Sibling sexual abuse is debated in the Westminster Parliament for the very first time.
Sibling sexual abuse is a term used to describe ‘harmful sexual behaviour with a victimising intent or outcome between children who self-identify as siblings’. Until recently it has remained a largely hidden phenomenon, under-researched and rarely discussed. This is despite its prevalence. Data are limited, but it is estimated from a range of studies that perhaps around 5% of children may be involved in sibling sexual abuse (Yates & Allardyce, 2021). Even the more conservative estimates of 2% would suggest that in the UK, a country with a population of just over 67 million people, around 1.3m people would be directly affected. This is not to mention children’s parents, other siblings, grandparents and wider family members. Sibling sexual abuse is thought to be up to three times as common as sexual abuse by a parent (Krienert & Walsh, 2011; Stroebel et al., 2013), and the impact may be just as severe. The possible short and long-term consequences of sibling sexual abuse include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, substance misuse, eating disorders and relationship difficulties throughout life (Yates, 2017). Given these figures and this level of impact it is hard to fathom how it has remained under the radar for so long.
Perhaps we can look to history. In the ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’, Krafft-Ebing (1914) provided two examples from the late nineteenth century of sexual behaviours between a brother and a sister, presented as isolated cases of individual psychopathy. Since then only a small handful of studies were published from the 1940s onwards regarding children’s harmful sexual behaviour towards other children, in which brothers and sisters were occasionally mentioned (e.g. MacLay, 1960). It wasn’t until the 1980s that more started to be written on the subject (e.g. Bank & Kahn, 1982; Finkelhor, 1980; Smith & Israel, 1987). Hacking (1991) argues that the ground for discussing sexual behaviours between siblings was prepared in the 1960s by publication of the Battered Child Syndrome (Kempe et al., 1962). This brought to public attention the idea that parents may not only be strict or even cruel to their children, but may actually abuse them. The language of ‘child abuse’ that then followed allowed for the taboo subject of parent-child ‘incest’ to be discussed, therefore paving the way for sibling incest, which Hacking (1991: 277) considered at the time to be ‘the next hinterland’.
Comments