Incest

Frequency and Prevalence

Estimates of the prevalence and frequency of incest are varied and likely to be inaccurate. This is because incest is historically an underreported crime. In many situations, abusers and other family members pressure victims into remaining silent through disbelief, blame, or threats. Additionally, most societies view incest as taboo, and this likely produces shame, guilt, fear, and humiliation in victims, thereby reducing the already unlikely event of disclosure. As such, victims of incest are extremely unlikely to go to the police or to reveal their sexual victimization to any other helping professional. In some cases, victims may deny that anything untoward is going on, even when met by a sympathetic adult. In other cases, victims may not understand or recognize that what is happening to them is inappropriate and illegal because one way that abusers win the compliance and silence of victims is to assure them that this is a normal family learning experience.

Another issue interfering with a full awareness about the frequency and prevalence of incest is that many child victims (approximately three quarters) do not tell anyone about the abuse for at least a year, and up to half of the victims do not tell anyone for at least 5 years. Some never disclose.

Nevertheless, leading incest researchers estimate that slightly less than half of the children who are [Page 362]sexually molested are abused by family members. David Finkelhor, a leading scholar in the area, suggests that as many as 1 million women are victims of father–daughter incest, and 16,000 new cases occur each year. Research also suggests that the younger the victim, the more likely it is that the abuser is a family member. To specify, 50% of those molesting a child less than age 6 were family members, and about a quarter of those abusing 12- to 17-year-old children were family members.

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