Incest. A word that is so infrequently passed between the lips of parents and professionals. A word too frequently used in contexts that give permission for consensual incestuous relationships or sexual abuse in families. A word that is used alongside others like rape and child sexual abuse in various incest laws by state. The definition of incest remains confusing for those who have not been touched by the issue. But many incest survivors, those of us whose bodies, brains, and beings hold the effects of sexual abuse in families, know the importance of this word and these conversations.
We are seeking to resurrect conversations about incest abuse in coffee shops between friends, in schools and clinical settings with professionals, around dinner tables with family, and in public discourse across media outlets. Together, we are building a future where children are protected from sexual violence in their homes, survivors and families are supported through their recovery journeys, and people who harm are unable to repeatedly offend or reoffend after conviction.
Note that I am not a physician or clinician and the information in this blog post should not be used in replacement for professional medical care. The tools below were gathered through lived experience and a peer-to-peer support network.
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What is family incest abuse?
Simply put, the definition of incest is sexual activity between family members. But of course, nothing about the meaning of incest is actually simple. Before we can answer the question, what is incest? we must address another one, what is family?
Once believed to be relations between those related by blood, today our families present so much more diversely. From communities raising children to solo-parents courageously rearing kids alone, from blended families to live-in nannies, from queer family systems to communities structured by choice, the people whom children depend on for love, care, basic needs, and identity formation throughout their childhoods varies.
Today, the Incest AWAREness Movement (IAM), defines incest as the sexual abuse of a person by a family member or someone considered family. People are incested by parents and grandparents, stepparents and foster parents, live-in partners and caregivers, in-laws and offspring, aunts and uncles, siblings (including step, half, and foster) and cousins, or even close family friends. However, the preferred language for this form of harm differs across cultures and industries.
While some survivors and activists use the word “incest” to always mean abuse, others will say “incest abuse” to differentiate between consensual incestuous relationships. While academics and other researchers often use the phrase, “Intrafamilial Child Sexual Abuse” or ICSA, to specifically describe the sexual abuse in families against children.
What are the types of family incest abuse?
Family incest abuse can include groping, the exposing of genitals, invading body privacy, orally, anally, and/or vaginally penetrating someone with an object or body part, creating sexually explicit photos or showing them to a child, including pornography and child sexual assault material (CSAM). It can also include forcing children into sexual activity with other adults or children, as well as grooming, seduction, bribery, manipulation, hitting, and/or threatening someone into performing harmful sexual behaviors. Lastly, adults who burden their children with inappropriate levels of emotional support can also be considered abusers of incest. This is called covert incest.
In order to provide the most accurate information based on the lived experiences of both people who harm and victims or survivors, incest abuse is divided into a few categories:
Adult-on-Adult Incest Abuse
This includes the sexual violence by an adult within the family network against another person over the age of majority (in most states 18, but in some 19 and 21) or the age of consent (which can be as young as 16).
Adult-on-Child Incest Abuse
This includes the sexual abuse of an adult family member against a person under the age of majority or the age of consent. The most researched form of adult-on-child incest abuse is sexual abuse by a father. However, sexual abuse by mothers and other relatives also occurs.
Child-on-Child Sexual Abuse (COCSA)
Child-on-child sexual abuse, or COCSA, refers to any harmful sexual behavior between family members and/or peers under the age of 18. Sibling Sexual Abuse or Trauma refers to incest abuse between siblings such as whole/step/half/foster brothers and sisters. Cousin incest abuse also occurs.
Intrafamilial Sex Trafficking
This includes the sex trafficking of family members by others within or outside of the family network.
What are incest abuse statistics?
Due to a data gap, most incest abuse related statistics are outdated. However, what we do know is that approximately 1 in 10 children will be sexually abused, while 30% or so of reported cases are perpetrated by family members. However, due to lack of disclosure and reporting, as well as ease of access to children within the home, we estimate that incest abuse is much more common. Incest abuse has been proven to start younger, be more serial, continue for longer periods of time, and be more aggressive than other forms of child sexual abuse.
What causes family incest abuse?
From social stigma to the silencing of survivor stories, medical ignorance and denial of the issue to communal blaming of victims and children, power dynamics to the legal protections of the institution of family, a number of historical social issues have combined to cause and continue family incest abuse. Other issues such as racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia, genderism, homophobia, and transphobia, also contribute to the widespread nature of the problem.
I have come to coin, “The Incest Gap,” as the lack of effective methods of incest prevention, intervention, recovery, and justice that leave children vulnerable to incest abuse in their homes, survivors and their families isolated in their recovery journeys, and people who harm free to serially offend or reoffend after conviction.
What are the laws regarding family incest abuse by state?
Incest laws vary by state. Sometimes legislation around incest assumes consensual incestuous relationships between related adults, which is illegal in most but not all states. While sexual abuse within families falls under rape and child sexual abuse laws. Incest legality and laws by state can be found in a number of legal resources.
What are the effects of incest abuse on survivors?
Unfortunately, incest survivors may carry the burdens of abuse in their brains, bodies, and beings throughout their life journeys. Due to dependency on the family system, the nervous systems of incest abuse survivors — who cannot fight or flee the abuse — often begin to attack themselves. The imprint of incest abuse can feel so present and intense, even after the survivor has left the abusive environment. Often, the brain interprets new experiences and information as unsafe. So although the survivor may be encountering loving, safe, and trust-building relationships in the present, their nervous systems may find it difficult to tolerate them.
Many healing methods and treatments can be ineffective for incest abuse survivors because they depend on trust between the client and clinician or assume a nervous system baseline of safety, both of which may have never been learned by the survivor. Positive results from recovery work can be so time-intensive and expensive, that survivors feel that the labors of liberation and recovery are a full-time job. Unfortunately, many do not have the social and economic privileges to pursue the healing resources they need.
Thus, the effects of incest abuse include increased risks for physical and mental health conditions, economic hardships, relationship challenges, and suicidality. All of these effects can lead to a lower quality of life. Retraumatization, in relationships as well as during the processes to liberation, healing, and justice, is far too common due to the lack of social and systemic support of incest abuse survivors.
How can incest survivors and their families heal?
The good news is that with social, economic, and medical support, incest survivors can heal from sexual abuse in so many ways. Often, we find a sense of solidarity in chosen relationships, especially with each other, make meaning of our histories, and create fulfilling futures. If we wish, some of us become menders for justice as activists and advocates to ensure others are safe from the harms and effects of family incest abuse. We feel fortunate to be so sensitive to the protection of children from sexual abuse, especially in the home.
Together, many of us are developing a culture of empowering love for incest survivors, so that we can understand our pain, shame, and challenges as symptoms of survival. Then invite ourselves to center our identities and self-awareness around our courage, resilience, wisdom, creativity, and strength as liberators, healers, and cycle breakers.
As an incest survivor, I hope that those who have been touched by this issue will be patient with their brains, bodies, and beings as they learn trust and safety, as well as find a unique baseline of self and communal love from the inside out or outside in. From my own experience, I recommend an exploratory approach to healing by utilizing a number of treatment types. Some may find the questions below helpful to guide their recovery process:
Brain Health
How can others assist you in understanding the impacts of complex trauma on your brain? How can you receive support as your brain rewires and heals? For the parts of you that are taking time to heal or will not heal, how can you lean into interdependency and community care models to live meaningfully?
Mental Health
How can others support you in learning how to receive and provide safe love and care? How can you learn to listen to how your various internal needs speak to you, so you can learn the deepest sense of self-awareness? How can you treat others as you wish you had been treated?
Physical Health
How can others aid your body in finding release and relief to ease the impacts of trauma on the body? From food practices to exercise rituals, physical therapies to float therapy, how can you and your support system accompany your body into its own preferences for wellness?
Economic Health
How can your work environment be a supportive network in your healing journey? Can you advocate for yourself to receive disability accommodations or lean into community generosity in order to relieve the financial burden of life and healing management?
Creative Health
How can you practice creativity through the expressive arts in a way that aids your healing journey? From painting to drawing, vision boarding to collaging, writing to reading, performing to singing, can your art or the art of others inspire and guide you?
Recreational Health
How can you integrate a sense of fun and play in your day-to-day life? What do you enjoy doing right now and how can you make more time for it? It can be as simple as short walks or coffee with a friend, a visit to a museum or a day trip to a lake or ocean. How can you let yourself receive and be?
Spiritual Health
Do you feel connected to an expansive source of support internally or externally? Maybe you feel most aligned with this source by being with nature or praying in church, gathering with loved ones or practicing grounding meditations at the beginning each day. Whatever it is for you, treat yourself to your own spiritual fulfillment.
Relational Health
Are your relationships with animals or other adults providing you joy and support? If so, celebrate the partnerships in your life. If you’re in need of more supportive relationships, or maybe must set boundaries with people who deplete, begin to practice distancing yourself while developing life-affirming friendships, romantic partnerships, family connections, and collegiality among co-workers.
Where can incest survivors and their families find support?
Here are some resources to turn to while you navigate incest abuse recovery. From community support to professional care, peer-to-peer networks to solidarity in survivor circles, there are a number of ways to receive healing at every stage of your recovery journey.
Hotlines & Helplines
If you’re in need of immediate assistance, call or chat with the National Sexual Assault Hotline. Stop It Now! Offers chat, email, and text helplines to support adults and youth to navigate questions about sexual violence and sexuality, including people who may harm.
Incest AWARE Alliance
The Incest AWARE Alliance, a collective of individuals and organizations seeking to improve methods of incest prevention, intervention, recovery, and justice, is a great resource to find educational, consulting, and direct services. Together, we are working to advance the Incest AWAREness Movement to increase social conversations about the issue, educate parents and professionals about how to protect kids and intervene safely, and increase incest-informed and culturally-affirming competencies for clinicians. We also offer resource lists for teens, incest survivors, people who may or have harmed, as well as those who want to learn how to support a survivor in their healing journeys.
Sexual Abuse Therapists or Counselors
Learn how to find the right healing methods, as well as a sexual abuse therapist or counselor who best suits your needs.
Child Advocacy Centers
Families can also find support through their local Child Advocacy Center.
The Rape Crisis Network
Survivors can reach out to their local Rape Crisis Center and other community-based organizations for support.
A dear friend, fellow survivor-activist, and TedX speaker, Pennie Saum, asks all of us to talk about incest just as commonly and naturally as we do about oranges in a grocery store. We acknowledge that the resistance of the use of the word “incest” is the repression of those who have experienced it. As a survivor who liberated myself from an incest family, then pulled myself out of The Incest Gap with the support of loving community, I refuse to allow such a central part of my experience to be erased by society’s discomfort of a word. So I claim my right to call myself an “incest survivor” and commit to discovering and living my best life in interdependent community, while ensuring others are safe from sexual abuse in their families. I hope others will join me in this meaningful and most-important work.
After reviewing this piece, what are your next best steps for healing? Do you have a journaling practice that will help you to integrate the wisdom offered here? Would connecting with a friend or professional to discuss the content help you to heal? Maybe you feel invited to get involved in advocacy or activism work. Whatever your next step, know that you’re not alone. We are a community of survivors and allies here to support your healing journey.
Review my list of services if you'd like consulting support on anti-incest projects.
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