Father-son incest: underreported psychiatric problem?

Father-son incest: underreported psychiatric problem?

Six families are described in which 10 sons were involved incestuously with a natural father (N=4) or step-father (N=2). Father-son incest as a part of the spectrum of child abuse appears to be a more frequent clinical entity than was thought previously. There has been increasing public and professional awareness over the past decade of parental sexual exploitation of children as a form of child abuse. The psychiatric literature contains a number of studies describing clinical features and suggesting dynamic formulations associated with heterosexual parent-child incest (1), but there is a significant lack of discussion dealing with homosexual parent-child incest. It is unclear whether this conspicuous dearth of information reflects a very low incidence of homosexual incest, as suggested by some authors (2-4); a tendency to label this behavior pattern as simply homosexual rather than incestuous, as Cory (5) has implied; clinicians ' failure to recognize the problem; or a combination of all three factors.

During a period of 4 years, cases involving six families with homosexual incest have come to our attention. We were not looking for incest but, rather, were impressed by the accidental finding of such a large number of homosexual incest cases in our population in view of the lack of attention the phenomenon has received to date in the literature. All of our cases involved father-son incest, and we are aware of no cases of mother-daughter or mother-son incest in the same clinical population.

Psychiatry and Mental health