This book deals with a recent historical period when some incestuous practices that had been common place and perfectly neglected by all authorities for ages came to the front and were considered as criminal at long last. We must widen the scope and consider imposed sexual practices from adults onto young children and teenagers. The latter do not know what sex is, though they live the sexual drive intensely. They can be manipulated and used by adults. They have to learn about sex all by themselves. The point is that incest warps the learning because parents are natural models for the kids and what they say is naturally the rule, the law, the truth. If parents sexually meddle with their children, they warp the perception these have of this essential human activity. Then the kids react and build their own personalities from these warped experiences. That leads to a complete mix-up that can bring the young people to all kinds of despaired attitudes : suicide, revulsion, criminal drive, rebellion, etc.

This book shows how Donald D'Haene managed to go through it, build by himself and for himself some kind of balanced grown-up life. He chose confrontation and was half-heartedly followed by the social authorities that should have followed him entirely. That is because he was the first or one of the first to come up with the denunciation of such practices in a society where it had been neglected and ignored for centuries, in fact forever. It should be a beacon in our consciousness that life is complex and requires a lot of courage to come to terms with its hardships or crimes, with victimization and the pangs of growing up. The main lesson is that growing up can only be successful if one confronts one's past and comes to terms, no matter what and which, with it. It is a lesson of courage on the side of the individual and a denunciation of the half-measures a society takes in such fields as incest. The general idea that governs social services in such cases is that the kid has to be protected but that the family unit must not be broken up. The society tries to deter but does not want to intervene in family matters as long as it can ignore them. A must on the reading-list of any educator and social worker, or even psychologist or psychiatrist.

The conclusion I may put forward is that we have to be careful in such fields because at times an insufficiently thought about act from " social " services might be more harmful than helpful. A criminal has to be punished but the punishment must be seen not as a deterrent in society but as a helping hand for the victims to grow through the crisis such crimes build up in them. The prime concern has to be the victims and not the perpetrators of the crimes nor society. This is a new approach to social behavior and it is far from being a won battle. Especially since sex deals in everyone of us with the deepest layers of our beings, the deepest drives of our psyches and necessarily the guilt one develops at only having " unhuman " desires (and I don't say unnatural because man is not a purely natural animal any more but a social and historical being), and I am afraid everyone has or has had such desires and everyone develops some guilt concerning them.