More attention has been paid to it in the media in recent years, but it still remains a social taboo. One in six people are said to be victims of it. That means we are dealing with a problem on the scale of a pandemic. Yet no major alarm has ever been raised or its political arena is in turmoil. Foreign? Certainly. But a good explanation is that we are talking about one of the biggest taboos in Western society: incest.
What exactly is incest?
Incest, also called incest, is strictly speaking sexual intercourse between close blood relatives. The word is derived from the Latin incastus , meaning ,unchaste,. In recent years there has been a tendency to label other sexual acts between blood relatives as incest. In this sense, incest also includes abusive sexual acts between a married man and his child(ren), of which he is not the biological father. If incest is committed with children, there is a strong overlap with pedosexuality. If the incest leads to offspring, it is called inbreeding.
How common is incest?
In modern Western society we have the idea that we can exclude many evil things. When it comes to child sexual abuse, this is unfortunately an inflated bubble, a lie. Research shows that more than fifteen percent of women have undergone a violent sexual experience with a family member before reaching the age of sixteen. Just over half of these victims have suffered serious forms of abuse by one or more perpetrators. The majority of perpetrators were fathers, older brothers and uncles. One percent of the (co-)perpetrators were women.
What are the consequences of incest?
The consequences of incest are enormous for the victims. The physical sense of security is violated, which can result in physical and emotional problems. Social anxiety, destructive tendencies, depression, sexual problems, tense muscles and post-traumatic complaints are just a few examples. It will take a lot of effort for a victim of incest to live a full and dignified life. To achieve this, the trauma must first be accepted and recognized and a better self-image must be achieved. An attempt must be made to slowly close the emotional wounds and build a renewed sense of security step by step. The victim must learn to trust people and situations again and thus reintegrate into social life. In addition to pain, victims often carry a great sense of anger towards the perpetrator, which they can sometimes also direct at themselves. When they come out with their story, the environment sometimes reacts angrily and often in denial. This can complicate and slow down the healing and processing process.
Why is incest still a taboo?
If you say at a party that you have cancer, you will receive support and warmth, in addition to shock. But saying that you have been a victim of incest is something that very few people will do. Despite the attention that the media has given to abuse cases in the church, for example, we can still speak of a social taboo here. Why is that actually so? One theory is that the modern West, which is supposed to be liberal and democratic, has difficulty admitting that violence exists at its innermost core; the family and the extended family. This seeing blindness is a psychological mechanism that not only works for the individual, but can also apply to the larger collective of a society. Not wanting to know makes it easier for incest to continue, which can only exist in secret, behind closed curtains. So you could conclude that the taboo on incest facilitates the existence of this evil.
Openness helps
Openness and transparency therefore seem to be the keys to solving this problem. If every family could talk openly about incest, much would have been achieved. Information and reporting can help to take the weight off the subject, as was previously done with AIDS, a subject that over time became open to discussion again without too much shame. In addition to education, the government could play an important role in this. This could include a policy of prevention, information, signaling and problem solving. After all, a taboo is only a taboo for as long as we choose.