I am curious to know how much we know about how often people in the same immediate family enter into sexual relationships which they conceive of as consensual, and as meaningfully of a piece with normal romantic relationships. (Not cases of unknown or mistaken identity–I mean cases where the people involved know they are in the same immediate family.) (Also, husband/wife doesn’t count. )
I’m interested in a breakdown by family role. In other words, how often does this happen between fathers and daughters, how often between mothers and sons, how often between opposite gendered siblings, how often between brothers, how often between sisters.
I’m guessing not much is known, especially about some of the latter items on that list. But the Dope has oft surprised me in the past.
This is generally known as Genetic Sexual Attraction - and is surprisingly common among long separated family members - I have seen details of several cases in the UK and Europe.
Quoth your link: “Genetic sexual attraction (GSA) is sexual attraction between close relatives, such as siblings, first and second cousins or a parent and offspring, who first meet as adults”; emphasis mine. This is not what the OP is looking for.
I can see from my OP how someone might not have understood that, but Indistinguishable is right. I had in mind people who were raised together and have basically always known they are members of the same immediate family.
Reading about such stuff makes me queasy, but I would like to throw out here a supposedly true story I read once in a column (maybe Dr. Drew?) - a woman married a man she knew for a very short time and everything was going well. Until she discovered he was doing all the neighbors. ALL the neighbors - many women and a few men. And not even trying to hide it, when confronted, he admitted, yeah, he asked and they said yes…It turned out he grew up in an incestuous family. Parents, kids - brothers and sisters - all walked around nude, all of them had sex with each other in couples or groups. So he thought that was the normal way of things…Sounds strange to me, but I suppose it could happen.
Generally, going back to the original & most complete study, The Kinsey Report(s), gives the best available data.
I believe the report on males had some figures on sexual activity between brothers. I remember seeing them and thinking that they were higher than I would have expected.
Not much to add but IIRC most incestuous relationships are between siblings. I would presume that most of those would be consensual. At least I cannot think of a time I read of a brother raping a sister (someone will doubtless point to a story of that happening but is it common?).
ETA: Where is the line drawn for incest? By that I mean how closely does the person need to be related to you? Immediate family (parent or sibling)? Aunt/Uncle? Grandparent (eww)? Cousin (if so how close)?
(In fact, FWIW, one of my very best friends in High School was raped on a regular basis by her brother for several years. So I know it happens, but of course, who knows how common it is. Actually, I would have assumed rape is more common that consensual incest, for some reason.)
Marriage between first cousins (sometimes restricted to cross-cousins or parallel cousins) is relatively common worldwide, and legal in some places in the Western world. Incest is a universal human concept, but the boundaries of exactly how distant you need to be for “not incest” are culturally determined. As far as I am aware, direct ancestors / descendants and full siblings would always be incest. Half-siblings too except in a few highly unusual and restricted circumstances (Ptolomeic Egyptian royalty, for example). Aunts / uncles / nieces / nephews would usually be. Further than that, it depends.
Regarding the brothers example, you should probably make a distinction between sex play / experimentation and a genuine sexual relationship (open or clandestine). I am not a psychologist, so I don’t know how you’d make that distinction, but the act of incestuous sex alone isn’t enough to convince me that two teenaged brothers are in a meaningful romantic relationship.
“Consentual” incest is I think what the OP is asking about. And short of some “coming out” on a scale equal to gay liberation, it’s probably impossible to know: the two main sources we have about incest are porn and criminal/psychiatric reports about pathological relationships, neither of which can be taken as unbiased. I would guess there must be some consentual incest out there, but the signal-to-noise ratio is hopeless.
BTW: Kinsey is now widely discredited as an unbiased source.
Other than the recent Mackenzie Phillips story the only two others that I can think of were the story a few years ago of the wealthy money manager and his daughter, and the story several years ago of a long separated brother and sister in (IIRC) England that were arrested after having child together.
Not impossible, but less likely. I believe that studies of kids growing up in kibbutzes in Israel showed that the kids tended not to marry other kids from the same kibbutz, even if there was no blood relationship - the authors of the study theorized that the social conditioning of growing up closely with another person tended to make it unlikely that you would be sexually attracted to them - a socialization pattern which would help to prevent inbreeding.
The first link, though, is a case study on a father who brainwashed his daughters into the relationship. I don’t think that qualifies as a “romantic” sexual relationship. (I did not read the entire article; I did read the abstract and skimmed it a bit, so I apologize if there is something I missed in it, like relevant statistics on romantic incestuous relationships.)
Sibling rape is pretty common. According to thiswebsite, in substantiated cases of sexual assault in Pennsylvania, 10.9% were perpetrated by a sibling.
I know an assload of people abused by siblings, including within my own family. Normally when a kid assaults another kid, the assaulting kid was him/herself victimized first. Though I’m sure the line gets a little blurry for older kids in their teens who know full well what they are doing.
I may be biased, but I am strongly skeptical of the idea that within the context of family, even siblings, there is any such thing as consensual sex. There is almost always a power dynamic involved in family relationships.
I happen to know of a guy who made accusations of incest when his (paternal) uncle and his widowed mother married. But this was in Denmark, and he was crazy.
Legal in much of the U.S. too.
There’s a power dynamic when you meet someone in a bar too. I don’t mean to trivialize it, because I think it’s safe to presume that a lot of intrafamily sexual relationships are damaging, even if they don’t involve rape or over coercion. But I don’t see why adults shouldn’t be allowed to make those decisions if they want.