Incest in Families
Information, Stories, Statistics, Behavioural & Psychological Effects

Definition of Incest

From the website: 'The traditional definition of incest is sexual intercourse between blood relatives: it is illegal to marry because of such a close relationship.

There is now an evolving definition of incest that takes into consideration trust and power. One such definition is: "the imposition of sexually inappropriate acts, or acts with sexual overtones ... by one or more persons who derive authority through ongoing emotional bonding with that child." (Blume, 1990, p. 4) This definition of incest includes as perpetrators immediate/extended family members, babysitters, school teachers, scout masters, priests/ministers, etc.'

"Stepdaughters are over eight times more at risk of sexual abuse by the stepfathers who reared them than are daughters reared by their biological fathers." (Russell, 1986, p. 103)

https://www.clinicalsocialwork.com/incest.html

Evolution & Incest

From the essay: 'Taking into consideration cross-cultural literature, biological principles, results from animal studies, and common observation, the Finnish sociologist and anthropologist Edward Westermarck proposed (in the late 19th century) that a mechanism designed to cause the development of sibling incest avoidance was built into human nature – what we would now call an evolved information-processing adaptation or adaptive specialization.

He hypothesized that, as the product of such a mechanism, children who are reared in close physical proximity during early childhood develop a sexual aversion toward one another later in adulthood (Westermarck, 1891/1921). As modern, evolutionarily oriented researchers would express it, the evolved function of such a mechanism was to lower the probability of highly inbred conceptions.

.. From a biological perspective, there are good reasons to expect the existence of psychological mechanisms dedicated to (1) identifying those individuals who have a high probability of being a close genetic relative, and (2) using that information to inhibit potentially fertile sexual relations with them to the degree that such matings would have been harmful.

Throughout our species’ evolutionary history, the presence of deleterious recessive genes (e.g., Bittle and Neel, 1994) and pathogens (e.g., Tooby, 1982) created strong selection pressures for the evolution of psychological mechanisms designed to inhibit close inbreeding.

An important point is that the emergence of any kind of inbreeding avoidance mechanism depended on two evolutionarily recurrent conditions: 1) that close genetic relatives encountered each other during potentially fertile years at a sufficiently high rate, and, 2) that those individuals who mated with a close genetic relative suffered a relatively reduced reproductive success over those who did not. Accordingly, in those species where close genetic relatives did not regularly encounter one another during fertile years, no sexual aversion system is expected to exist.'

By Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, Center for Evolutionary Psychology. October 19, 2000

https://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/papers/Incest_avoid.pdf

Analyse any human emotion, no matter how far it may be removed from the sphere of sex, and you are sure to discover somewhere the primal impulse, to which life owes its perpetuation. ... The primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable. ... Mans most disagreeable habits and idiosyncrasies, his deceit, his cowardice, his lack of reverence, are engendered by his incomplete adjustment to a complicated civilisation. It is the result of the conflict between our instincts and our culture. (Sigmund Freud)

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Evolution of Incest in Families. Information, Stories, Statistics, Sexual Behaviour and Psychological Effects

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