"It felt good to be wanted … and to be needed." An interpretative phenomenological analysis of intimacy and rejection among fathers convicted of incestuously abusing their children

Familial dysfunction intuitively plays a crucial role in father-child incest offending, but concerningly little research has examined fathers’ familial relationships. This study phenomenologically interpreted intimate relationships to parents, partners, children, and self of six fathers convicted of incestuously abusing their children. The participants’ narratives spanned two superordinate and five subordinate themes. (1) Complex construals of care, comprised: (1.1) Intergenerational complexity, characterised by the participants’ complexity to integrate the experiences of both abuse and care in their upbringing; (1.2) Instrumentalised fatherhood, which detailed their instrumental and utilitarian execution of parenting; and (1.3) The fragmented father, which describes the fragmentation of the participants’ father identities. The second superordinate theme, (2) Intimately resented, comprised: (2.1) Craving adoration, inflicting harm, characterised by the discrepancy of participants’ yearning for adoration and intimacy, and how the absence thereof was related to feelings of resentment and inadequacy in their masculinities and themselves; and (2.2) Spurned retaliation, which reflected the participants’ feelings of entitlement to intimacy and sex, and grievances related to the rejection thereof. This study finds that familial dysfunction is a core component to father-child incest offending, with central experiences of rejection and entitlement, and encourages future studies to explore intimate dynamics as an explanatory mechanism of incest.Practical Impact StatementLonging for, entitlement to, and rejection of intimacy and adoration were central experiences in fathers’ narrated cascading sequence to incest. Feelings of grievance and hostility are relatively unexplored in child sexual abuse, but the unique interplay of intimate relationships to adult partners and children in incest offending suggests these might be important avenues to explore in future research.