Fritzl is a pretty clever guy…

Kastner: Oh, you would be surprised to know how little ingenuity it takes to do something this sinister. Fritzl is a technician who approached his actions with the precision of an accountant. I knew not to expect any sophisticated reflection from him, because it didn't happen. Fritzl is simple-minded. For him, everything is confined to one box. There is nothing else.

SPIEGEL: Was Fritzl your worst case?

Kastner: The chronological dimension was certainly unusual. But when it comes to the details I have encountered similarly horrific crimes.

SPIEGEL: You describe the case of a man named G., who beat his wife and abused the child, a baby, so severely that it later died. When you interviewed G. in prison, he portrayed himself as a persecuted innocent and bragged about his correspondence with a wealthy woman. How do you manage to remain calm in conversation with a man like that?

Kastner: I have to admit that I found him hard to tolerate, as a person. I try to be conscious of my own reactions, so as to prevent them from shaping my actions. I go there as a professional and not as a person with her own emotions. But I do notice that it's difficult for me to distance myself from some of these cases and remain objective.

SPIEGEL: Do the offenders try to manipulate you?

Kastner: Of course, again and again.

SPIEGEL: Do you notice something like that right away?

Kastner: No, I would be lying if I said that. But over the years I've certainly developed a sixth sense for things that seem a bit too smooth and pleasant, which make me professionally suspicious. You have to know the files well and prepare yourself well.

SPIEGEL: Your book is so full of abominations that one could lose one's faith in the good side of people. Have you already given up on humanity?

Kastner: Not at all. I deal with these cases every day, sometimes for 12 to 14 hours, and I've seen evil from almost every angle. I promised myself that if I ever notice that it's changing me, that it's making me depressed, resigned or cynical, I'll stop. But that isn't the case. I have honed my awareness and I'm probably far more curious than many others. Evil is part of human nature. It's better to recognize that fact.

Interview conducted by Frank Thadeusz.