Is incest more common than most people realize?

Because I was watching this television show related to my home country about how apparently it's more common than people realize in my home country. Not necessarily in the immediate family, but distant relatives and stuff. It got me thinking about how it may be more common than people realize, even within immediate family because there's no real 'research' about it. I shudder to think it happens and people don't even know. Sometimes I'll see pictures of a girl with her dad standing too close or something... and it just feels so wrong.
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Most Helpful Guys

  • There was a study done in the UK years ago (I remember when it was in the newspapers) about a series of tower blocks which had a higher incidence of birth defects, and they thought it might be radiation or pollution or something. Turns out there was a much higher amount of inbreeding in the tower flats. Several generations of large families, with people not always correct about who their father was, led to a large number of half-siblings breeding together through ignorance. This happened over several short generations (15 - 20 years) and had begun to influence the number of birth defects.

  • Incest has been a problem forever, essentially. That's why Sophocles wrote the play, Oedipus Rex, to identify and demonize incest.

Most Helpful Girls

  • What do you mean in that last sentence?

    I was possibly dating a distant distant cousin at one point, and to be honest, it didn't freak me out because if it were true that our paths were close at one point, our families had diverged and introduced very different dna.

    But then it turns out we weren't related so things went along.

    Honestly, I wouldn't care as long as the guy and I weren't close cousins or anything closer than that.

  • Yes sure. Sure signs of this is when you see people with eyes too close to their nose, their face too round and big and their body shape is of a melting ice cream cone... etc

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What Girls & Guys Said

1 9
  • Yes, both incest and bestiality are much more common than most people realize.

  • it is, since you can't really help who you fall in love with. But it's there choice, they have one life and if thats how they live it then thats up to them

  • I say in my family this has been a issue , my great uncle was caught having sex
    with his sister.. my late maternal grandma and her sister married 2 brothers but
    they are all different families ,, me and my sister fooled around age 13 and i had
    a crush on my 3rd cousin ,. yes it happens in families what can i say ,

  • too close like what? she can luv her dad.. its her dad... everybody loves their dad, you get me fam?

  • It used to be normal everywhere. Marrying your 3rd cousin and having children was perfectly acceptable. Now it's taboo, but it still happens.

    • It is not illegal to marry a third cousin. In fact it is quite legal to marry second cousins..

    • Yeah but its viewed as distasteful. It was perfectly normal back in the day.