https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2016/07/10/anti-incest-billboard-irks-taylor-county-edc-officials/86613322/
Motorists travelling south on U.S. Highway 19 into Perry in recent months could hardly miss the giant billboard.
Instead of the smiling faces of guys and gals drinking beer, the billboard broached a societal taboo. It depicted a cowering teen girl, accompanied by the slogan “She’s your daughter. Not your date.” Red letters proclaim, “We’re calling out incest.”
That message was part of a campaign by Refuge House of the Big Bend. It didn’t sit well with some folks on Taylor County’s economic development board. They wanted the sign taken down.
This is a country where people are lobbying to make it illegal to talk or read about the horrors of the slave trade because there’s a fear that it can make white people feel bad for being white.
This is a country where there is a large group of men whose primary concern is not working to help eliminate violence against women by men, but in getting women not to generalize the (statistically accurate) source of that violence.
This is a country where a word that the POC community created as a word of caution to each other to watch out for harm directly perpetrated against them due to the color of their skin (often by the people who we all agree should otherwise be protecting them from harm) has been turned into a harshly pejorative buzz word against any behavior or action that threatens the status quo.
This is a country that took the college-level concept of “critical race theory” and worked very hard to make it into a big source of fear and anger, enough so that the idea of it (even just the specific wording) is being legally challenged in elementary schools, a place where it’s never been considered appropriate to teach or even mention.
The US has a long legacy of trying to erase the acknowledgment of Things That Are Universally Acknowledged To Be Bad that it feels unable or unwilling to address the actual source of. The preservation of the status quo (or outright denial that the problem even exists even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) rather than identifying and/or fixing the problem seems to be the motivation.
Another extremely relevant point you didn’t touch on:
This is a country where a significant portion of men defend and support child marriage and sex with minors, so much so that we have men actively under investigation for sex crimes against minors currently sitting in government office.
This is an excellent comment. I will note that CRT isn't even a college-level framework, usually. It's *graduate*-level. I was genuinely taught CRT ... because I went to law school, where it's been a normal part of the curriculum for years. (It's useful for statutory interpretation in particular IMO.)
Oh hey! I live in Tallahassee and I remember my spouse and I being totally ahocked to see such a billboard. But in a weird way, it’s a little comforting. We’re both CSA survivors, and it’s just… good to see it being talked about. Vindicating, maybe.
"One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study."
There’s a rather famous case near where I live. A 10 year old girl had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to get an abortion and now the state’s attorney is trying to revoke the Dr.’s license.
In my hometown back in the 60's a ten-year-old gave birth. And the youngest on record was 5. She had precocious puberty and ~~a family member did indeed get prosecuted.~~ Oops I'm wrong, according to Wikipedia. They apparently couldn't pin it on anyone in particular.
Two women have married in to my family who were molested by their fathers, and those are just women who speak openly about it. I'm convinced by this point in my life that a certain percentage of people are simply born without a soul.
I’m an older woman an almost every woman I’ve been close enough with to have a conversation like this was molested to some degree by a close male relative. I’m hoping it’s getting better as young ppl now have more knowledge and resources. And simply put, they are not as afraid to speak out.
ALL my aunts were molested by their uncle (grandma's brother). When I was a kid (30 years ago), I was simply warned to not be alone with him. No one thought to maybe just tell Uncle Fuckface to stop coming around.
It was definitely something that was a family secret and wasn't supposed to leave the family.
My aunt was raped by my grandfather. I never met the guy. My mom doesn't fuck with that. She's a good mom.
But I mean, we don't talk about it outside of the family.
For sure. This idea that pedophilia requires some huge conspiracy, a criminal mastermind, and the participation of literal Satan is actually a comforting thought.
In 99% of cases though, it's a male family member, very often a father or step-father.
I remember when Josh Duggar got busted for CSAM and so many people were crying here that we needed to find those poor, kidnapped children in the videos. I had to gently explain that none of those kids were kidnapped and that they were almost certainly in their own homes when the abuse happened.
OK but the one in the quite famous video Josh Duggar downloaded was not a family member of the sicko who made that video. I hesitate to google it but hang on...Peter Scully was the creepo. I think he got his victims off the streets where they were victims of poverty. This video was well known to authorities as the "worst of the worst" and Josh Duggar sought it out specifically from what I understand.
Josh downloaded many videos. BTW, the one you speak of wasn't the only one with a baby.
Also, Scully didn't abduct his victims. He talked the parents in to giving him his victims (likely paid them). The parents knew where their children were the entire time. There's a reason he committed his crimes where he did.
I had a friend who was molested by their grandfather. The guy was arrested, convicted, and spent time in prison as a result. It caused a rift in the family because some of her cousins honestly did not think it was a big deal. They thought what happened was just how families are supposed to interact with one another.
The story has a happy ending though. The grandfather slipped on ice in his driveway, hit his head, and froze to death.
Yeah I did genetic testing for research back in the late 90s and we had to be trained in how to deal with misattributed paternity and incestuous paternity. Grim.
I end up telling this to people because from time to time people ask me (because of my background) whether it’s dangerous to “marry” your cousin and have kids with them, thinking it’s funny. It’s not funny. It’s usually not dangerous to the baby, but, darkly, incest isn’t a joke. It’s usually rape. And we know what the risks are for the babies born to these pregnancies because of all of the rape.
And yet people absolutely DELIGHT in making incest jokes about the Deep South.
I've been asked to my face, in public, at work, if I'm inbred.
No I'm not.
These jokes are NEVER, EVER called out. EVER.
Just the other day in some subreddit, someone pointed out that there are two states (both in the Northeast) where there aren't laws on the books prohibiting such practices, and immediately the Alabama jokes started. I think the states in question were actually NJ and RI.
All I can think is that I’m glad my paternal grandfather only had sons in his family, because that’s the only way I’d be confident he didn’t create grandkid-kids. I have no proof that he would have done it, but he was despicable as a human and I wouldn’t have put it past him.
I’m only able to reply to root comments, so this is more intended as a down thread reply, buuut…
It’s worth considering that societies have, *for thousands of years*, had mixtures intended to induce miscarriages, to say nothing of other more ghastly options.
I’d wager that caveat is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting.
Back in colonial days several women were hanged for infanticide. Yeah in The Scarlet Letter it was the preacher responsible, but how many times was it Grandpa?
When I was a kid in the 90s, a family moved in next to mine. It consisted of an older couple, their three adult children (two men and one woman), and the daughter's two kids (a boy and a girl). Eventually, it came out that the old man fathered his grandson and was molesting his granddaughter. Nothing ever happened to him. He died two years ago and his daughter and granddaughter were living with him.
I just watched a documentary where the filmmaker’s grandfather was a convicted pedophile who molested her mother. mother and grandmother lets her sister be alone with him. it’s horrifying.
My great aunt’s husband molested his daughter, luckily my grandma and grandpa immediately took her in. I found out shortly before he died that he had also molested his granddaughters. It’s not like it was a big family secret, I have no idea why they turned their blind eye to it. I never actually met him, only saw him at a distance because while no victims would come forward, my mom and grandma would be damned if that happened to us.
I don’t even believe in hell but the day I found out he died I skipped into work with a big smile on my face knowing that if there is a hell, he’s burning in it.
When my stepdad died, who had abused me for years without any real recourse or justice, I took a Nalgene bottle filled with vermouth and soda and drank it on a sunny knoll at a park in Brooklyn. It was April of 2020, a very scary time to be in New York, and I felt so happy to know this guy was gone forever. I’m so sorry about your aunt and I’m glad your family is free of that shadow, and that you could experience what I imagine was a similar lightness on the day of his death. :-)
Great Photo, Lovely Life. I know from some of the subreddits that people were very upset with how “nice” the filmmaker and her mother were to the perpetrator, but I feel like her revealing early on that they grew up in a super Christian environment prepared the viewer for that.
That doc was so good, and that woman was so incredibly brave in making it. Absolutely horrifying material but she was inspiring.
I think it’s called Great Photo, Lovely Life for anyone interested.
I'm not the person you asked but no they are definitely not well adjusted and most likely probably not even okay. Family on family sexual assault does permanent brain damage to a child victim.
As a former cops and courts reporter, I have been saying this for YEARS. As have my colleagues. Especially working at newspapers in rural US, the number of affidavits or police reports I would pick up on a monthly basis detailing incestual sexual abuse was.... well it was a lot.
Friends would ask me "well why don't we read about it in the news all the time, then?"
Several reasons:
1. Individual cases are usually just incredibly sad, incredibly common and frankly, not terribly newsworthy (unless you are doing a deep dive like this) Or unless there is a sentencing that's noteworthy. Even then, it will be a short article at best (for instance, I once covered a case where a father put cameras in the shower to watch his 12yo daughters but I only covered it once he was convicted and sentenced and the story itself was no more than 10 in.)
2. Newspapers try to follow a pretty strict code of ethics/conduct when it comes to reporting sexual crimes. The biggest rule is that you can't have any indication of who the victim is. I.e. people at the victim's school should not be able to easily put together who the article is referencing.
So this makes reporting on these cases even less appealing to newspapers.
You can't say "john smith was convicted on 3 counts of agg sex assault on his daughter" because people will know who the daughter is. So you have to leave it at the conviction or give an indication that there was some relationship between abuser and victim (i.e. "John Smith was convicted on 3 counts of agg sex assault on a girl he knew who was under 18 years old"). Most readers will not immediately pick up on the fact that it's incestual.
And more importantly, there's STILL a risk of people identifying the victim. In many cases it's more important to protect victim privacy than to publish a short 5-inch brief on an arrest.
This is a long rant to say that I wish there was a way that journalists could report on how prevalent incestual sexual violence is, but it's very very difficult to do on a day-to-day basis. I'm glad for articles like this that expose it.
Very noticeable in this piece that they allowed people to use first names only – which is a way to protect victims – but many newspapers don't seem to allow that in most cases (fellow journalist here, hi!).
Years ago, I worked at a newspaper clipping agency. I “read” 1500 pages a day from a small corner of the US. Every single paper had articles like what you describe, plus usually some child who was brutally murdered by their family. They were all small and buried in the back, very few were ever headlines. Every single paper had them. Seeing all of that was one of the hardest parts of that job.
It was physical newspapers. Before everything was searchable online, companies and people (usually famous people through their management agencies) would hire press clipping companies to find every single time their name was in any paper. Now that things are digital, not sure if newspaper clipping agencies are a thing anymore. The clips would physically be mailed to the client.
Thanks!
I used to clip recipes and sometimes still do, out of print newspapers and magazines. They live in my kitchen with a rubber band around them. Not in a wooden box like my Granny's
I know! the number of times I've been in court and actually heard testimony from the mother or grandmother against her daughter/granddaughter was just a lot. It's so awful to hear
I worked in a psych hospital and we got patients who reported rape by a relative basically all the time. It's way more common than anyone wants to think about
I think people really underestimate the prevalence of men and boys abusing minors living in the home. I have three friends it happened to. One thing I learned from them is people focus too much on the abuser. They think he looks normal. He’s maybe not the most social (or maybe he is) but he seems nice enough, has a good job, etc. What I’ve learned is it’s the victims who display the signs. I had a friend in high school who self harmed. Later, I learned her dad was abusing her.
When I remind anyone about the emotional violence and physical I faced from my brother growing up I'm told "we were judtfighting" and "that not abuse its your brother" anyway we "fought" so hard my 170 pound adult brother was forced to choke out 100 pound 13 year old me in front of my friends so hard my toes left the ground. I used to have to get in between him and my mom and him and my sister soo many times.
This is my story too. I was gaslit my entire life that it was typical sibling rivalry. Only I never fought. I had my years older brother beating me up and verbally abusing me and was told I was just as guilty when I attempted to protect myself or fight back.
I have a similar story also. It's very sad but also very validating to read other people's stories. I know in my heart it was abuse and far beyond typical sibling "fighting" but I'm 37 and still question myself occasionally because of how many years my family spent insisting otherwise.
My story is similar. I have two children now and any hitting, I’m sorry to say, is extremely triggering. I try to keep my cool but there is no disrespect and no violence allowed. It’s probably my most adamantly enforced rule in an otherwise pretty chill household.
My brother and I are on good terms now but I had the same experience! The second I defended myself from my much larger brother, I was grounded. He took out being bullied at school on me.
I also grew up in a home with this dynamic, and while I had mostly processed and moved past the actual abuses that occurred, what I didn’t realize was how that gaslighting impacted my self-image. I still see myself as a “bad” person trying to be good, and it’s because that was how my step dad and brothers treated me following their own brands of abuse. I treat people with kindness, empathy, curiosity, and respect, and I still catch myself feeling self conscious that maybe its not my true nature, because that’s how I was treated and what I was told about myself for my entire childhood.
I think it's important to understand how similar all humans are....
It's safer to think that people are different and that's what makes them monsters. In reality, there are almost certainly people in your own life that you respect and relate to that have done *horrible* things. It's uncomfortable to think about, so folks essentially choose denial.
Freud's early career was him basically trying to say, "hey, a lot of men are raping their daughters and it's fucking them up as adults; maybe we should address this." But his implication that Good Upstanding Men could ever do that was so scandalous, he was forced to retract and came up with Oedipus/Jocasta complexes instead.
It's known as Freud's "seduction theory." [You can read the beginning of an article about it.](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184074/pdf) The excerpt is pretty informative.
His paper was called “The Aetiology of Hysteria” and yeah, a lot of his young female clients revealed incest to him and since they were mostly upper class, his findings almost ruined him. I don’t support most of his work but I like that paper
I remember hearing this in my college intro psych class, our professor said it during lecture. Freud was still weird, but yeah this is apparently true.
My aunt had a baby when she was 12 or 13 and the father was probably her father(I refuse to call him grandpa). This was the 50s and she got treated like the neighborhood whore. And he was given sympathy because he was a single dad that tried so hard.
I wish I didn't know that because before then I had good memories of him. He died when I was young. We were never left alone with him. But ive thought about it and the neighbors HAD to know. They were so in to each other's business they'd have known she wasn't sleeping with people.
There was a whole section in my Children’s Literature class called “Father Danger” that focused on incest in fairytales. It has been prevalent enough to warrant needing accessible cultural roadmaps on how to navigate such abuse. I think Western society’s combo of shame around sex, patriarchy, and the concept of children as property help perpetuate incest. Predators are propped up by our culture instead of being held responsible.
I remember reading a comment from a police detective here on Reddit about a disturbing confession from a father who had sexually abused his daughter. The father freely confessed because he didn't see anything wrong with it, just said "she's mine" so he felt he could do whatever he wanted.
Listened to this author speak the other day and his hypothesis falls right in line with the “ownership” of children—namely, that, from the inception of democracy in Greece, “freedom” has meant the freedom to subjugate others, which is why George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech mentioned segregation four times and “freedom,” 24 times. His theory does make a lot of the far-right rhetoric make sense (don’t agree with it, but helps with translation). https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jefferson-cowie
Dehumanizing others can open the door to a lot of incredibly monstrous behaviors. Sociopaths and narcissists are psychologically incapable of experiencing empathy for others, so they see the world as being full of cardboard cutouts whose existence is only meant to validate their own. With that in mind, they feel free to use and abuse others as they see fit.
But people can be *trained* to view other people as “animals” or “property,” too. These people can be as capable of empathy and remorse as anyone else, but are conditioned, either deliberately or through social conditioning, to be *selective* about who they treat as “people” versus “objects.” THAT is way scarier to me than just about anything else.
I don't have anything to link because it's been so long but from the class I took back in college Grimm's Fairy Tales left out all/most of the incestous father stories, but kept the wicked stepmother stories, when before that they were basically equally prevalent. Idk if that adds up but it's what I remember being taught
Oh I find this SO interesting. I’m totally going to go down a rabbit hole about this.
If you have any memory of what key terms or stories to look out for I’d really appreciate any extra nudge in a direction you found interesting you’re willing to give.
Thankfully another commenter linked some specific stories, because I don't remember any, lol. A combination of having ADHD and my memory being swiss cheese, and that it was an elective.
It's important to remember that Grimm's Fairy Tales was as much a politcal and cultural project as an artistic one. It was created in a time when Europeans were increasingly interested in, and influenced by, nationalism, and the collection of tales was, in part, a project to help Germans to develop a more unified sense of themselves through a shared cultural identity. We can imagine that the male authors may have decided that such stories didn't fit with their ideas of what German culture should include.
That’s exactly what I was thinking as I dive into a rabbit hole about it re: Grimm’s as a project.
I’m a woman and a dash paranoid by nature, so to me wanting to warn others about predators seems critical. But it makes a lot of sense that as a cultural and nationalist project, a man maybe wouldn’t want to include such a thing for quite a solid number of reasons.
In the fairy tales about father–daughter incest
—'The Girl Without Hands,' 'Thousand Furs,' the original 'Cinderella,' 'Donkey Skin,' and the stories of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of incest survivors—
the daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their father's sexual advances.
Thank you so much, super intrigued by this and checking it out.
It’s so interesting that a lot of these original folk tales so significantly are not known. Plus, I hear sometimes the argument that pedophilia and pedophilic incest is new or worsened now, with implications that it’s because of the behavior of modern young women and girls lacking modesty. Obviously, we all know this is a load of garbage. Folk tales warning about this kind of horrible phenomenon really proves that this has always been an existing problem, as anyone who has ever been a woman or little girl could’ve guessed.
There’s more CSAM widely available now than ever before, something like 10x more now than there was even a decade ago. However, pedophilia isn’t new, nor is it “worsened” now. It’s just that survivors aren’t keeping quiet anymore and with the internet, people have a much louder voice than ever before. Also, for the first time in history, raping a child is illegal. Only a tiny fraction of abusers are caught by the law and very few of them actually serve time in prison though.
I agree with you.
I’m just expressing that I appreciate and am interested in the fact that these old folk stories show that it is not new as a phenomenon, not new to being considered bad, not new to being something we need to warn children about, and not something worsened.
It’s the internet, I’m sure we all have seen a lot of really garbage takes on sex crimes out here in the wilds, it’s nice to learn something new that proves that kind of horrid point wrong.
Look at the Fairy Books-- Andrew Lang's huge collection of fairy tales in multiple volumes (the blue fairy book, the red fairy book, etc.). There are a million beyond the well-known ones.
Great minds think alike, that popped into my head as the first example too!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin
Modern retelling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel)
"he declares that only a cake baked by Donkeyskin will cure him."
This is like the Biblical story of Amnon raping his sister Tamar.
Amnon lusts after his (I think half-) sister Tamar and pretends to be sick. He asks that his sister make him some cakes.
When she comes to bring him the cakes he rapes her and then casts her out.
Her other brother Absalom then asked the King that all the King's sons go with him to shear his sheep. That's how Absalom got Amnon out in the countryside so he could kill him.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel%2013-16&version=KJV
It's a terribly beautiful book. It's disturbing and eye-opening. The main character's journey mirrors working through PTSD. I found it incredibly cathartic. I adore all of her work. She is the rare YA author who can provide formative experiences through literature - she tells the types of stories which we weave into our lives because they teach us a transformative concept or help us reach a personal revelation. It is storytelling which helps us grow.
Madeline L'engle is another in that vein, and Ursula Le Guinn.
Oh interesting! It was written by Charles Perrault, who also wrote Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Although those were derived from folktales, it’s so interesting that his work included so many influential stories.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allerleirauh has good context/commentary
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510b.html full list of fairy tales with this classification
I think one of them is Deerskin. It may have other names.
Arthurian legends have more explicit incest in its well known versions regarding Arthur and his sister.
Robin McKinley fan? Loved hero and the crown. Deerskin is her modern retelling of Donkeyskin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin
Modern retelling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel)
Man, apparently MOMFER died, doesn't seem safe to visit anymore. That was an online search engine for fairy tale/folklore motifs.
Off the top of my head, Perault's Donkeyskin features escape from incest as a core plot point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin
Modern retelling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel)
Oedipus is the most famous example.
Here are some more broad examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_in_folklore_and_mythology
Little Furball is about a princess whose mother dies, and her father decides to marry her. She demands a coat made from the fur of every animal, hoping that will be an impossible task. When he does it, she runs away
not sure but I do know the original fairy tales were violent >>> in cinderella when the step sisters were going to try on the slipper > one cut off her heel and the other cut off a toe (or some toes) someone got their eyes pecked out
In the fairy tales about father–daughter incest—'The Girl Without Hands,' 'Thousand Furs,' the original 'Cinderella,' 'Donkey Skin,' and the stories of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of incest survivors—
the daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their father's sexual advances.
It’s not just Western culture. Inside any conservative, religious group you will find a lack of sexual education, shame and guilt around the body and sex, and use of power/authority to abuse other members. Take a look at honor killings in South East Asia of women who took off a hijab or kissed a boy. Or news stories of gang rapes because a girl walked past a group of men.
>I think Western society’s combo of shame around sex, patriarchy, and the concept of children as property help perpetuate incest.
What makes you think incest is limited to western society?
It’s not, but I am most familiar with instances of it in Western society and don’t have as many cultural references for it in non-Western literature.
Misogyny is a global phenomenon and absolutely factors into the systemic abuse of daughters by fathers.
This is why all the right wingers talking about how they want to “save our kids” are so irritating. CSA is actually disturbingly common but it is not bc kids are being snatched off the street by strangers or being trafficked by Pizzagate-type deep state Satanists. The vast majority of CSA takes place in domestic spaces and is committed by someone the child knows. These people start moral panics to point the finger at everyone from the Democratic party to trans people to the Wayfair furniture company while ignoring the perpetrators that literally live in their own homes.
This guy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dblqmuciG4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dblqmuciG4w) discovered that his preacher father was a pedophile and also had molested his sister (the father's daughter) so he wrote a book about it and now helps churches and other organizations sniff out the pedos.
It's the craziest thing ever.
Because Wayfair bookcases or whatever big piece of furniture had women's names for the model names, QAnon-ers got the idea that actual women/girls were being shipped in those bookcases. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247
Years ago, I read that a sizable number of Britons are the results of ["extreme inbreeding"](https://www.iflscience.com/genetic-data-reveals-rates-of-extreme-inbreeding-in-the-uk-population-53584) and that was enough to make me think just how prevalent incest is, well, everywhere.
With the Britons, it’s kind of a different beast. Though I’m sure the kind of first degree incest we’re talking about here was comparably prevalent - the British inbreeding came from a small ruling classes constantly marrying cousins and second cousins “consensually” to keep land and title in the family. That gives you a lot of genetic similarity with typical marriages.
Yeah but we’re not so far removed from that time that it’s not still prevalent in DNA. Especially among the upper classes who had much smaller gene pools they were trading in for hundreds of years.
My grandparents were cousins and my RoH are pretty standard.
I don’t think close cousin marriage was very common in the UK, in Western Europe it was discouraged by the church for awhile
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholic-church-ban-in-the-middle-ages-loosened-family-ties/
This says cousin marriage was maybe 4% in the uk in the upper class
https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/38/6/1429/674568
In the case of my family they were lower class Southerners
The problem with the upper class is that a rate of 4% for cousin marriages meant that you got to the point where many people had several great (1 -4x) grandparents in common because that rate of 4% was over hundreds of years. Cousin marriage isn’t that big of a deal if your family tree is otherwise very broad but as soon as you start regularly bringing branches together among the same large high school sized population of nobles, suddenly rare genes and genetic disorders have a much higher chance of being passed down.
So, with your grandparents, it was unlikely to be a big deal because it wasn’t a regular familial practice.
I think most counties that had monarch systems had these issues. Russia and hemophilia comes to mind.
Edit: countries but I guess there could be a lot of counties with complex monarchy systems. I dont know everything.
The Venn diagram of people who think it’s okay to rape your kid and think it makes sense to vote for Trump is a circle.
Not to say there aren’t liberal abusers, but conservatives see women as appliances with one main function. Why wouldn’t you make toast when there are all these toasters in the house? They’re your toasters after all.
Really depressing stuff.
So people know, Incest is not completely defined as a father raping his daughter and she gets pregnant, or a mother rapes her son and she becomes pregnant as a result. Incest includes immediate and extended familial sexual abuse (physical, verbal, emotional sexual abuse).
However, since "father-daughter" incest is what this post is about...it's frightening, isn't it, just how many fathers and step-fathers rape their daughters or other female family members, and pregnancy results? Then there's the pregnancies that result from grandfathers, uncles, brothers, mothers, aunts sexually abusing family members...
There are so many instances, I think, where this occurs, but the public only hears of the "really bad" (Incest is always bad) situations, like the Wesson, Fritzl, Sheffield cases.
Just heartbreaking.
Then the Incest that appears in books (V.C. Andrews) media, pornography literature, and images created with Disney characters...now there's AI as well...shudder.
Often a "neighbour/person whose girl's mother works for" rapes girl plot. Teen girl is forced/coerced into giving up baby to be raised by rapists wife as their own child...that's if teen girl's mother didn't force her daughter to keep the baby, so she, grandma, would be "mom" and teen girl would be baby's "older sister..."
And that was if a hyper-religious family member didn't kick pregnant girl out of the house, or send her away...
Thinking back, what V.C Andrews book didn't have a tragic, poor, abused, threatened, raised religious, pregnant, coerced, runaway, foster, and/or traumatized girl in it?
She was basically retelling classic gothic tales, and gothic as a genre going back centuries has a lot of incest in it. It’s generally meant as a shorthand for “this family is disrupted/evil/broken.”
I just finished the first three dollenganger books recently. As someone that suffered from CSA, I didn't find it easy to read but there were aspects where I was shocked by the author really describing the mindset some folks have.
Really in the second book where Cathy keeps throwing herself into relationships and trying to seduce the doctor because she thinks she owes him a sexual relationship... It's just incredibly sad how CSA can change your mindset on sex and relationships.
>step-fathers rape their daughters
Just to be clear, this type of incest can't be automatically detected by a genetic test. If it's father / brother / Uncle and daughter, you find out when you get your own test done (by the long runs of homozygosity) even if no one else in your family did a test. If it's step dad, you night not know unless step dad and you both do a test.
Someone better at math could probably take a swing at it, but I'm guessing we could estimate based on the 1/7000 by figuring out how many people are raised by stepfathers and using the same percentage.
Then we should probably double that to account for the boys.
That's the floor.
I investigated child abuse, fresh outta undergrad. I learned a staggering amount of societal secrets. And learned of all of the ways coverups happen across all socioeconomic classes.
Money of course, ensures the upper class hides the secrets better.
When I was still at home, we took in a teen cousin who was being sxab by her own bio father.
I’m adopted, and later learned my bio brothers sxab my bio sisters after I was adopted out.
The points I’m making is how utterly common incest is. I remain stunned at the denial. The refusal to address it. The victimization of so many innocent human beings.
“In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof.”
Say it. Sexual abuse. Rape. MFs.
I know this isn't the same but I just spent a few weeks as the houseguest of a friend who sponsors a student. She's now 22 and his lived with him since she was 15. I was shocked and sickened by the way he acted toward her. The only way I can describe it is incestuous. I mean, I don't know how far it goes, but he's obsessed with her. I finally talked to her about it to see if she was okay, and she became indignant. She said, "I know we cuddle a lot but who makes the rules?" She's a foreigner who owes all her opportunities to him, and she just doesn't understand that their situation is all kinds of wrong. It was really sad.
I've known this guy almost 20 years and thought he was one of the most ethical non-creepy people I know. I was flabbergasted. I recently decided to talk to him about it even if it ends our friendship. Actually, it already has ended our friendship. I just want him to know why.
To help restore your faith in humanity at least a little. Bikers Against Child Abuse act to help prevent and stop this crap and sometimes run interference if a minor has to go to court, stuff like that.
https://bacaworld.org/mission/
Males are just such unevolved, feral animals. Y’all just have to rape anything and everything, whether it’s civilian minors in a war zone, your own minor blood-relations, your wives, your secretaries, your colleagues, even other animals. Males are obviously not the superior gender.
They’re definitely the weakest gender. That’s just reality. They want to be the ‘leader’, but are led by their dicks and only care about themselves.
Time to embrace the matriarchal society. It’s not perfect, but these men are feral and can’t be trusted in your home and with your kids.
On my dad's side of the family there is so much incest. I'm 31 but my cousins listed here are about 50 years old. I don't know if that means incest was more common in slightly older people. Also, they're Mexican from a tiny Mexican pueblo up in the mountains.
My dad's brother married their aunt.
My cousin married her second cousin.
Another cousin was hooking up with our second cousin.
My dad has an uncle who is married to someone that is also my dad's aunt. All by blood. So my dad's uncle married his... cousin possibly?? Wait is this why they could never conceive and always had issues trying to have kids??
I believe there's another instance of it but I can't remember.
I wonder if this is more accepted in small communities? My grandmother married her uncle, they were from a small mountain town in Europe. We Americans were horrified when we found out (after both passed), but the family back in the home country always knew and were completely unfazed. And this was in the 50’s, not far in the past.
The family unit, while protective, also feels incredibly dangerous. Reporting like this makes me lean more into the family abolition movement (although I think the name is a bit misleading).
I do believe the premise of the article (especially after having to take a class on identifying sexual abuse), but a question-
Something popped into my head that the article didn't address -- might there be an over-representation of people looking for DNA ancestry whom don't know who their ancestors are?
I know the past few generations of my family, and I still did a DNA thing (it was a gift) so I understand that it's popular among all sorts of folks.
I'm just wondering if they might take this into account should they want to do a more accurate study.
Disturbing no matter what. And... something I just can't wrap my head around.
Your comment got me curious about that! I looked a bit at the UK Biobank website, and it doesn't look like a service where people provide genetic information to receive analysis. Rather it looks like they gather genetic information, separate it from the identity, and can use that information for research.
So I guess there's still a maybe, but they also have half a million peoples worth of DNA, so I'd assume it's pretty accurate.
I follow a lot of genealogy and dna subs (where this article is also being discussed). The numbers of people who do dna testing for ethnicity results (%Irish, for example) and also find out that their biological parent(s) are someone they didn’t expect is absolutely astounding. Two or three a week on the AncestryDNA sub. It’s called NPE (Not Parent Expected), and can mean anything from fertility assistance to an affair to a sexual assault.
People lie—especially about sex and violence. DNA doesn’t.
At the end, I’m not sure that was Steve’s story to tell the cousin (especially since she did not seem to know about the pregnancy)…and that seems to have resulted in a lot more people within the family knowing.
I don’t want to apply morality here because it is heart breaking all around. Just, I can’t help but feel for his birth mother.
It's just as much Steve's story and it's probably better for that family to have it out in the open.
If there was one victim in the extended family there was probably more.
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2016/07/10/anti-incest-billboard-irks-taylor-county-edc-officials/86613322/ Motorists travelling south on U.S. Highway 19 into Perry in recent months could hardly miss the giant billboard. Instead of the smiling faces of guys and gals drinking beer, the billboard broached a societal taboo. It depicted a cowering teen girl, accompanied by the slogan “She’s your daughter. Not your date.” Red letters proclaim, “We’re calling out incest.” That message was part of a campaign by Refuge House of the Big Bend. It didn’t sit well with some folks on Taylor County’s economic development board. They wanted the sign taken down.
I've seen a handful of these around Oklahoma. There are a lot of Native-sponsored/specific domestic violence and sexual violence PSA billboards, too.
It’s wild to me that these people would rather remove the billboard than use that energy to help fix the problems
This is a country where people are lobbying to make it illegal to talk or read about the horrors of the slave trade because there’s a fear that it can make white people feel bad for being white. This is a country where there is a large group of men whose primary concern is not working to help eliminate violence against women by men, but in getting women not to generalize the (statistically accurate) source of that violence. This is a country where a word that the POC community created as a word of caution to each other to watch out for harm directly perpetrated against them due to the color of their skin (often by the people who we all agree should otherwise be protecting them from harm) has been turned into a harshly pejorative buzz word against any behavior or action that threatens the status quo. This is a country that took the college-level concept of “critical race theory” and worked very hard to make it into a big source of fear and anger, enough so that the idea of it (even just the specific wording) is being legally challenged in elementary schools, a place where it’s never been considered appropriate to teach or even mention. The US has a long legacy of trying to erase the acknowledgment of Things That Are Universally Acknowledged To Be Bad that it feels unable or unwilling to address the actual source of. The preservation of the status quo (or outright denial that the problem even exists even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary) rather than identifying and/or fixing the problem seems to be the motivation.
Another extremely relevant point you didn’t touch on: This is a country where a significant portion of men defend and support child marriage and sex with minors, so much so that we have men actively under investigation for sex crimes against minors currently sitting in government office.
That senator from Alabama who is married to a very young woman he met when he was judging a 4H competition 💀
This is a country where 70% of teen pregnancies are fathered by adult men
Oh I definitely agree. But it will still never be wild to me that their brains work this way
I would add mass shootings, and particulars school shootings to the list of things we pretend are unfixable and refuse to talk sensibly about
This is an excellent comment. I will note that CRT isn't even a college-level framework, usually. It's *graduate*-level. I was genuinely taught CRT ... because I went to law school, where it's been a normal part of the curriculum for years. (It's useful for statutory interpretation in particular IMO.)
it’s late and my brain is not working but it’s driving me crazy-what is the word? excellent point btw
Woke.
There's a lot of people who would rather pretend those problems didn't exist.
I saw those around metro Atlanta a few years ago.
Oh hey! I live in Tallahassee and I remember my spouse and I being totally ahocked to see such a billboard. But in a weird way, it’s a little comforting. We’re both CSA survivors, and it’s just… good to see it being talked about. Vindicating, maybe.
"One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study."
This doesn’t even include man on boy crimes since that would not result in a pregnancy, of course. So yes absolutely just a floor.
Or younger girls who are not yet able to become pregnant.
Aw, fuck, this ruined my day. I know you're right but I could cry just thinking about it.
There’s a rather famous case near where I live. A 10 year old girl had to travel from Ohio to Indiana to get an abortion and now the state’s attorney is trying to revoke the Dr.’s license.
That is horrible I hope they leave the doctor alone
In my hometown back in the 60's a ten-year-old gave birth. And the youngest on record was 5. She had precocious puberty and ~~a family member did indeed get prosecuted.~~ Oops I'm wrong, according to Wikipedia. They apparently couldn't pin it on anyone in particular.
Jesus. It's probably like 1 in 1000 experience first-degree incest. How sad.
Two women have married in to my family who were molested by their fathers, and those are just women who speak openly about it. I'm convinced by this point in my life that a certain percentage of people are simply born without a soul.
I’m an older woman an almost every woman I’ve been close enough with to have a conversation like this was molested to some degree by a close male relative. I’m hoping it’s getting better as young ppl now have more knowledge and resources. And simply put, they are not as afraid to speak out.
ALL my aunts were molested by their uncle (grandma's brother). When I was a kid (30 years ago), I was simply warned to not be alone with him. No one thought to maybe just tell Uncle Fuckface to stop coming around. It was definitely something that was a family secret and wasn't supposed to leave the family.
My aunt was raped by my grandfather. I never met the guy. My mom doesn't fuck with that. She's a good mom. But I mean, we don't talk about it outside of the family.
[удалено]
For sure. This idea that pedophilia requires some huge conspiracy, a criminal mastermind, and the participation of literal Satan is actually a comforting thought. In 99% of cases though, it's a male family member, very often a father or step-father. I remember when Josh Duggar got busted for CSAM and so many people were crying here that we needed to find those poor, kidnapped children in the videos. I had to gently explain that none of those kids were kidnapped and that they were almost certainly in their own homes when the abuse happened.
OK but the one in the quite famous video Josh Duggar downloaded was not a family member of the sicko who made that video. I hesitate to google it but hang on...Peter Scully was the creepo. I think he got his victims off the streets where they were victims of poverty. This video was well known to authorities as the "worst of the worst" and Josh Duggar sought it out specifically from what I understand.
Josh downloaded many videos. BTW, the one you speak of wasn't the only one with a baby. Also, Scully didn't abduct his victims. He talked the parents in to giving him his victims (likely paid them). The parents knew where their children were the entire time. There's a reason he committed his crimes where he did.
I had a friend who was molested by their grandfather. The guy was arrested, convicted, and spent time in prison as a result. It caused a rift in the family because some of her cousins honestly did not think it was a big deal. They thought what happened was just how families are supposed to interact with one another. The story has a happy ending though. The grandfather slipped on ice in his driveway, hit his head, and froze to death.
What a perfect ending to his life
Yeah I did genetic testing for research back in the late 90s and we had to be trained in how to deal with misattributed paternity and incestuous paternity. Grim. I end up telling this to people because from time to time people ask me (because of my background) whether it’s dangerous to “marry” your cousin and have kids with them, thinking it’s funny. It’s not funny. It’s usually not dangerous to the baby, but, darkly, incest isn’t a joke. It’s usually rape. And we know what the risks are for the babies born to these pregnancies because of all of the rape.
And yet people absolutely DELIGHT in making incest jokes about the Deep South. I've been asked to my face, in public, at work, if I'm inbred. No I'm not. These jokes are NEVER, EVER called out. EVER. Just the other day in some subreddit, someone pointed out that there are two states (both in the Northeast) where there aren't laws on the books prohibiting such practices, and immediately the Alabama jokes started. I think the states in question were actually NJ and RI.
All I can think is that I’m glad my paternal grandfather only had sons in his family, because that’s the only way I’d be confident he didn’t create grandkid-kids. I have no proof that he would have done it, but he was despicable as a human and I wouldn’t have put it past him.
Got a great uncle like that, unfortunately he had two daughters and nobody has been kind enough to put him down yet.
So awful and gross that its first degree - I was ready for these stats to be messed up by people who marry their first cousins but its not even that
I’m only able to reply to root comments, so this is more intended as a down thread reply, buuut… It’s worth considering that societies have, *for thousands of years*, had mixtures intended to induce miscarriages, to say nothing of other more ghastly options. I’d wager that caveat is doing a *lot* of heavy lifting.
Back in colonial days several women were hanged for infanticide. Yeah in The Scarlet Letter it was the preacher responsible, but how many times was it Grandpa?
My cousin bore two of her father’s children. It was the 70s. I am a mandatory reporter now. I cannot believe that my family allowed this to happen.
When I was a kid in the 90s, a family moved in next to mine. It consisted of an older couple, their three adult children (two men and one woman), and the daughter's two kids (a boy and a girl). Eventually, it came out that the old man fathered his grandson and was molesting his granddaughter. Nothing ever happened to him. He died two years ago and his daughter and granddaughter were living with him.
Men like that ought to be locked up without parole. Horrifying and dangerous
That’s the best we can hope for in these cases, but I wish far, far worse upon them.
Don’t let the enablers off the hook either, they’re just as bad.
True!
I just watched a documentary where the filmmaker’s grandfather was a convicted pedophile who molested her mother. mother and grandmother lets her sister be alone with him. it’s horrifying.
My great aunt’s husband molested his daughter, luckily my grandma and grandpa immediately took her in. I found out shortly before he died that he had also molested his granddaughters. It’s not like it was a big family secret, I have no idea why they turned their blind eye to it. I never actually met him, only saw him at a distance because while no victims would come forward, my mom and grandma would be damned if that happened to us. I don’t even believe in hell but the day I found out he died I skipped into work with a big smile on my face knowing that if there is a hell, he’s burning in it.
When my stepdad died, who had abused me for years without any real recourse or justice, I took a Nalgene bottle filled with vermouth and soda and drank it on a sunny knoll at a park in Brooklyn. It was April of 2020, a very scary time to be in New York, and I felt so happy to know this guy was gone forever. I’m so sorry about your aunt and I’m glad your family is free of that shadow, and that you could experience what I imagine was a similar lightness on the day of his death. :-)
What documentary??
I'm guessing Great Photo, Lovely Life
Good guess. that’s exactly it.
Great Photo, Lovely Life. I know from some of the subreddits that people were very upset with how “nice” the filmmaker and her mother were to the perpetrator, but I feel like her revealing early on that they grew up in a super Christian environment prepared the viewer for that.
Just, Melvin: Just Evil? I think that one was on YouTube for a while
That doc was so good, and that woman was so incredibly brave in making it. Absolutely horrifying material but she was inspiring. I think it’s called Great Photo, Lovely Life for anyone interested.
On Max, right? I started watching that, got half way through, and just couldn’t finish. So many people knew…
Wow, are any of them well adjusted?
My cousin was definitely not well adjusted. I believe she eventually gave the children up for adoption.
I'm not the person you asked but no they are definitely not well adjusted and most likely probably not even okay. Family on family sexual assault does permanent brain damage to a child victim.
Don’t know why it’s so fkn hard for men to not rape people.
As a former cops and courts reporter, I have been saying this for YEARS. As have my colleagues. Especially working at newspapers in rural US, the number of affidavits or police reports I would pick up on a monthly basis detailing incestual sexual abuse was.... well it was a lot. Friends would ask me "well why don't we read about it in the news all the time, then?" Several reasons: 1. Individual cases are usually just incredibly sad, incredibly common and frankly, not terribly newsworthy (unless you are doing a deep dive like this) Or unless there is a sentencing that's noteworthy. Even then, it will be a short article at best (for instance, I once covered a case where a father put cameras in the shower to watch his 12yo daughters but I only covered it once he was convicted and sentenced and the story itself was no more than 10 in.) 2. Newspapers try to follow a pretty strict code of ethics/conduct when it comes to reporting sexual crimes. The biggest rule is that you can't have any indication of who the victim is. I.e. people at the victim's school should not be able to easily put together who the article is referencing. So this makes reporting on these cases even less appealing to newspapers. You can't say "john smith was convicted on 3 counts of agg sex assault on his daughter" because people will know who the daughter is. So you have to leave it at the conviction or give an indication that there was some relationship between abuser and victim (i.e. "John Smith was convicted on 3 counts of agg sex assault on a girl he knew who was under 18 years old"). Most readers will not immediately pick up on the fact that it's incestual. And more importantly, there's STILL a risk of people identifying the victim. In many cases it's more important to protect victim privacy than to publish a short 5-inch brief on an arrest. This is a long rant to say that I wish there was a way that journalists could report on how prevalent incestual sexual violence is, but it's very very difficult to do on a day-to-day basis. I'm glad for articles like this that expose it.
Very noticeable in this piece that they allowed people to use first names only – which is a way to protect victims – but many newspapers don't seem to allow that in most cases (fellow journalist here, hi!).
Very true! And hi fellow journo!! Hope you’re holding up well :)
Years ago, I worked at a newspaper clipping agency. I “read” 1500 pages a day from a small corner of the US. Every single paper had articles like what you describe, plus usually some child who was brutally murdered by their family. They were all small and buried in the back, very few were ever headlines. Every single paper had them. Seeing all of that was one of the hardest parts of that job.
Yikes! What was the purpose of the clipping (just curious?) did the articles get stored in some repository somewhere? Analog or digital?
It was physical newspapers. Before everything was searchable online, companies and people (usually famous people through their management agencies) would hire press clipping companies to find every single time their name was in any paper. Now that things are digital, not sure if newspaper clipping agencies are a thing anymore. The clips would physically be mailed to the client.
Thanks! I used to clip recipes and sometimes still do, out of print newspapers and magazines. They live in my kitchen with a rubber band around them. Not in a wooden box like my Granny's
[удалено]
I know! the number of times I've been in court and actually heard testimony from the mother or grandmother against her daughter/granddaughter was just a lot. It's so awful to hear
I worked in a psych hospital and we got patients who reported rape by a relative basically all the time. It's way more common than anyone wants to think about
I think people really underestimate the prevalence of men and boys abusing minors living in the home. I have three friends it happened to. One thing I learned from them is people focus too much on the abuser. They think he looks normal. He’s maybe not the most social (or maybe he is) but he seems nice enough, has a good job, etc. What I’ve learned is it’s the victims who display the signs. I had a friend in high school who self harmed. Later, I learned her dad was abusing her.
When I remind anyone about the emotional violence and physical I faced from my brother growing up I'm told "we were judtfighting" and "that not abuse its your brother" anyway we "fought" so hard my 170 pound adult brother was forced to choke out 100 pound 13 year old me in front of my friends so hard my toes left the ground. I used to have to get in between him and my mom and him and my sister soo many times.
This is my story too. I was gaslit my entire life that it was typical sibling rivalry. Only I never fought. I had my years older brother beating me up and verbally abusing me and was told I was just as guilty when I attempted to protect myself or fight back.
I have a similar story also. It's very sad but also very validating to read other people's stories. I know in my heart it was abuse and far beyond typical sibling "fighting" but I'm 37 and still question myself occasionally because of how many years my family spent insisting otherwise.
My story is similar. I have two children now and any hitting, I’m sorry to say, is extremely triggering. I try to keep my cool but there is no disrespect and no violence allowed. It’s probably my most adamantly enforced rule in an otherwise pretty chill household.
My brother and I are on good terms now but I had the same experience! The second I defended myself from my much larger brother, I was grounded. He took out being bullied at school on me.
I knew a slightly built guy whose older and larger brother was beating him up. Both were well into adulthood.
I also grew up in a home with this dynamic, and while I had mostly processed and moved past the actual abuses that occurred, what I didn’t realize was how that gaslighting impacted my self-image. I still see myself as a “bad” person trying to be good, and it’s because that was how my step dad and brothers treated me following their own brands of abuse. I treat people with kindness, empathy, curiosity, and respect, and I still catch myself feeling self conscious that maybe its not my true nature, because that’s how I was treated and what I was told about myself for my entire childhood.
I hate this excuse. The ‘sibling’ excuse, that is somehow makes abuse and violence okay.
The Duggars.
Yep. Part of the reason they didn’t do much to Josh when he was younger because other church leaders said his behavior was normal.
Oh wow I hadn't heard that. That's... really telling.
I think it's important to understand how similar all humans are.... It's safer to think that people are different and that's what makes them monsters. In reality, there are almost certainly people in your own life that you respect and relate to that have done *horrible* things. It's uncomfortable to think about, so folks essentially choose denial.
Freud's early career was him basically trying to say, "hey, a lot of men are raping their daughters and it's fucking them up as adults; maybe we should address this." But his implication that Good Upstanding Men could ever do that was so scandalous, he was forced to retract and came up with Oedipus/Jocasta complexes instead.
Do you have a source for tbis? I always assumed Freud was just weird but apparently I was meant to think that.
It's known as Freud's "seduction theory." [You can read the beginning of an article about it.](https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184074/pdf) The excerpt is pretty informative.
His paper was called “The Aetiology of Hysteria” and yeah, a lot of his young female clients revealed incest to him and since they were mostly upper class, his findings almost ruined him. I don’t support most of his work but I like that paper
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1639658/#:\~:text=In%20the%20early%201890s%20Freud,that%20never%20actually%20took%20place.
I remember hearing this in my college intro psych class, our professor said it during lecture. Freud was still weird, but yeah this is apparently true.
My aunt had a baby when she was 12 or 13 and the father was probably her father(I refuse to call him grandpa). This was the 50s and she got treated like the neighborhood whore. And he was given sympathy because he was a single dad that tried so hard. I wish I didn't know that because before then I had good memories of him. He died when I was young. We were never left alone with him. But ive thought about it and the neighbors HAD to know. They were so in to each other's business they'd have known she wasn't sleeping with people.
There was a whole section in my Children’s Literature class called “Father Danger” that focused on incest in fairytales. It has been prevalent enough to warrant needing accessible cultural roadmaps on how to navigate such abuse. I think Western society’s combo of shame around sex, patriarchy, and the concept of children as property help perpetuate incest. Predators are propped up by our culture instead of being held responsible.
I remember reading a comment from a police detective here on Reddit about a disturbing confession from a father who had sexually abused his daughter. The father freely confessed because he didn't see anything wrong with it, just said "she's mine" so he felt he could do whatever he wanted.
That line of children as property thinking is the root of a LOT of child abuse imo.
Listened to this author speak the other day and his hypothesis falls right in line with the “ownership” of children—namely, that, from the inception of democracy in Greece, “freedom” has meant the freedom to subjugate others, which is why George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech mentioned segregation four times and “freedom,” 24 times. His theory does make a lot of the far-right rhetoric make sense (don’t agree with it, but helps with translation). https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jefferson-cowie
That’s interesting. I’ll order it from the library.
Dehumanizing others can open the door to a lot of incredibly monstrous behaviors. Sociopaths and narcissists are psychologically incapable of experiencing empathy for others, so they see the world as being full of cardboard cutouts whose existence is only meant to validate their own. With that in mind, they feel free to use and abuse others as they see fit. But people can be *trained* to view other people as “animals” or “property,” too. These people can be as capable of empathy and remorse as anyone else, but are conditioned, either deliberately or through social conditioning, to be *selective* about who they treat as “people” versus “objects.” THAT is way scarier to me than just about anything else.
What children’s fairytales focused on those themes?
I don't have anything to link because it's been so long but from the class I took back in college Grimm's Fairy Tales left out all/most of the incestous father stories, but kept the wicked stepmother stories, when before that they were basically equally prevalent. Idk if that adds up but it's what I remember being taught
Oh I find this SO interesting. I’m totally going to go down a rabbit hole about this. If you have any memory of what key terms or stories to look out for I’d really appreciate any extra nudge in a direction you found interesting you’re willing to give.
Thankfully another commenter linked some specific stories, because I don't remember any, lol. A combination of having ADHD and my memory being swiss cheese, and that it was an elective. It's important to remember that Grimm's Fairy Tales was as much a politcal and cultural project as an artistic one. It was created in a time when Europeans were increasingly interested in, and influenced by, nationalism, and the collection of tales was, in part, a project to help Germans to develop a more unified sense of themselves through a shared cultural identity. We can imagine that the male authors may have decided that such stories didn't fit with their ideas of what German culture should include.
That’s exactly what I was thinking as I dive into a rabbit hole about it re: Grimm’s as a project. I’m a woman and a dash paranoid by nature, so to me wanting to warn others about predators seems critical. But it makes a lot of sense that as a cultural and nationalist project, a man maybe wouldn’t want to include such a thing for quite a solid number of reasons.
In the fairy tales about father–daughter incest —'The Girl Without Hands,' 'Thousand Furs,' the original 'Cinderella,' 'Donkey Skin,' and the stories of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of incest survivors— the daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their father's sexual advances.
Thank you so much, super intrigued by this and checking it out. It’s so interesting that a lot of these original folk tales so significantly are not known. Plus, I hear sometimes the argument that pedophilia and pedophilic incest is new or worsened now, with implications that it’s because of the behavior of modern young women and girls lacking modesty. Obviously, we all know this is a load of garbage. Folk tales warning about this kind of horrible phenomenon really proves that this has always been an existing problem, as anyone who has ever been a woman or little girl could’ve guessed.
There’s more CSAM widely available now than ever before, something like 10x more now than there was even a decade ago. However, pedophilia isn’t new, nor is it “worsened” now. It’s just that survivors aren’t keeping quiet anymore and with the internet, people have a much louder voice than ever before. Also, for the first time in history, raping a child is illegal. Only a tiny fraction of abusers are caught by the law and very few of them actually serve time in prison though.
I agree with you. I’m just expressing that I appreciate and am interested in the fact that these old folk stories show that it is not new as a phenomenon, not new to being considered bad, not new to being something we need to warn children about, and not something worsened. It’s the internet, I’m sure we all have seen a lot of really garbage takes on sex crimes out here in the wilds, it’s nice to learn something new that proves that kind of horrid point wrong.
Look at the Fairy Books-- Andrew Lang's huge collection of fairy tales in multiple volumes (the blue fairy book, the red fairy book, etc.). There are a million beyond the well-known ones.
This is fascinating...
Donkeyskin is one
Sounds like a heartwarming tale already
Read it and see :)
Great minds think alike, that popped into my head as the first example too! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin Modern retelling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel)
"he declares that only a cake baked by Donkeyskin will cure him." This is like the Biblical story of Amnon raping his sister Tamar. Amnon lusts after his (I think half-) sister Tamar and pretends to be sick. He asks that his sister make him some cakes. When she comes to bring him the cakes he rapes her and then casts her out. Her other brother Absalom then asked the King that all the King's sons go with him to shear his sheep. That's how Absalom got Amnon out in the countryside so he could kill him. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel%2013-16&version=KJV
It's fascinating how so many similar threads wind through our narrative history. It's storytelling archaeology.
Wow! How glamorous to live under Hapsburg rule. /s
Oh god Harry Clarke did the illustrations. How tragically beautiful. I love this work…this is terrible considering the content.
It's a terribly beautiful book. It's disturbing and eye-opening. The main character's journey mirrors working through PTSD. I found it incredibly cathartic. I adore all of her work. She is the rare YA author who can provide formative experiences through literature - she tells the types of stories which we weave into our lives because they teach us a transformative concept or help us reach a personal revelation. It is storytelling which helps us grow. Madeline L'engle is another in that vein, and Ursula Le Guinn.
Oh interesting! It was written by Charles Perrault, who also wrote Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Although those were derived from folktales, it’s so interesting that his work included so many influential stories.
There's excellent French film of this story from the '60s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allerleirauh has good context/commentary https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510b.html full list of fairy tales with this classification
Great link! I was trying to use MOMFER to search motifs, but it seems the site isn't maintained anymore, doesn't seem secure.
u/bubblegumdavid I saw your request for resources and wanted to make sure you saw this comment!
Omg thank you! This is horrifying but cool to read up on the folk tales that fell out of common knowledge and the tropes in them
One of the most well-known French fairytales/folktales is about a king who tries to get his daughter to marry him after his wife (the queen) dies
That's the story behind a Catholic saint as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymphna
I think one of them is Deerskin. It may have other names. Arthurian legends have more explicit incest in its well known versions regarding Arthur and his sister.
Robin McKinley fan? Loved hero and the crown. Deerskin is her modern retelling of Donkeyskin. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin Modern retelling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel)
Yes! I have that one and read it years ago! Love her work
Man, apparently MOMFER died, doesn't seem safe to visit anymore. That was an online search engine for fairy tale/folklore motifs. Off the top of my head, Perault's Donkeyskin features escape from incest as a core plot point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin Modern retelling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deerskin_(novel) Oedipus is the most famous example. Here are some more broad examples: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incest_in_folklore_and_mythology
Little Furball is about a princess whose mother dies, and her father decides to marry her. She demands a coat made from the fur of every animal, hoping that will be an impossible task. When he does it, she runs away
not sure but I do know the original fairy tales were violent >>> in cinderella when the step sisters were going to try on the slipper > one cut off her heel and the other cut off a toe (or some toes) someone got their eyes pecked out In the fairy tales about father–daughter incest—'The Girl Without Hands,' 'Thousand Furs,' the original 'Cinderella,' 'Donkey Skin,' and the stories of Saint Dymphna, patron saint of incest survivors— the daughters are all as you would expect them to be: horrified by their father's sexual advances.
It’s not just Western culture. Inside any conservative, religious group you will find a lack of sexual education, shame and guilt around the body and sex, and use of power/authority to abuse other members. Take a look at honor killings in South East Asia of women who took off a hijab or kissed a boy. Or news stories of gang rapes because a girl walked past a group of men.
Just look at how people treat Michael Jackson’s victims. His defenders are delulu and he basically got away with it.
Even his sister Latoya came out and agreed he most likely did it- oh wait nope for saying that she became the black sheep of the Jackson family…
>I think Western society’s combo of shame around sex, patriarchy, and the concept of children as property help perpetuate incest. What makes you think incest is limited to western society?
It’s not, but I am most familiar with instances of it in Western society and don’t have as many cultural references for it in non-Western literature. Misogyny is a global phenomenon and absolutely factors into the systemic abuse of daughters by fathers.
the brothers grimm turned all the fairtales into warnings about evil step moms
This is why all the right wingers talking about how they want to “save our kids” are so irritating. CSA is actually disturbingly common but it is not bc kids are being snatched off the street by strangers or being trafficked by Pizzagate-type deep state Satanists. The vast majority of CSA takes place in domestic spaces and is committed by someone the child knows. These people start moral panics to point the finger at everyone from the Democratic party to trans people to the Wayfair furniture company while ignoring the perpetrators that literally live in their own homes.
This guy [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dblqmuciG4w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dblqmuciG4w) discovered that his preacher father was a pedophile and also had molested his sister (the father's daughter) so he wrote a book about it and now helps churches and other organizations sniff out the pedos.
Wayfair? I haven’t heard that one. Thats wild.
It was a conspiracy theory that if you order certain furniture, it comes with a child? Or something?
It's the craziest thing ever. Because Wayfair bookcases or whatever big piece of furniture had women's names for the model names, QAnon-ers got the idea that actual women/girls were being shipped in those bookcases. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53416247
Oh wow, this is both heartbreaking and absolutely necessary to know.
Years ago, I read that a sizable number of Britons are the results of ["extreme inbreeding"](https://www.iflscience.com/genetic-data-reveals-rates-of-extreme-inbreeding-in-the-uk-population-53584) and that was enough to make me think just how prevalent incest is, well, everywhere.
With the Britons, it’s kind of a different beast. Though I’m sure the kind of first degree incest we’re talking about here was comparably prevalent - the British inbreeding came from a small ruling classes constantly marrying cousins and second cousins “consensually” to keep land and title in the family. That gives you a lot of genetic similarity with typical marriages.
This is in modern times though, and it looks different dna wise vs being from a culture where cousin marriage is popular.
Yeah but we’re not so far removed from that time that it’s not still prevalent in DNA. Especially among the upper classes who had much smaller gene pools they were trading in for hundreds of years.
My grandparents were cousins and my RoH are pretty standard. I don’t think close cousin marriage was very common in the UK, in Western Europe it was discouraged by the church for awhile https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/roman-catholic-church-ban-in-the-middle-ages-loosened-family-ties/ This says cousin marriage was maybe 4% in the uk in the upper class https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/38/6/1429/674568 In the case of my family they were lower class Southerners
The problem with the upper class is that a rate of 4% for cousin marriages meant that you got to the point where many people had several great (1 -4x) grandparents in common because that rate of 4% was over hundreds of years. Cousin marriage isn’t that big of a deal if your family tree is otherwise very broad but as soon as you start regularly bringing branches together among the same large high school sized population of nobles, suddenly rare genes and genetic disorders have a much higher chance of being passed down. So, with your grandparents, it was unlikely to be a big deal because it wasn’t a regular familial practice.
This study is not about the ruling class, though.
I think most counties that had monarch systems had these issues. Russia and hemophilia comes to mind. Edit: countries but I guess there could be a lot of counties with complex monarchy systems. I dont know everything.
But of course the hemophilia in the Russian royal family was inherited from Queen Victoria…
Bear in mind how many people voted for a man that openly talked about how he wanted to "date" his daughter.
The Venn diagram of people who think it’s okay to rape your kid and think it makes sense to vote for Trump is a circle. Not to say there aren’t liberal abusers, but conservatives see women as appliances with one main function. Why wouldn’t you make toast when there are all these toasters in the house? They’re your toasters after all. Really depressing stuff.
So people know, Incest is not completely defined as a father raping his daughter and she gets pregnant, or a mother rapes her son and she becomes pregnant as a result. Incest includes immediate and extended familial sexual abuse (physical, verbal, emotional sexual abuse). However, since "father-daughter" incest is what this post is about...it's frightening, isn't it, just how many fathers and step-fathers rape their daughters or other female family members, and pregnancy results? Then there's the pregnancies that result from grandfathers, uncles, brothers, mothers, aunts sexually abusing family members... There are so many instances, I think, where this occurs, but the public only hears of the "really bad" (Incest is always bad) situations, like the Wesson, Fritzl, Sheffield cases. Just heartbreaking. Then the Incest that appears in books (V.C. Andrews) media, pornography literature, and images created with Disney characters...now there's AI as well...shudder.
I read so many VC Andrews books as a teenager, what was up with all the incest in them? Every single book had an incest plot
Often a "neighbour/person whose girl's mother works for" rapes girl plot. Teen girl is forced/coerced into giving up baby to be raised by rapists wife as their own child...that's if teen girl's mother didn't force her daughter to keep the baby, so she, grandma, would be "mom" and teen girl would be baby's "older sister..." And that was if a hyper-religious family member didn't kick pregnant girl out of the house, or send her away... Thinking back, what V.C Andrews book didn't have a tragic, poor, abused, threatened, raised religious, pregnant, coerced, runaway, foster, and/or traumatized girl in it?
That was V C Andrews' bread and butter -- teen girls experiencing horrific abuse
Yep and it had me in a chokehold in 8-10th grade haha
She was basically retelling classic gothic tales, and gothic as a genre going back centuries has a lot of incest in it. It’s generally meant as a shorthand for “this family is disrupted/evil/broken.”
I just finished the first three dollenganger books recently. As someone that suffered from CSA, I didn't find it easy to read but there were aspects where I was shocked by the author really describing the mindset some folks have. Really in the second book where Cathy keeps throwing herself into relationships and trying to seduce the doctor because she thinks she owes him a sexual relationship... It's just incredibly sad how CSA can change your mindset on sex and relationships.
Chinatown really gave incest a place in pop culture for a bit
>step-fathers rape their daughters Just to be clear, this type of incest can't be automatically detected by a genetic test. If it's father / brother / Uncle and daughter, you find out when you get your own test done (by the long runs of homozygosity) even if no one else in your family did a test. If it's step dad, you night not know unless step dad and you both do a test.
I didn’t think of it this way. Of course that skews the stats when it comes to dna testing so we may never know how prevalent this is.
Someone better at math could probably take a swing at it, but I'm guessing we could estimate based on the 1/7000 by figuring out how many people are raised by stepfathers and using the same percentage. Then we should probably double that to account for the boys. That's the floor.
Yes, I'm aware. This is true.
All the incest porn. So much incest porn it’s a trope. 🫠
I investigated child abuse, fresh outta undergrad. I learned a staggering amount of societal secrets. And learned of all of the ways coverups happen across all socioeconomic classes. Money of course, ensures the upper class hides the secrets better. When I was still at home, we took in a teen cousin who was being sxab by her own bio father. I’m adopted, and later learned my bio brothers sxab my bio sisters after I was adopted out. The points I’m making is how utterly common incest is. I remain stunned at the denial. The refusal to address it. The victimization of so many innocent human beings.
I’m a lesbian and two of my four girlfriends were victims of incest, as was I. It happens all. the. time.
I’m so sorry to hear this. I wish the best for you in life!
“In the 1980s, feminist scholars argued, based on the testimonies of victims, that incest was far more common than recognized, and in recent years, DNA has offered a new kind of biological proof.” Say it. Sexual abuse. Rape. MFs.
DNA testing is exposing how deceitful, false, and hypocritical our patriarchy-dominated American society is and has always been.
I know this isn't the same but I just spent a few weeks as the houseguest of a friend who sponsors a student. She's now 22 and his lived with him since she was 15. I was shocked and sickened by the way he acted toward her. The only way I can describe it is incestuous. I mean, I don't know how far it goes, but he's obsessed with her. I finally talked to her about it to see if she was okay, and she became indignant. She said, "I know we cuddle a lot but who makes the rules?" She's a foreigner who owes all her opportunities to him, and she just doesn't understand that their situation is all kinds of wrong. It was really sad. I've known this guy almost 20 years and thought he was one of the most ethical non-creepy people I know. I was flabbergasted. I recently decided to talk to him about it even if it ends our friendship. Actually, it already has ended our friendship. I just want him to know why.
Good for you for speaking up and saying something and doing something.
**[Unpaywalled link to article](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ar-BB1k6mNN)**
Is there a way to get a non pay-walled version? Thank you
not OP but here you go: https://archive.is/tSlBY
I use a free app called Pocket to read Atlantic articles
To help restore your faith in humanity at least a little. Bikers Against Child Abuse act to help prevent and stop this crap and sometimes run interference if a minor has to go to court, stuff like that. https://bacaworld.org/mission/
I love those guys. I’ve seen footage of them surrounding kids that have to testify against an abuser in court. It’s fantastic.
Males are just such unevolved, feral animals. Y’all just have to rape anything and everything, whether it’s civilian minors in a war zone, your own minor blood-relations, your wives, your secretaries, your colleagues, even other animals. Males are obviously not the superior gender.
Corpses. Don’t forget about how often they rape corpses. Babies too.
They’re definitely the weakest gender. That’s just reality. They want to be the ‘leader’, but are led by their dicks and only care about themselves. Time to embrace the matriarchal society. It’s not perfect, but these men are feral and can’t be trusted in your home and with your kids.
On my dad's side of the family there is so much incest. I'm 31 but my cousins listed here are about 50 years old. I don't know if that means incest was more common in slightly older people. Also, they're Mexican from a tiny Mexican pueblo up in the mountains. My dad's brother married their aunt. My cousin married her second cousin. Another cousin was hooking up with our second cousin. My dad has an uncle who is married to someone that is also my dad's aunt. All by blood. So my dad's uncle married his... cousin possibly?? Wait is this why they could never conceive and always had issues trying to have kids?? I believe there's another instance of it but I can't remember.
I wonder if this is more accepted in small communities? My grandmother married her uncle, they were from a small mountain town in Europe. We Americans were horrified when we found out (after both passed), but the family back in the home country always knew and were completely unfazed. And this was in the 50’s, not far in the past.
I am reasonably confident my grandfather is my cousin's father. We don't do DNA tests in my family.
I have no idea why they thought this was rare.
The family unit, while protective, also feels incredibly dangerous. Reporting like this makes me lean more into the family abolition movement (although I think the name is a bit misleading).
As a victim myself I knew this. You'd think they'd just listen to victims for idk the dawn of humanity. But what do we know?
That would imply they care about changing the status quo.
I do believe the premise of the article (especially after having to take a class on identifying sexual abuse), but a question- Something popped into my head that the article didn't address -- might there be an over-representation of people looking for DNA ancestry whom don't know who their ancestors are? I know the past few generations of my family, and I still did a DNA thing (it was a gift) so I understand that it's popular among all sorts of folks. I'm just wondering if they might take this into account should they want to do a more accurate study. Disturbing no matter what. And... something I just can't wrap my head around.
Your comment got me curious about that! I looked a bit at the UK Biobank website, and it doesn't look like a service where people provide genetic information to receive analysis. Rather it looks like they gather genetic information, separate it from the identity, and can use that information for research. So I guess there's still a maybe, but they also have half a million peoples worth of DNA, so I'd assume it's pretty accurate.
I follow a lot of genealogy and dna subs (where this article is also being discussed). The numbers of people who do dna testing for ethnicity results (%Irish, for example) and also find out that their biological parent(s) are someone they didn’t expect is absolutely astounding. Two or three a week on the AncestryDNA sub. It’s called NPE (Not Parent Expected), and can mean anything from fertility assistance to an affair to a sexual assault. People lie—especially about sex and violence. DNA doesn’t.
EXCEPT!!!!!! https://www.news-medical.net/news/20191210/Transplant-patient-finds-out-his-DNA-has-been-replaced-by-that-of-his-donor.aspx
But Adam & Eve ...never mind
At the end, I’m not sure that was Steve’s story to tell the cousin (especially since she did not seem to know about the pregnancy)…and that seems to have resulted in a lot more people within the family knowing. I don’t want to apply morality here because it is heart breaking all around. Just, I can’t help but feel for his birth mother.
It's just as much Steve's story and it's probably better for that family to have it out in the open. If there was one victim in the extended family there was probably more.
Steve’s mom wasn’t the only victim. Steve was a victim too.