I can’t find a lot of good surveys or papers, many of them are behind paywalls. I have the abstract to this paper though, which states: “15% of the females and 10% of the males reported some type of sexual experience involving a sibling. Fondling and touching of the genitals were the most common activities in all age categories.”
“Reactions to the experiences were equally divided among those who considered them positive and those who considered them negative.”
“Those with positive sibling experiences after age 9 have more sexual self-esteem. However, experiences with much older siblings taking place before age 9 are associated with generally lower levels of self-esteem and no increase in current sexual activity.”
Of course this is a bit of an older study, it’s harder to find modern studies which ask participants if they considered a “positive” result at all! (Or include statistics in the free abstract, lol.) One thing is for sure, it’s going on a lot more than people usually talk about. Heck, I’ve had an easier time finding surveys which discuss bestiality!
Out of the very few people who I’d say I’m close enough to talk about it with, I’d say everyone has had at least some experience of sexual touching with their siblings around puberty, but no full on sex that I’d strongly describe as “incest”. How common do you guys think it really is? Did you have any incest experiences, or people you know about? How did they turn out?
Finding good numbers on this is very hard. It’s certainly possible that they arent accurate, and with something which is such a strong social taboo, it’s basically impossible to judge if it’s becoming more or less common over time, or if people are simply becoming more or less open about it.
Some studies in various countries seem to end up with reported incest in the context of having been abused at around 4-5% on the high side. I think you would double this if you include the other party (for every victim there is a perpetrator) to 8-10% of the population having some kind of incest involvement. Again, that’s kind of cherry picking the higher end examples.
I wonder if people who consider their outcomes positive are less likely to report on surveys that characterize incest strictly as a form of abuse (eg they’re still keeping the secret).
Man, that’a a lot of incest abuse. It’s pretty close to the result above (13%). It’s hard to know how often incest actually happens when I’m not a part of it or its community.