Posted: Wed 14 Mar 2007 13:20 Post subject: Incest: an age-old taboo
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Incest: an age-old taboo
As a German brother and sister take their fight for the right to a sexual relationship to the country's highest court, the BBC News website's Clare Murphy looks at the history of the incest taboo and how it is changing.
When Henry VIII wanted to be rid of Anne Boleyn, he made sure she was accused of one particularly heinous crime: sleeping with her brother.
According to the great modern anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, the incest taboo has been the driving force of humankind. By forcing man to find a mate outside the home, disparate, warring clans have been brought together and society has flourished.
Others see the abhorrence for sleeping with relatives as having a primarily biological motive - a human instinct to prevent defective genes being passed down.
"Society has long relied on the family unit as its basis," says sociologist Vikki Bell. "That's why it has been so important to keep family roles clear."
It is not hard to see how incest can make family life very complicated, potentially turning brothers into fathers and mothers into sisters.
Yet while most are clear that sexual acts between a related adult and child constitute abuse and as such must be punished, there is no modern consensus on whether society has the right to ban consensual sex between siblings, or indeed parent and adult child.
Too close to attract
If Sigmund Freud is to be believed, everyone would be sleeping with their close relatives given half a chance. Society had to keep these deep-seated desires in check, he argued.
No need, countered Finnish anthropologist Edward Westermarck, who said that if anything, close association in childhood automatically created sexual aversion - in other words, familiarity breeds contempt.
His theory was tested in a study of unrelated children growing up together in an Israeli kibbutz. Despite the parents being keen on their children forming relationships, the children themselves had no sexual interest in one another as they began to mature.
Here lies the daughter, here lies the father, here lies the sister, here lies the brother, here lie husband and wife, and yet there are only two bodies in the grave
16th Century French poem
The theory was also backed up by another study in Taiwan by a US academic Arthur Wolf.
He looked at two forms of marriage - one in which the two partners married as adults, and another in which the wife was taken into her future husband's household as a young child, growing up with him.
The latter produced more adultery, more divorces and fewer children than the former. This, he said, indicated closeness as children stifled rather than stimulated sexual feelings.
Locked up
But these cases, which in any event did not involve actual blood relatives, fitted uncomfortably with the only well documented case of a society which embraced sibling incest outright - that of Roman Egypt.
For about 300 years, a significant proportion of all marriages recorded were between brothers and sisters.
The relationships appear to have been both social and reproductive.
But there might have been years between the siblings given the high rate of infant mortality, so sibling husband and wives may have barely grown up together.
The phenomenon of genetic sexual attraction - where siblings fall for each other on meeting after an estranged childhood - accounts for some of the high-profile incest cases of recent years.
In the German case, Patrick was brought up in a foster home while Susan remained with the biological parents, meeting for the first time when she was 16 and he 23.
And in the US case of Allen and Patricia Muth, which went to the Supreme Court in 2005, the sister was raised in care, not meeting her brother until she was 18.
Both of them have served prison sentences for incest.
Biological risks
Both of these relationships have produced children with special needs, although whether this resulted from their parents' biological proximity is unclear.
Some geneticists put the risk of producing a disabled child as high as 50%, but this is hotly debated. Opponents of the incest ban also argue there are double standards, noting that no-one would ban those with hereditary diseases from reproducing.
In some countries, the law has tried to take into account the risks while legalising incest in certain circumstances. In Brazil, an uncle and niece may have a relationship provided they undergo health checks.
In parts of the US, first cousins may marry if they are beyond reproductive age or ability.
Our moral guardians don't need to get too worked up about this
Joachim Renzikowski, criminologist
But even in countries where incest between adults is not prosecuted, the rights of both parents and children born of incest are not clear cut.
France dropped incest from the penal code under Napoleon - 200 years ago.
But siblings may not marry, and in 2004, a man who was having a sexual relationship with his half-sister was refused legal paternity of his own child.
In the Netherlands meanwhile, where consensual incest is no longer prosecuted, the legal status of the child born of such a relationship is ambiguous, according to Masha Antokolskaia, an expert in family law at the Free University in Amsterdam.
Sweden is the only country in Europe which allows marriage between siblings who share a parent.
"In many ways society no longer wants the state to intervene in private lives when it doesn't have to," she says. "But it is still not prepared to grant incestuous couples full rights."
There is also debate over how much laws affect behaviour. Some even argue that what is proscribed becomes all the more attractive.
Not according to Joachim Renzikowski, a criminal law professor at Germany's Halle University.
"I don't believe that because incest is banned, there's a certain attraction about doing it," he says.
"But I doubt equally that getting rid of our incest law will result in any measurable increase in cases. Our moral guardians don't need to get too worked up about this."
A genetic report should cause a rethinking of incest laws
By Joanna L. Grossman
April 10, 2002 Posted: 2:51 p.m. EDT (1851 GMT)
(FindLaw) -- Jerry Lee Lewis is notorious for having married his cousin. So are Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. All three suffered for having violated a widely held social norm against "incestuous" unions. Yet there may be less reason for this norm, and for the laws enforcing it, than was once believed.
A panoply of state laws say cousin marriages are taboo. But a new report in the Journal of Genetic Counseling, described in the New York Times last week, might send state lawmakers back to work revising their incest laws.
The report concludes that cousins can have children together without running much greater risk than a "normal" couple of their children having genetic abnormalities. Accordingly, the report potentially undermines the primary justification for laws that prevent first cousins from marrying or engaging in sexual relations with one another.
The laws regulating incest in different states
Incest in this country is regulated through two parallel sets of laws: marriage regulations and criminal prohibitions. Marriage laws prohibit unions of parties within certain relationships of consanguinity (by blood) or affinity (by marriage). They declare such marriages void from the start.
Criminal laws prohibit marriage and sexual relationships based on the same ties (with the necessary consanguinity and affinity usually defined the same way as in the marriage laws). They penalize those who disobey with fines or imprisonment.
Every state today has a statute defining eligibility for marriage, and each and every one prohibits marriages between parents and children, sisters and brothers, uncles and nieces, and aunts and nephews. Some prohibit all ancestor/descendant marriages, regardless of degree. Four states extend the prohibition to marriages between parents and their adopted children.
Twenty-four states prohibit marriages between first cousins, and another seven permit them only under special circumstances. Utah, for example, permits first cousins to marry only provided both spouses are over age 65, or at least 55 with evidence of sterility. North Carolina permits first cousins to marry unless they are "double first cousins" (cousins through more than one line). Maine permits first cousins to marry only upon presentation of a certificate of genetic counseling. The remaining nineteen states and the District of Columbia permit first-cousin marriages without restriction.
The origins of incest laws
Incest laws in this country have largely religious origins. In England, incest was punishable only in ecclesiastical courts, which ostensibly applied the law of Leviticus prohibiting persons more closely related than fourth cousins to marry. This ban applied equally to relations by blood and by marriage, based on the canonical maxim that husband and wife were one, and therefore equally related to each other's kin.
American jurisdictions departed from English law by declaring incest a crime, as well as a basis for invalidating marriage. However, many states only punished relationships between first cousins and closer, and others only punished relationships of consanguinity, but not affinity.
The modern justifications for incest laws
Today, the justifications given for retaining statutory prohibitions on cousin marriage (and even debating the passage of new ones) are largely based on the fear that such unions will cause genetic problems for the children they produce.
The states that permit cousin marriage only under certain circumstances make this underlying justification clear - since a common thread runs through all their laws. Each requires a showing that the couple will not reproduce (because of age or sterility) or, at the very least, that they have undergone counseling to understand the risks of reproduction.
There are other justifications for incest laws that might be more compelling. Anthropologists Margaret Mead and Claude Levi-Strauss both wrote convincingly in defense of the "incest taboo." Mead characterized the widely held belief that incest is wrong as "among the essential mechanisms of human society."
According to Mead, the taboo has strong benefits: Because certain sexual and marital relationships are categorically forbidden, and the categorical ban is instilled early on in children's minds, children can grow and develop affectionate, close bonds with a wide span of relatives, without the intrusion of "inappropriate sexuality." Children can "wander freely, sitting on laps, pulling beards, and nestling their heads against comforting breasts-neither tempting nor being tempted beyond their years."
Levi-Strauss focused on the benefits of the incest taboo to society at large. The ban on intrafamily marriage forces families to reach outward and connect with other families -- and it is those connections between many different families that make society function.
Possible constitutional challenges to incest laws
Will the new data -- which strongly suggest, for cousins, that the genetic justification does not hold water -- mean that state prohibitions on cousin-marriages are vulnerable to constitutional attack? Certainly, the new data dramatically strengthen the basis for such an attack.
The Supreme Court, in a long line of due process cases establishing the right to make important decisions about family life, has treated the right to marry as fundamental. State laws that significantly interfere with the right to marry have, therefore, been subjected to heightened scrutiny. In other words, states must show that they have a compelling reason for restricting the right to marriage, and that they have chosen means that are closely related to their stated goals.
What will the states assert as the "compelling interests" that justify banning cousin marriage? One might be the desire to discourage reproduction when the children are likely to have significant birth defects. Another might be the desire to preserve intrafamily harmony. (The desire to replicate Levitical law would, of course, not be a legitimate interest for a state, given the Constitution's ban on state establishment of religion). These ends are probably sufficiently compelling under a constitutional analysis.
The problem comes in another component of the constitutional analysis -- the "narrow tailoring" requirement, which tests the closeness of the relationship between the state's chosen means and its desired ends. According to the recent report, children of unrelated parents have a 3 percent to 4 percent chance of being born with a serious birth defect. Children of first cousins have only a slighter higher risk--roughly a 4 percent to 7 percent chance. Thus, the ban on cousin marriages will not go very far toward the general problem of preventing birth defects.
Likewise, the concerns about intrafamily harmony are most compelling with respect to members of the same household, and thus seldom implicated in our culture, where it is fairly unusual for first cousins to grow up in close confines. The potential for family disruption is limited where cousins grow up in separate households and then marry as adults. A few courts have applied this reasoning to invalidate incest laws with respect to couples with no blood relation, like a step-sister and step-brother who became related only as adults when their parents married.
The prohibition of cousin marriages suffers from problems of both under- and over-inclusiveness--flaws that are usually fatal to a statute under heightened scrutiny. These bans are underinclusive in that they do not prohibit marriage in other cases where the risk of producing children with birth defects is significant. Carriers of diseases like cystic fibrosis, for example, are permitted to marry and reproduce with other carriers, even though resulting children have a one in four chance of developing the disease. For most individuals, the decision whether to marry and reproduce in the face of known risks to resulting children is left to their discretion.
The bans are over-inclusive to they extent they prevent marriage for the 93 percent of cousin-couples who will not have children with birth defects. Genetic testing may even allow those couples to prove that they do not carry any of the recessive genes known to become dangerous when doubled. Nonetheless, the broad-sweeping bans on cousin-marriage would still prevent them from marrying (except in North Carolina, which creates an exception for cousin couples that have undergone genetic counseling).
More generally, scientific advances that enable doctors to screen for many potentially harmful genes may render general presumptions about genetic risks, like those embodied in marriage bans, inappropriate. When a particular individual can know his or her specific risk of passing on dangerous genes to children, how can a presumption as to the average person's general risk of doing so constitutionally be applied?
Will cousins be allowed to marry?
Prohibitions on cousin marriage are unique to the United States. Most other countries permit first-cousin marriages without restriction, and the rate of cousin marriages in some countries is as high as 60 percent of all marriages. But that has always been the case, and being unique has rarely motivated Americans to change their ways.
A constitutional challenge to a state's ban on cousin marriage may well be successful, and studies like this recent one will be important to such a case. But even if legal barriers to cousin marriage are removed, the cultural taboo (the so-called "ick" factor) will be harder to remove.
The term "incest" -- which conjures an image of a sexually exploitative relationship between an older male relative and a young girl -- is one barrier to cultural change. Cousin marriages between two adults are not, of course, incestuous in this sense.
Just as the term "bastard" gave way first to "illegitimate child" and later to "nonmarital child" in the literature on unwed parenting, perhaps "incest" could be replaced with more palatable terms like "kinship marriage" or "distant consanguineous relationships."
Beyond nomenclature, cousin marriage faces other barriers. Regardless of widely reported scientific advances, many will continue to believe that cousin couples are destined to produce genetically inferior offspring. Just two years ago, one Maryland legislator spoke in favor of a proposed bill to prohibit cousin marriage, claiming that one in 32 children born to cousins has a birth defect, compared to one in 100,000 born to unrelated parents. Correcting such misperceptions will be important to the success of those advocating for cousin marriage.
Joanna Grossman, a FindLaw columnist, is an associate professor of law at Hofstra University.
ABC News
Brother and Sister, and Lovers
Inside a Phenomenon Called Genetic Sexual Attraction
By MAGGIE BURBANK
Feb. 19, 2007 — - Rachel and Shawn's love story sounds like something out of a fairy tale. They say it was love at first sight when they met almost eight years ago, and they have lived together as a happy couple ever since. But there is one crucial difference that sets Rachel and Shawn apart. They are part of a phenomenon known as genetic sexual attraction, or GSA.
Psychotherapist Joe Soll says that, "genetic attraction is an attraction between two people who've been separated ... seeing someone they've missed all their life, all the emotion of that loss, sometimes turns into a sexual relationship." You see, Rachel and Shawn are half brother and sister.
Rachel and Shawn -- who didn't want their real names or where they lived revealed -- were born only 28 days apart, from mothers who were pregnant by the same man. Despite having the same father, the two never met until they sought each other out at the age of 27. Rachel believes growing up separately is key to understanding their love.
"Had we grown up together as siblings, as children," Rachel says, "this would have not existed."
Regardless, they know they are breaking a social taboo, and they say they understand why people might call it incestuous.
"We are related," Rachel says. "We're not going to deny that."
'It's Like Kissing Myself'
Rachel and Shawn insist they are just like any other couple.
"I'm a normal guy," Shawn says. "I'm in fantasy football, I fish, I do everything that they do. I'm a normal person."
Rachel says they go to work, eat dinner, watch TV and go to sleep just like other couples. And just like other couples, they have an intimate relationship as well. But unlike everyone else, they believe their attraction is actually heightened by their genetic similarities.
"It's like kissing myself," Rachel says.
After four years together, Shawn decided to propose to Rachel. However, they are not married, because no state in the country allows brothers and sisters to legally wed. Rachel does not want to have children, but the couple says they would not be afraid to start a family if she did.
"I have two different sets of friends that are together," Rachel says, referring to other brother-sister couples. "Their children are perfectly normal."
But is it safe for half brothers and sisters to procreate? No studies have been conducted on the offspring of siblings, but social anthropologist Martin Ottenheimer has done extensive research on first cousins.
"The myth is that cousin marriage, or close inbreeding, produces stupid, deformed people," Ottenheimer says. "But that's not the case."
A report from the Journal of Genetic Counseling indicates that cousin couples have only 2 percent more of a chance of having children with birth defects as compared to unrelated couples.
Going Back to the Bible?
Ottenheimer also points out that sibling marriages were not always such an aberration.
"Brothers and sisters married in a number of different societies," he says. "This happened in Peru. This happened in Egypt. This happened in Hawaii."
But while Ottenheimer believes it is time to change the incest taboo against cousins, he doesn't think we need to go as far as accepting brother-sister couples.
"Does that mean that we have to allow brothers and sisters?" he asks. "No, it doesn't mean that. Nor do we have to allow parents and children to legally have sexual intercourse. We don't have to allow it."
Rachel and Shawn are devoutly religious, and even point to the Bible as a precedent for their love.
"If you take Adam and Eve," Shawn says, "where did we all come from if there wasn't incest?"
Shifting Emotions
Genetic sexual attraction is not a phenomenon that is exclusive to sibling couples. According to Barbara Gonyo, a 70-year-old grandmother in the Midwest, it can also occur between parents and their estranged adult children.
Gonyo was only 15 years old when she discovered she was pregnant in the early 1950s. Her parents forced her to give up her baby for adoption, and she remembers how traumatic it was to watch the nurse at the hospital immediately take her baby son away from her.
"'Say goodbye to your mommy now'… was all she said," Gonyo says. "It's like somebody put a rock in my heart. It was horrible."
As the years passed, Gonyo never stopped wondering about the son she lost. She sought him out, and almost 30 years ago, when he was 26, they were reunited. The first thing Barbara noticed was how much her son looked like his father, the first love of her life.
Gonyo's son made it clear to her that he did not want to call her "mom" out of respect for his adoptive mother. As Barbara realized she couldn't be his mother, her emotions began to shift.
"If I can't be his mother, who can I be?" she asked herself. "So I started to feel more romantically towards him that I did motherly."
Gonyo was sickened by her feelings and feared she was crazy. But she soon began to understand her feelings to be genetic sexual attraction. She believed she had feelings of attraction because she had missed out on bonding with her son.
Joe Soll, who wrote a book called "Adoption Healing," says GSA often happens in people separated by adoption.
"They want to be close and hug because they haven't had the relationship for 20 or 30 years," he says. "And that hug can turn into something else."
'If We Act on It, It's Called Incest'
Not everyone believes GSA is a legitimate phenomenon. Adoption expert Adam Pertman says genetic sexual attraction is no more common a phenomenon than incest.
"It happens in adoption just like it happens in biologically formed families," he says. "It's rare in adoption just like it's rare in biologically formed families. If we act on it, that's called incest, and we don't think that's a great idea for lots of good reasons."
Gonyo agrees that acting on those feelings would have been a horrible mistake. Even though she had an intense attraction toward her son for 15 years, her son never reciprocated, and she never acted on desires.
"Emotionally," she says, "you are the adult, and they are the child. If you go through with the sexual act, then I hold the parent responsible, not the child."
But half siblings Rachel and Shawn don't feel the need for restraint. They couldn't be happier that they finally met and fell in love.
"I apologize to everybody out there that's a nonsibling couple, but you will never have what we have…ever, ever, ever," says Rachel. "It just simply cannot exist outside of what we have."
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