Issues Involving Sibling Incest
July 5, 2010 by Diane
Just as childhood incest is underreported, so is sibling incest. It occurs far more frequently than many want to believe although many of the same reasons for father-daughter incest (the most prominent) are the same. In fact, sibling incest is estimated to occur 3-5 times as often as father-daughter incest.[1] Once again, the root causes lie with faulty/uninformed parenting skills.
For abuse to occur, perpetrators have to have access to children. Who has the most access? Parents and siblings. And when the parents are unreliable, demonstrate poor boundaries, provide little or no direction on conflict resolution skills , and overall model unhealthy behavior, the smallest and most vulnerable pay the price. The younger siblings have to fend for themselves with no direction.
Sibling assault can be defined as “a repeated pattern of aggression directed toward a sibling with the intent to inflict harm, and motivated by an internal emotional need for power and control.”[2] When siblings are close in age, the typical excuses for aggression toward each other are that younger children normally get involved in harmless sex play or that sibling fighting is normal family behavior. In my article Sibling Incest, I provide more in depth descriptions of this behavior.
Three family configurations are commonly found in sibling abuse families[3]:
- Peripheral parent families: One parent is absent a lot and abusive when he/she re-enters the household. Children’s needs for love, attention, and support are not met, so they turn toward each other. Since their interactions are not often supervised and the children have not been taught appropriate behavior, sibling incest can occur—especially when an older sibling feels resentful and aggressive.
- Pseudo-consensual sibling incest families: When the home is sexually charged and there is ongoing parental abuse or neglect, siblings many times turn toward each other to get the emotional support not provided by the parents.
- Pseudo-parent sibling families: When neither parent is available, many times the oldest child is positioned as the caretaker to his/her siblings. With the older sibling in charge and he/she has had no modeling provided by the parents for healthy behavior, when he/she becomes sexually aware, he/she may relate to younger siblings erotically.
All three of these examples show how the physical and psychological abandonment of the parents leads to abusive behavior, and consequently, long-term harmful effects for their children.
[1] “Sibling incest: The myth of benign sibling incest,” E. Cole, Women and Therapy, 5, 79-89, (1982); “Sibling incest: A study of the dynamics of 25 cases,” H. Smith & E. Israel, Child Abuse & Neglect, 11, 101-108, (1987)
[2] “Treating sibling abuse families,” John V. Caffaro, Allison Conn-Caffaro, Aggression and Violent Behavior 10, 604-623, (2005).
[3] Ibid.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 5, 2010 at 6:14 am and is filed under Abuse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 17, 2010 at 4:37 pm
I recently watched Oprah’s show on Mo’Nique, the comedian, where her brother admitted that he sexually abused her, but it made me angry to watch him in denial, and how the family was in total denial themselves. This triggered my own experience to come to the surface after some forty years, and how my family did just the same thing. My brother set out to make me sound crazy to my parents and is still in denial as to how it has affected me. I am 47-years-old today and I didn’t tell my mother until four years ago. She made my brother apologize to me, but I didn’t feel as though he meant it. Now that my parents have both passed on, I have nothing but great anger for both my brothers, because there is no sibling closeness with them, and they feel I should be even though they have done everything to cause me more pain. Again they are in rare form in putting me down. I have now distanced myself from them, but I fight to survive. I find most of my relationships are strained and anger builds in me. I don’t know how to cope?
July 18, 2010 at 11:53 am
I am very sorry to hear about the abuse you experienced, but the denial by your brothers, the perpetrators, sad to say, is not new. The way in which your parents minimized the effect on you has just added to your distress. I have written many articles that may help you. On the left-hand side of my home page are categories. Check out the articles under “Abuse” and “Healing From Abuse.” It will also help if you can find a therapist to assist you in your recovery process. A good place to start is http://www.isst-d.org. Go to their website and click on “Find A Therapist.” I hope this helps.