When the Austrian building engineer Josef Fritzl locked up his daughter in the cellar, raping her for almost a quarter of a century and fathering seven children by her, it seemed like a crime that went to the dark heart of Austrian society with its culture of secrecy.

Now Britain has a similar scandal and it seems that perhaps we should not be so smug. Rape, brutality behind closed doors, the reckless abuse of parental power . . . these are, it appears, part of a universal netherworld. And each family has its own blighted narrative – a weak, subdued mother, perhaps, her will broken early in a marriage; a history of mental disorder or of alcohol-fuelled rage on the part of the rapist; the cynical choosing of favourites, the sexualisation of one or two children out of a whole brood.

Sorry, Austria – we do it too. The Fritzl crimes were more carefully planned than the British case. The Austrian constructed a cellar dungeon, maintaining a second household below stairs. It was plainly about power – Elisabeth was his difficult, defiant daughter who refused to buckle to his will. So sex became for Fritzl an instrument of control until she started to bear his children.

Then a crude exchange system was set in place: when Elisabeth had sex with her father, life “improved” for the downstairs family. Even so, they never saw sunlight.

Fritzl is facing charges of murder, rape, mental torture, slavery, incest and kidnapping. It will be a very public trial, and that is a good thing. It is important to understand the mechanics of Fritzl’s life. So much of his criminal endeavour took place in his head. The scheming has to be exposed to open view. The children need that before they can reach the next stage of recovery. So, too, does society as a whole.

Yet it is precisely this kind of detailed and open analysis that has been denied the British public. The man sentenced yesterday has not been named, to protect his victims. A deal was struck with the prosecution to spare his two daughters – raped and abused for more than 25 years – the ordeal of entering the witness box.

What, as a result, will we know about the dynamics of this unhappy family? The answer is, only a fraction of the information and insights that have emerged from the Fritzl case. Even if the daughters of the British rapist eventually felt strong enough to talk about their experiences, they would be able to present only a small piece of the story. It is in the nature of these cases that the controlling father figure withholds information and plays off one child against another.

The Austrian way of justice seems to be better. Elisabeth Fritzl, and perhaps some of the other adult children, will be allowed to testify by video, avoiding a courtroom confrontation with their father – painful, certainly, but a necessary precondition for uniting the family and helping them to understand what has happened to them over the past decades. And it is probably the only sure way of discovering how society failed them.

The British system is right to want to defend minors and damaged relatives. But, in gross rape cases where the victims have essentially been locked up psychologically and left alone with their secrets, a policy of openness is essential. The British police were apparently told of suspicions 20 years ago, yet nothing happened. How has the relationship between the police and the social welfare network crumbled to such a deplorable level? Unlike Fritzl, the British family rapist moved house frequently and thus slipped out of view. But that is not a sufficient explanation. Nineteen pregnancies, nine births, seven offspring still alive: how did the father hide his plan? What kind of subterfuge allowed him to escape scrutiny?

All these facts and many more are known about the Fritzl family. This is not voyeurism, it is a means to understanding. There is one way of dealing with the problem of privacy: it is giving the victims of a monstrous father entirely new identities. The precedent had been set by the various witness protection schemes in operation across Europe and the United States.

There is no reason why these arrangements should not be adapted for victims of horrific child abuse. The Fritzl family – the upstairs component that lived more or less normally, attending school, and the seriously neglected downstairs part of the clan – have all been offered new names and resettlement after the trial of their father and after their therapy has begun to show results.

This may seem a dramatic step, a robbing of identity even. But surely no one seriously wants to carry on bearing the name of an abusive criminal, the constant nagging reminder of a tainted parenthood. There is expense involved – new social security numbers and income support – but surely that is the very least that can be offered to people who have suffered because of shortcomings in the welfare net.

Nobody wants a nanny state that peeps behind our net curtains. However, the daughters of the man sentenced in Sheffield should have been shielded as children, and were not. Instead, in a classic case of stable doors and bolting horses, protection has been offered now in the form of a dubious deal with a fiendish rapist.

What should have been proposed is a new life and new identities for his psychologically wrecked offspring. The present outcome – an incomplete trial that seems to give more consideration to the perpetrator than to his victims – is unsatisfactory in almost all respects. We really could learn a thing or two from the Austrians after all.

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