Do you want to know what incest is? What it really is? No ...

Who commits incest?
Everyone reading this article probably knows—whether aware of it or not—more than
one incestuous man or woman. "Offenders don't have horns and a tail," says incest
survivor Kim Shaffir. "They look like nice guys. They are not strangers. Everyone tells
you to say no to strangers. No one tells you to say no to your family."
In Broken Boys, Mending Men: Recovery from Childhood Sexual Abuse, incest survivor
Stephen D. Grubman-Black points out that "perpetrators who commit sex crimes are
rarely the wild-eyed deviants who stalk little boys. They are as familiar and close by as
the same room in your home, or next door, or at a family gathering."
Offenders come from the ranks of doctors, construction workers, hairdressers, building
contractors, teachers, landscapers, philosophers, nuclear physicists, and women and
men in the armed forces. David Finkelhor, Ph.D., director of the Family Research Laboratory
at the University of New Hampshire, and his associate, Linda Meyer Williams,
Ph.D., had just concluded Characteristics of Incest Offenders, their landmark study of
incestuous fathers, when they saw nearly half of their subjects sail off to the Persian
Gulf to serve their country.
Some offenders prefer girls, others boys. Some abuse both. Some are interested only in
adolescents, or preteens, or toddlers, or new-borns. Some, though not most, molest
only when they are drinking or depressed or sexually deprived. Some don't abuse until
they are adults, but more than half start during their teens.
Abuse Cycle
Like Bingo, some victims go on to become abusers. Seventy percent of the incestuous
fathers in the Finkelhor study admitted that they were abused during their own
childhood. Judith V. Becker, Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the
University of Arizona College of Medicine who has supervised or been involved in the
assessment and/or treatment of more than 1,000 abusers, reports that some 40
percent said they had been sexually abused as children. Ruth Mathews, a psychologist
who practices with Midway Family Services—a branch of Family Services of Greater St.
Paul—has seen a similar number of adolescent offenders, male and female, and has
arrived at a similar conclusion.
Mathews went on to tell me about a girl whose father abused her with vibrators after her
mother's death. He also brought in other men to abuse her and, with his new wife, had
sex in front of her. When she was 12, a city agency, acting on a neighbor's complaint,
removed her from her father's house and placed her in a foster home. There she
inserted knitting needles into her foster sister's vagina. Asked why, she replied, "For
fun." In therapy, asked to draw a picture of herself, she chose a black magic marker and
wrote, over and over again, the words hate, disgust, and hell.
In another instance of children acting out their own abuse on other children (animals are
also frequent targets), one little boy was referred for therapy because he tried to mount
most of the children in his kindergarten. His parents told the therapist that they made
him ride on his father's back while they had intercourse. They said that this excited
them.
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