Sister-brother Incest: Data from Anonymous Computer Assisted Self Interviews

Abstract

Retrospective data were entered anonymously by 1,178 adult men using computer-assisted self-interview. Twenty-seven were victims of sister-brother incest (SBI), 119 were victims of child sexual abuse by an adult female (CSA-AF) before 18 years of age, 1,032 were controls. SBI was often the first sexual experience for the victim. Our findings were consistent with other reports of early and persistent hyper-eroticization of incest victims. SBI increased the likelihood of engaging in behaviors as an adult consistent with a co-existing or primary male-male sexual orientation, and SBI and CSA-AF had deleterious impacts on adult men's sexual adjustment with their adult partners. Meiselman (1979, pp. 294-298) found eight cases of brother-sister incest described by sisters (BSI) and three cases sister-brother incest described by brothers (SBI) in her clinical sample. The three SBI victims Meiselman (1979) described had all been harmed by the SBI, but the victims described in two of the three cases also had been victims of incest perpetrated by other family members (the mother in one case and a brother in the other case). Over

Childhood and adolescent sexual behaviors predict adult sexual orientations

“…Box 11081, Charleston, WV 25339), the initial scale validation, and some of the items used in the present study have been described by Beard et al (2013) and O'Keefe et al (2014) based on subsets of the participants included in the present study. Scale evaluations are also provided below for the full set of participants included in the present paper (see Appendix A for items used in the present research).…”

“…No reference to incest was made during the promotion of the study. The research was conducted using the S-SAPE1 computerized anonymous survey instrument O'Keefe et al, 2014). Surveys were administered in university computer laboratories that had up to 45 computers to a room.…”

“…Many participants had never had sex with another human (Williams & Weinberg, 2003). Human sexual imprinting that preserves the early acquired preferences for opposite-sex partners or same-sex partners is also a form of critical period learning O'Keefe et al, 2014). Because it occurs while the brain is developing (Desmarais, Roeber, Smith, & Pollak, 2012;Fox, Levitt, & Nelson, 2010;Fox & Rutter, 2010;Uylings, 2006), critical period learning also explains the enduring higher interest in sex reported by individuals who begin masturbating while young, as well as by individuals who begin partner sexual experiences while young (Griffee et al, 2014a;Griffee et al, 2014b).…”

“…Increasing evidence has suggested for more than half a century that both preferences and orientations are continuously distributed rather than discrete variables (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948;Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953;Kinsey, Reichert, Cauldwell, & Mozes, 1955;Van Wyk & Geist, 1984). Alternative ways to describe this continuum-like range of preferences and orientations have included (1) using at least five separate categories (Vrangalova & Savin-Williams, 2010 or (2) using two orthogonal (opposite-sex and same-sex) variables that both exist, to some extent, within a single individual Bickham et al, 2007;O'Keefe et al, 2014;Robinett, 2012;Storms, 1980;Stroebel et al, 2013;Whalen, Geary, & Johnson, 1990). …”

“…genetic, endocrine, and birth order; for reviews see Dawood, Bailey, & Martin, 2009;Hyde, 2005;Mustanski, Chivers, & Bailey, 2002;Schwartz, Kim, Kolundzija, Rieger, & Sanders, 2010) and those that attribute adult sexual preference to the combination of early social learning, classical, and operant conditioning Bickham et al, 2007;O'Keefe et al, 2014;Robinett, 2012;Stroebel et al, 2013). For reviews of conditioning studies in humans and animals, see Hoffmann (2012) and Pfaus et al (2012), respectively.…”