How we’re learning the true prevalence of incest

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Jordan: A quick warning, today’s episode contains frank discussion of sexual abuse. Please listen with care. I will be honest. I’m a little uncomfortable writing this introduction, and I know I’ll be uncomfortable speaking it. And really that gets to the heart of why we need to do this today. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve managed with great difficulty to shed the stigma around abuse that happens behind closed doors, spousal abuse, sexual abuse, harassment, coercion, violence. All of that has been dragged into the light by a lot of brave people. And slowly, slowly we’ve been able to work on confronting it, addressing it, and naming it except for one sort of abuse, incest. How do we know that? Well, for decades we’ve had numbers on how often incest occurs. Those numbers were assumptions, and they weren’t even close. How do we know that they weren’t close? Because now people like to test their DNA to see their family tree, and so many more people than we ever imagined are finding out an awful thing in an awful way. And so yeah, we need to talk about it. Uncomfortable as that is. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Sarah Zhang wrote about the Last Taboo in The Atlantic. Hello, Sarah.

Sarah Zhang: Hi.

Jordan: Thanks for joining us today.

Sarah Zhang: Oh, thank you for having me.

Jordan: Maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about a man named Steve Edsel. Who is he and what happened to him?

Sarah Zhang: Yeah, so Steve is in his fifties. He lives in North Carolina. He has lived there pretty much his entire life, and he was born in North Carolina, and he has known also since he was born that he was adopted. The reason he knows this is that the circumstances of his birth were actually splashed across front page papers. What had happened is that a 14-year-old girl had come into the hospital with her parents. They gave what turned out to be fake names, and she gave birth to a baby boy, and then just hours later, she and her parents disappeared. That baby boy was Steve, and for the next few days, as Steve describes it, the police were trying to find his birth mother and his birth family, but essentially they never did. So he was more or less abandoned at the hospital, and he knew this whole story growing up. His foster parents who later became his adoptive parents, they kept a scrapbook for him where he could read the newspaper stories about what happened. There was a picture, basically a sketch that based on nurse’s recollections of what his mother had looked like, she was 14 years old. She wore glasses, she had reddish hair. According to descriptions, her hair was about shoulder length, and this is basically all the information he had to go on, on who she was and where he came from. Steve told me that when he was little, he didn’t really think that much about his birth mom or exactly where he came from. He was kind of just a kid living his life. But when he also turned 14, that’s when he really began to think about his mom. She was 14 when she had him at 14. He could really feel how young she was and sort of how scared she probably was and how vulnerable she probably was. He really began to feel a lot of empathy for her, and from that point forward, he became interested in who his biological mom might be. When he turned 20, he went to the hospital and got the hospital records, and it didn’t have that much more information for him, but it did have a thumbprint of hers that had been taken when she was admitted. So that was in some ways the closest has ever gotten at that point to something she had touched something that came from her, and he told me about just looking at a thumbprint and seeing this is as close as he’s gotten, but there weren’t really any other records. Of course, she had disappeared, so the trail really kind of ran cold after that point.

Jordan: That was years ago. Now, as you mentioned, he’s in his fifties. What’s changed since then that allowed him to track down his birth mother, and how did that process work? This is something that I gather is happening to a lot of curious, formerly adopted kids.

Sarah Zhang: Yeah, that’s right. So when Steve turned 40, he sort of told his wife that he really wanted to have one less go at trying to find his birth mother. He actually gave a bunch of interviews at that point to local news stations. He actually made a Facebook post that went kind of viral, and he was covered quite widely in the local news, and lots and lots of people commented and wrote it with tips, but that also didn’t really lead anywhere. But around that time, this was around 2013, 2014. This is when Ancestry DNA in 23 and me started selling DNA tests. But for Steve, it was pretty clear that this might be a new way to help him figure out who his family is. So he took a test. He had some distant relative matches, but there weren’t that many people in the database. It really didn’t lead very far. And again, this sort of seemed like a dead end, but he had been posting a Facebook group for people who were searching for biological family and his case, he kept on seeing a particular woman’s name, CeCe Moore getting tagged. She’s a genetic genealogist. She helps people like Steve find their biological family. And so she agreed to take on Steve’s case, and she looks at sort of all these distant matchups on the second cousin, the third cousin, the fourth cousin, and then based on the amount of DNA that you share the exact pieces of DNA you share, and then information that she, and really anyone, if you’re sort of clever enough or enterprising stuff you can gather from the internet. So this is obituaries, Facebook profiles, birth records, death records.

Jordan: So it’s kind of a combination of genetic work and detective work.

Sarah Zhang: Yes, exactly. I mean, I think she would call it genetic detective work. I think a lot of people tend times people tend to focus on the DNA, which is crucial, but it’s also in these cases, like Steve’s, it’s actually not possible to figure out where you’re going unless you also look at all this digital trail that people are leaving online. So she was actually makes pretty quick work at this. If I remember, it’s maybe about a week or two later, she calls Steve and says, well, first of all, she says, I’ve narrowed it down to two cousins in the same family. They’re the same age. They would’ve both been 14 in 1973 when Steve was born, and Steve could see their Facebook profiles. They could see that they had lived really divergent lives. One cousin, she was married, she had several kids who had all gone to university and they were always posting pictures themselves, smiling. She looked like she had this beautiful, perfect family. The other cousin had done quite well for herself professionally, but she wasn’t married. She didn’t have kids, and she had moved really far away from most of her family, and she didn’t seem to be Facebook friends with anyone else either, which seems to suggest she maybe hadn’t really kept in touch with her family. You can’t really, you say anything for certain, but when you have so few data points, you just kind of looking at all these little clues of who these people can be. So CeCe tells Steve that she’s narrowed it down to these two cousins, and then she asked that he get on the phone with her because she had something to tell him. This is the conversation that CeCe specifically wanted to have over the phone. They had been Facebook messaging, but at this point she said to Steve, Hey, call me. I think this was a Saturday evening. And so Steve gets on the phone and CeCe gives him two pieces of preparation. The first thing she says is, oh, I figured out exactly who your biological mom is. She is a woman who is unmarried and doesn’t have kids, and this didn’t come as a surprise to Steve, I think just based on the clues that he pays together from booking at their profiles, he thought this maybe fit what might have happened, but then she told him something really unexpected, which is that she knew something about his biological father as well, which is that his parents were very closely related, and she said that she couldn’t tell him exactly who his biological father was, but based on the DNA, it had to be either his mother’s father or his mother’s older brother. This was just an utter shock to Steve. He had spent all these years wondering who his parents might be, and he had thought that maybe his mom had had a boyfriend and they had gotten carried away, but he had never imagined the scenario where she was likely abused by a family member. It’s just not something that comes to mind when you were thinking about what might have happened and how could this happen? I think even as I’m trying to tell this story now, I just feel like he experienced such a swirl of emotions. He was angry on behalf of his mother, of what likely happened to her. He was in some ways glad to have a resolution, but this also just opened up so many questions about himself and his own identity. He had in some ways because of the taboo and the stigma around incest, he felt ashamed and he at one point said he felt like he was trashed, that had been thrown away because he had been abandoned by his biological family at the hospital. The next six months. He said, were some of the toughest of his life because he was just dealing with this shocking shock and revelation. He didn’t know anyone that this has happened to and what are the chances that something like this could have happened to him? And so for the next several months, he’s just kind of dealing with all of this anger and all of these emotions. He wants to reach out to his mom, but he’s afraid that reaching out to her might potentially retraumatize her. He wants to know her. He wants to know his biological family, but it’s just so much more complicated than he envisioned.

Jordan: I want to zoom out now to the big picture because this is why I think as you just described with Steve, your story left a lot of people wondering how this could happen and how common it is. How common did we used to consider incest?

Sarah Zhang: Yeah, well, so the short answer is we didn’t really know, right? Because how would you do that study? How would you do that survey? Who would want to talk about this?

Jordan: Right.

Sarah Zhang: One estimate in the 1970s, so around the time, say we would’ve been born, put the incidence of incest at one in a million, which yeah, that sounds pretty rare.

Jordan: Most people assume that incest is incredibly rare.

Sarah Zhang: Yes. But what we’re finding with DNA tests is that it is almost certainly far, far, far more common than one in a million. So we don’t have insight into exactly what are in a databases of Ancestry DNA or 23andMe because it was private databases, but there’s kind of a public research database publicly available to researchers in the UK called the UK Biobank, and a researcher who’s looked at it told me that he found one in 7,000 people on that database as parents who were first degree relatives. First degree relatives means parent, child or brother, sister. So one in 7,000, most of them likely don’t have any idea even. And on top of that, there are people who are now like Steve taking 23andMe, Ancestry DNA tests and finding this out about themselves. So I had actually first heard about this several years ago when I was reporting a story about people who had taken these DNA tests and found unexpected things about themselves. And my story was really about people finding out their father is not who they thought their father was, often because maybe their mother had an affair or maybe their parents had used a sperm donor and kept that a secret. Those were really common situations. And then in the course of that reporting, I heard about a support group for people who found out specifically that their parents were very closely related. So either first or second degree relatives. Second degree relatives would be like a uncle, niece or grandparent, grandchild or half siblings. And my first reaction to hearing about the script is just simply, oh my God, there are enough people finding this out about themselves that there’s a whole support group for them? And the answer is yes, and CeCe told me that she’s personally seen over a thousand cases. So it’s not, certainly not common, and the rate is still low when you think about the millions and millions of people that live in say, the United States. But it’s probably a lot more common than a lot of us would think or would like to think.

Jordan: And you mentioned first and second degree incest, and of course here we’re talking about close relatives. I guess I assume most people would think when talking about incest that it’s cousins getting together, but what you are describing and what people are finding out seems to be darker than that.

Sarah Zhang: Yes. And I’m glad you made that distinction, and you’re right. We’re not talking about cousin marriages here, which in some parts of the world are perfectly accepted. We’re talking about much more closely related relatives, CeCe, who has seen a lot of these cases. She told me that most of the cases seem to be father daughter or older brother, younger sister, given the age gap, given how young the mother of the child often is, it’s really hard to imagine any scenario which these are entirely consensual. Basically, you’re probably looking for a family looking for some sense of belonging and to instead find this out. It can be a really, really difficult revolution. Something else Cece told me is that sometimes she would get people who were very upset that their parents were cousins and she would just tell them, I know over a thousand people whose parents are much more closely related.

Jordan: I also wanted to ask you about something. I imagine everyone who gets this news worries about and CeCe must hear a lot, and a question that I think is also suffused with stereotypes, which is what do we actually know about the medical risks of babies born via incest?

Sarah Zhang: Yeah, this is a really great question because I think everyone who finds this out, this might be one of the first questions they ask. So it’s true that if your parents are related, and especially if they’re very close related, it is more likely that they carry some of the same mutations, and if they are recessive mutations and the child inherits two of the same copy that we’re likely to have some sort of health condition. But if you look in the literature, and I looked a little bit back to studies from the sixties and seventies, you do see really high rates of things like early mortality or birth defects in children born from parents that were closely related. But the sort of circular thing about that is that if you think back at the 1670s, how would you know that a child was born from incest? You probably knew because the kid was maybe having problems and that’s why that was investigated. If a kid was entirely healthy, they were probably totally missed. And so that’s actually something that came out a lot of my conversations. So there’s a really just high degree of chance to whether incest between relatives leads to a child who actually does have health problems sharing a lot more. DNA definitely ups the risk, but it’s not a done deal. There are probably thousands of people in the UK who are walking around reasonably healthy have noticing to think that they have any sort of health issue. And I think that’s what’s really hard is that you really can’t know definitively. It’s not like saying incest will cause X, Y and Z thing. So it really depends on exactly which mutations inherited. So it really could manifest in a number of different ways. Steve, for example, he did have a heart murmur and he had to have open heart surgery when he was young. Heart murmurs are also not that uncommon in the general population, so that may or may not have faded

Jordan: Sure.

Sarah Zhang: He and his wife weren’t able to have children of their own. Infertility is something that is often correlated with incest, but again, can also happen without. So it’s really hard to know exactly why any of these things happen, though the chances of it do seem to be higher.

Jordan: In your reporting of this story, what was your experience of people’s willingness to talk and just in general, the kind of shame around it that we perhaps used to associate with people who had been assaulted, who now feel more comfortable telling their stories?

Sarah Zhang: Yeah. One of the most memorable conversations I had in the course reporting the story was with one woman in the support group. Her name is Mandy, her parents, she learned that her biological father was her mother’s uncle, and when she first found this out, she told me that she went looking just for stories about other people like her. She just typed into Google. What she found were basically pornographic fantasies or she found the old medical journals. I talked about all the horrible health conditions that might be associated with incest, and that’s actually the reason she wanted to talk to me. If someone else found out about themselves and Googled this, she wanted them to know that they weren’t alone, that there are other people like them out there, that this is not as rare as we might think just because we don’t talk about it. Just because in the past it might not have been possible for someone who is adopted to find out, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening, and now it is kind of pulling back this curtain on society, and I think on one level it is helping people who do find out at least that they are not alone, that there are other people who live through this revelation who have gone on to have just totally normal and productive lives. In some ways, it’s interesting because for survivors of incest, there is obviously too a lot of taboo associated with that, but I think there were resources for people in that situation because that is an identity you could have had, right? This is something that happened to you. You can find other people who had a similar situation, but knowing that you were born of incest, this is actually something that is a new discovery that people are having. They aren’t necessarily a victim of the original sexual assault, but it’s still a very big and shocking revelation, and I think the support group is one way for people to realize that emotions they’re going through, that it is something that other people have gone through as well and come out on the other side of.

Jordan: Well, that’s the last thing that I wanted to ask you actually, which is what do we need to do in terms of support and resources for a population that is clearly much larger than we ever imagined it was?

Sarah Zhang: Yeah. I was hoping that just in part by writing this story, it could shut some light on the situation. As I said, a lot of times when people go through this, I feel like they’re very alone. I’m hoping that if you are in this situation, you come across this story, you know that you are not alone and that there’s a community of people out there who have been through the same thing. And you’d think the other part of it is that, as we were saying, incest is something that’s really uncomfortable, and I think when we talk about it, it often comes in the province of jokes, right? Like when we’re uncomfortable, we joke about things. But I think what this is showing is that it’s not a joke. It really happens. It happens perhaps more often than we would like to think, and even just taking that seriously, this is a serious topic of inquiry, a serious topic to discuss and to have out in the open. I think on that sort of very basic level, acknowledging what this means. It’s helpful for people to find themselves in this situation.

Jordan: Sarah, thank you so much for this. It’s a fascinating discussion. I hope some people listening to this are happy that we’re breaking down the taboo a little bit.

Sarah Zhang: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this.

Jordan: Sarah Zhang writing in The Atlantic. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to The Big Story podcast.ca. If you want to give us some feedback about this episode or any other, the way to do that is via email, hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca, or by leaving a voicemail at 416-935-5935. You can find The Big Story wherever you get your podcast, and of course, it’s on your smart speaker if you ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page