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Incest generally refers to sexual relations between close family members, such as brother and sister. It is a criminal offence and an impediment to marriage in most modern countries, as well as being against most modern religions. The definitions of "close family member" and "sex" vary widely.

Prohibitions in the Old Testament

The Old Testament, a central part of both Jewish and Christian scriptures, contains prohibitions against sexual relations between various pairs of family members. Father and daughter, mother and son, et al., are forbidden on pain of death to engage is sexual relations.

Incest and Sexual Relations

All societies place restrictions on who one may marry but this has little or no relation to actual sexual practices. For example, one common practice among neolithic tribes is for mothers to sexually stimulate infants. Obviously, no marriage is involved.

It is commonly believed that all human societies have an "incest taboo". The most widely reported evidence for this is a cross-cultural study by Murdock of marriage rules and not sexual practices.

In the United States and other industrialized countries incest is generally used to refer to forbidden sexual relations within the family. Incest is most frequently a form of child sexual abuse committed by parents of both sexes. And while it is usually perceived as an act done by a father against his daughter, this is yet another myth surrounding the practice. It is widely, but by no means universally, agreed that incest by parents should be illegal. Some societies, notably India in the 1920s, consider incest an inescapable fact of life.

However, there is also the much rarer phenomenon of consensual incestuous relations between adults, such as between an adult brother and sister. This is illegal in most places, but these laws are sometimes questioned on the grounds that such relations do not harm other people (provided the couple have no children) and so should not be criminalised. Artificial insemination and distant adoption have compounded these problems. There are known cases of people having romances, or even marrying, only to later find out they are closely related.

Incest and Marriage Rules

Sociologists recognize that many societies distinguish between different sorts of prohibitions. In other words, although an individual may be prohibited from marrying or having sexual relations with many people, different sexual relations may be prohibited for different reasons, and with different penalties.

The relationship between sexual and marriage practices is complex. For example, Trobriand Islanders prohibit both sexual relations between a man and his mother, and between a woman and her father, but they describe these prohibitions in very different ways: relations between a man and his mother fall within the category of forbidden relations among members of the same clan; relations between a woman and her father do not. This is because the Trobrianders are matrilineal; children belong to the clan of their mother and not of their father. Thus, sexual relations between a man and his mother's sister (and mother's sister's daughter) are also considered incestuous, but relations between a man and his father's sister are not. Indeed, a man and his father's sister will often have a flirtatious relationship, and a man and the daughter of his father's sister may prefer to have sexual relations or marry.

Anthropologists have pointed out that in the Trobriand case a man and the daughter of his father's sister, and a man and the daughter of his mother's sister, are equally distant genetically. They thus distinguish between incest and inbreeding.

References:

• The Universality of Incest, by Lloyd deMause (http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/06a1_incest.html)