Incest
Prevalence and statistics

Incest between an adult and a person under the age of consent is considered a form of child sexual abuse that has been shown to be one of the most extreme forms of childhood abuse; it often results in serious and long-term psychological trauma, especially in the case of parental incest. Its prevalence is difficult to generalize, but research has estimated 10–15% of the general population as having had at least one such sexual contact, with less than 2% involving intercourse or attempted intercourse. Among women, research has yielded estimates as high as 20%.

Father – daughter incest was for many years the most commonly reported and studied form of incest.

Mother – son incest is rarely reported. According to Catanzarite (1980), between 1965 and 1980 only a handful such cases were documented. Catanzarite attributes this to selection bias and the lack of physical evidence in such cases. According to Etherington (1997), one of the reasons of the under-reporting of such cases is that men often found difficulty in defining their mother's behavior as abuse. In a clinical study by Olson (1990), 30 men had been victims of incest; the mother was a perpetrator in 61.5 % of cases. In a clinical study by Kelly et al. (2002), among the 67 sexually abused men, in 17 cases the perpetrators were their mothers.

More recently, studies have suggested that sibling incest, particularly older brothers having sexual relations with younger siblings, is the most common form of incest, with some studies finding sibling incest occurring more frequently than other forms of incest. Some studies suggest that adolescent perpetrators of sibling abuse choose younger victims, abuse victims over a lengthier period, use violence more frequently and severely than adult perpetrators, and that sibling abuse has a higher rate of penetrative acts than father or stepfather incest, with father and older brother incest resulting in greater reported distress than stepfather incest. South Africa,

Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan, and Nigeria are some of the countries with the most incest through consanguineous marriage.
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