The 1980s in Austria was a very patriarchal time and place; daughters were accustomed to facing authoritarianism, if not wanton violence, from the male family heads. In addition, it seems that everyone and their brothers were building underground bunkers to retreat to in case of nuclear attack. This was the the tenor of that country when Elisabeth ("Sissi") disappeared in 1984.

Josef Fritzl held his daughter captive as a sex slave from the time she was 18 in 1984 until 2008, when a doctor in a hospital suspected that something unusual was happening with the family. The middle-aged woman sat for an hour in the police station without saying a word. Then, she told a true horror story to the police officers.

In the underground secret torture chamber that Josef Fritzl built in the 1980s, Sissi's father raped and physically assaulted her for 24 years. This resulted in physical injury, trauma and seven children. Some of them were reared upstairs, with Elisabeth serving as the occasional babysitter. Her children, more than anything, are what sustained her throughout the ordeal and kept her soul alive.

I'm No Monster: the Horrifying True Story of Josef Fritzl by Stefanie Marsh and Bojan Pancevski, 2009

Books about sexual assault