For those of you who, like yours truly, feel consistently underinformed by what passes for journalism in Australia, here's something else from overseas. Crime coverage in this country veers towards two opposite, unpromising extremes, the glum circumlocutions of "mental health professionals" and the trashy metaphysics of the Herald Sun, according to which what there BASICALLY IS in the world are paedophiles lurking behind the rosebushes of childhood.
The subject of the following interview from Germany's Der Spiegel, Heidi Kastner, is more than moderately refreshing dealing with sex and violence within the family - a subject which stinks not just on account of the ugly deeds it involves, but equally because of the mainstream media's unblinking instrumentalisation of it. To go by her Spiegel interview, Kastner has a mind of her own - a preparedness to take it up to her interviewer, an awareness of the limitations of her knowledge and an ability to theorise realistically in public about atrocious acts committed within families - in a way that neither absolves abusers nor fudges the mixed feelings of victims. When was the last time you heard an Australian forensic expert ask "Do you have to give in to people's every voyeuristic twinge?" when confronted with one of 7, 9 or 10's self-righteous agents of provocation? Not that the Spiegel fares as badly as all that - where need be it challenges the expert to justify the very form in which she presents her sensation-saturated material.
The result is media-conscious media coverage - an interviewer and an interviewee who make each other mutually aware of the danger of overspicing the soup in every representation of their unpleasant topic - who, moreover, seem to accept that families are sites of inter- and intra-psychic stress and strain and of the total commercialisation of society - in part by means of the very media that provide them with the means to communicate. CS
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Kastner, 47, become known as an expert witness in the case of Joseph Fritzl. The culprit in the so-called incest-drama of Amstetten was sentenced in March this year to life imprisonment. For Kastner, the Friztl case is just one of many in which she has dealt with violence committed by fathers within their own families.
The subject of the following interview from Germany's Der Spiegel, Heidi Kastner, is more than moderately refreshing dealing with sex and violence within the family - a subject which stinks not just on account of the ugly deeds it involves, but equally because of the mainstream media's unblinking instrumentalisation of it. To go by her Spiegel interview, Kastner has a mind of her own - a preparedness to take it up to her interviewer, an awareness of the limitations of her knowledge and an ability to theorise realistically in public about atrocious acts committed within families - in a way that neither absolves abusers nor fudges the mixed feelings of victims. When was the last time you heard an Australian forensic expert ask "Do you have to give in to people's every voyeuristic twinge?" when confronted with one of 7, 9 or 10's self-righteous agents of provocation? Not that the Spiegel fares as badly as all that - where need be it challenges the expert to justify the very form in which she presents her sensation-saturated material.
The result is media-conscious media coverage - an interviewer and an interviewee who make each other mutually aware of the danger of overspicing the soup in every representation of their unpleasant topic - who, moreover, seem to accept that families are sites of inter- and intra-psychic stress and strain and of the total commercialisation of society - in part by means of the very media that provide them with the means to communicate. CS
***
Kastner, 47, become known as an expert witness in the case of Joseph Fritzl. The culprit in the so-called incest-drama of Amstetten was sentenced in March this year to life imprisonment. For Kastner, the Friztl case is just one of many in which she has dealt with violence committed by fathers within their own families.
Spiegel: Ms. Kastner, you write about terrible acts of extreme violence against children. Who would voluntarily read something like that?
Kastner: I don’t know. I’m confronted with these cases regularly. Maybe in the meantime I’ve lost a sense of how it affects others. If you work in garbage disposal, at some point you don't get worked up about the smell of toilet buckets any more.
Spiegel: The book teems with psychopaths, human beings running amok and other insane cases. Don't you overspice the soup a little?
Kastner: I present the really tough cases of paternal abuse - that's true. But I'm a forensic psychiatrist and I've been working in the field for twelve years. Someone who gives their child a clip over the ears on public transport is not going to land in my office.
Spiegel: What interests you about the cruelty of fathers?
Kastner: For me above all it's about the motivation of the culprits. Hardly any light has been thrown on it - for example, in the case of so-called family tragedies, where a man obliterates wife and child. In preparing this book I found three studies in total and one of them came from Fiji.
Spiegel: What have you discovered?
Kastner: As I looked more closely at the cases, it became clear that one thing was the same for all the men who run amok in their families - their lives had reached tipping point on two levels. They had been left by their partners and at the same time lost their jobs or were in major financial trouble.
Spiegel: That can happen to women too.
Kastner: Sure, though there we're dealing more with mothers who are so depressive that they take their children with them when the take their own lives. In almost none of the cases involving men that I've come across is there a depressive illness lurking in the background. They're more likely to be suffering from wounded narcissism.
Spiegel: You describe how a ten year old is regularly abused by his mother. In another case a woman who's prone to sadism restrained her daughter while her partner raped the child. Are the mothers just as guilty as the fathers?
Kastner: At no stage do I claim that men alone commit acts of violence. I've always been confronted with the problem of looking the other way, particularly with women. That whole "I'd be lost without him, that's why I looked on as he abused my child" is a lot of nonsense - especially nowadays, when resources like therapy and financial assistance are available to everyone. That's when my blood starts to boil. The children suffer almost exactly as much because their mothers betray them as they do because of the abuse itself. That's where the law hardly does justice to the guilt of the mothers.
Spiegel: Isn't it possible that mothers don't pick up on what's going on?
Kastner: When the mother says: "I didn't realise because I was never home when it was happening," it's difficult to prosecute them. But in the case of someone with normal human intelligence, it's inconceivable that a child can be abused over four years in a 40m square flat and the woman doesn't see it.
Spiegel: You write about an intergenerational tradition of fathers who exercise a "right of the first night" over their daughters. . .
Kastner: Certainly I've come up against such cases time and again and indeed in all classes. The father believes that the daughter is his property - that she's his, just like the biggest serve of steak at the dinner table. And the mother covers it up. When the daughter comes to her and says: "Father did some strange things to me," her answer is: "Now don't carry on like that, my father did that to me too of course."
Spiegel: How do things work in such families? Is a normal life possible in the midst of something incomprehensible like that?
Kastner: There are those one-off initiation rites, in many families they just go with growing-up. But there are also families where the daughter is abused regularly over many years and an astonishingly normal-looking life goes on in parallel in spite of it all. The child then completely splits off the abusive part. I've spoken time and again with victims who've reported that they lay there as if they weren't present at all. After it happened again, they clicked into everyday reality again afterwards. By splitting the abuse off from the rest of life, it was possible to go fishing with the father or on family trips, even possible to like him.
Spiegel: Isn't there something liberating for the women of the family when, after generations, one of them finally stands up and defends herself?
Kastner: No. On the contrary. Often in these families everyone firmly closes ranks against the child that brings charges against the father. In this respect, by the way, female victims are by now much more emancipated than male victims. There are definitely many abused young males, but they only rarely press charges. Sexual abuse is just much more difficult to integrate with a masculine self-image.
Spiegel: You've become famous because of a particularly atrocious case involving incest. You wrote the expert psychiatric report about Josef Fritzl, who held his daughter captive in a cellar dungeon for nearly 24 years. Wouldn't it have been more obvious to work that case up into a book?
Kastner: The Fritzl case is also a burden to me because I often get reduced to this case. On top of that - do you have to satisfy every questionable voyeuristic interest? No one becomes a better human being by knowing how often Mr. Fritzl changed his socks.
Spiegel: With Fritzl did you have the feeling - I've really understood him?
Kastner: I did. The crux of the Fritzl case was that I spoke with the man for 27 hours. But already after the first five hours I thought - I can understand this, I can explain how he ticks.
Spiegel: How does he tick then?
Kastner: According to the postulate of unlimited sexualised power. He chased after girls in the park, he raped a woman, he locked his daughter away and he always had the feeling that he could get away with it. We all know the feeling on a much lower level, a creeping process of corruption along the lines of - now I've eaten the first piece of cake, who cares if I eat the second too?
Spiegel: Did Fritzl have any form of moral consciousness?
Kastner: He did know that what he did was our of order. He once said to me that it became more impossible every day to put an end to the situation with his daughter. After a week he thought that he should really bring her out, but then came the question - how do I explain it to my wife and to everyone else out there? His next idea was that he should wait long enough till his daughter's will was broken and he could be sure she wouldn't give anything away. But the longer he waited, the clearer it became to him that it would actually work if he simply left his daughter in the dungeon.
Spiegel: Many sections of the media have given the impression that Fritzl is a fairly sly mind. . .
Kastner: . . . Well, you'd be surprised how little brilliance is needed to do something gruesome like that. Fritzl is a technician who went about his crimes with a book-keeper's precision. I knew I didn't have to wait for any sort of nuanced reflections from him, because they weren't going to come. Fritzl has a simple mind, literally a one-track mind - he has one groove, everything's in there and there's nothing else to him.
Spiegel: Was Fritzl your worst case?
Kastner: Admittedly the time-frame was extraordinary. But as far as details go, I've come across similarly black deeds.
Spiegel: You describe the case of a culprit, G, who beat his wife and maltreated his infant child so badly that it later died. Then G sat in prison opposite you, playing the persecuted innocent and bragging about a well-to-do female penfriend. How do you manage to stay calm when you're talking to a man like that?
Kastner: I have to admit that for me that individual was difficult to bear as a person. I try to become aware of my own reactions so I don't let them dominate the way I act. I'm there as a pro and not as a person with her own emotions. Though I also notice that with many people it's more difficult for me to keep a distance and maintain objectivity.
Spiegel: Do culprits try to manipulate you?
Kastner: Time and again, of course.
Spiegel: Do you notice something like that immediately?
Kastner: No, I'd be lying if I claimed I did. Though over the years I've certainly developed a special sense for behaviour that's all too smooth and nice - I mistrust it on professional grounds. You have to know the files and prepare yourself exactly in advance.
Spiegel: Your book is so full of atrocities that it would be possible to lose faith in human goodness. Are you finished with humanity by now?
Kastner: Not at all. I deal with these cases every day, sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day, I've had as good a glimpse at evil as anyone. I promised myself that if I notice that it changes me to the point where I become depressed, resigned or cynical, then I'll stop. But that's not the case. My perceptions have become sharper and I'm probably a lot more curious than many other people. Evil is part of human nature. It's better to acknowledge that fact.
(Heidi Kastner's Täter-Väter - without the alliteration: Perpetrators and Fathers - appeared in Europe in 2009 and is published by Verlag Ueberreuter. It is yet to appear in translation. The German original of her Spiegel interview can be found here.)
Spiegel: The book teems with psychopaths, human beings running amok and other insane cases. Don't you overspice the soup a little?
Kastner: I present the really tough cases of paternal abuse - that's true. But I'm a forensic psychiatrist and I've been working in the field for twelve years. Someone who gives their child a clip over the ears on public transport is not going to land in my office.
Spiegel: What interests you about the cruelty of fathers?
Kastner: For me above all it's about the motivation of the culprits. Hardly any light has been thrown on it - for example, in the case of so-called family tragedies, where a man obliterates wife and child. In preparing this book I found three studies in total and one of them came from Fiji.
Spiegel: What have you discovered?
Kastner: As I looked more closely at the cases, it became clear that one thing was the same for all the men who run amok in their families - their lives had reached tipping point on two levels. They had been left by their partners and at the same time lost their jobs or were in major financial trouble.
Spiegel: That can happen to women too.
Kastner: Sure, though there we're dealing more with mothers who are so depressive that they take their children with them when the take their own lives. In almost none of the cases involving men that I've come across is there a depressive illness lurking in the background. They're more likely to be suffering from wounded narcissism.
Spiegel: You describe how a ten year old is regularly abused by his mother. In another case a woman who's prone to sadism restrained her daughter while her partner raped the child. Are the mothers just as guilty as the fathers?
Kastner: At no stage do I claim that men alone commit acts of violence. I've always been confronted with the problem of looking the other way, particularly with women. That whole "I'd be lost without him, that's why I looked on as he abused my child" is a lot of nonsense - especially nowadays, when resources like therapy and financial assistance are available to everyone. That's when my blood starts to boil. The children suffer almost exactly as much because their mothers betray them as they do because of the abuse itself. That's where the law hardly does justice to the guilt of the mothers.
Spiegel: Isn't it possible that mothers don't pick up on what's going on?
Kastner: When the mother says: "I didn't realise because I was never home when it was happening," it's difficult to prosecute them. But in the case of someone with normal human intelligence, it's inconceivable that a child can be abused over four years in a 40m square flat and the woman doesn't see it.
Spiegel: You write about an intergenerational tradition of fathers who exercise a "right of the first night" over their daughters. . .
Kastner: Certainly I've come up against such cases time and again and indeed in all classes. The father believes that the daughter is his property - that she's his, just like the biggest serve of steak at the dinner table. And the mother covers it up. When the daughter comes to her and says: "Father did some strange things to me," her answer is: "Now don't carry on like that, my father did that to me too of course."
Spiegel: How do things work in such families? Is a normal life possible in the midst of something incomprehensible like that?
Kastner: There are those one-off initiation rites, in many families they just go with growing-up. But there are also families where the daughter is abused regularly over many years and an astonishingly normal-looking life goes on in parallel in spite of it all. The child then completely splits off the abusive part. I've spoken time and again with victims who've reported that they lay there as if they weren't present at all. After it happened again, they clicked into everyday reality again afterwards. By splitting the abuse off from the rest of life, it was possible to go fishing with the father or on family trips, even possible to like him.
Spiegel: Isn't there something liberating for the women of the family when, after generations, one of them finally stands up and defends herself?
Kastner: No. On the contrary. Often in these families everyone firmly closes ranks against the child that brings charges against the father. In this respect, by the way, female victims are by now much more emancipated than male victims. There are definitely many abused young males, but they only rarely press charges. Sexual abuse is just much more difficult to integrate with a masculine self-image.
Spiegel: You've become famous because of a particularly atrocious case involving incest. You wrote the expert psychiatric report about Josef Fritzl, who held his daughter captive in a cellar dungeon for nearly 24 years. Wouldn't it have been more obvious to work that case up into a book?
Kastner: The Fritzl case is also a burden to me because I often get reduced to this case. On top of that - do you have to satisfy every questionable voyeuristic interest? No one becomes a better human being by knowing how often Mr. Fritzl changed his socks.
Spiegel: With Fritzl did you have the feeling - I've really understood him?
Kastner: I did. The crux of the Fritzl case was that I spoke with the man for 27 hours. But already after the first five hours I thought - I can understand this, I can explain how he ticks.
Spiegel: How does he tick then?
Kastner: According to the postulate of unlimited sexualised power. He chased after girls in the park, he raped a woman, he locked his daughter away and he always had the feeling that he could get away with it. We all know the feeling on a much lower level, a creeping process of corruption along the lines of - now I've eaten the first piece of cake, who cares if I eat the second too?
Spiegel: Did Fritzl have any form of moral consciousness?
Kastner: He did know that what he did was our of order. He once said to me that it became more impossible every day to put an end to the situation with his daughter. After a week he thought that he should really bring her out, but then came the question - how do I explain it to my wife and to everyone else out there? His next idea was that he should wait long enough till his daughter's will was broken and he could be sure she wouldn't give anything away. But the longer he waited, the clearer it became to him that it would actually work if he simply left his daughter in the dungeon.
Spiegel: Many sections of the media have given the impression that Fritzl is a fairly sly mind. . .
Kastner: . . . Well, you'd be surprised how little brilliance is needed to do something gruesome like that. Fritzl is a technician who went about his crimes with a book-keeper's precision. I knew I didn't have to wait for any sort of nuanced reflections from him, because they weren't going to come. Fritzl has a simple mind, literally a one-track mind - he has one groove, everything's in there and there's nothing else to him.
Spiegel: Was Fritzl your worst case?
Kastner: Admittedly the time-frame was extraordinary. But as far as details go, I've come across similarly black deeds.
Spiegel: You describe the case of a culprit, G, who beat his wife and maltreated his infant child so badly that it later died. Then G sat in prison opposite you, playing the persecuted innocent and bragging about a well-to-do female penfriend. How do you manage to stay calm when you're talking to a man like that?
Kastner: I have to admit that for me that individual was difficult to bear as a person. I try to become aware of my own reactions so I don't let them dominate the way I act. I'm there as a pro and not as a person with her own emotions. Though I also notice that with many people it's more difficult for me to keep a distance and maintain objectivity.
Spiegel: Do culprits try to manipulate you?
Kastner: Time and again, of course.
Spiegel: Do you notice something like that immediately?
Kastner: No, I'd be lying if I claimed I did. Though over the years I've certainly developed a special sense for behaviour that's all too smooth and nice - I mistrust it on professional grounds. You have to know the files and prepare yourself exactly in advance.
Spiegel: Your book is so full of atrocities that it would be possible to lose faith in human goodness. Are you finished with humanity by now?
Kastner: Not at all. I deal with these cases every day, sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day, I've had as good a glimpse at evil as anyone. I promised myself that if I notice that it changes me to the point where I become depressed, resigned or cynical, then I'll stop. But that's not the case. My perceptions have become sharper and I'm probably a lot more curious than many other people. Evil is part of human nature. It's better to acknowledge that fact.
(Heidi Kastner's Täter-Väter - without the alliteration: Perpetrators and Fathers - appeared in Europe in 2009 and is published by Verlag Ueberreuter. It is yet to appear in translation. The German original of her Spiegel interview can be found here.)
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