The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child. “That’s way, way more than I think many people would ever imagine,” he told me. And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

Most of the people affected may never know about their parentage, but these days, many are stumbling into the truth after AncestryDNA and 23andMe tests.

  • ShareMySims
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    9 months ago

    And this number is just a floor: It reflects only the cases that resulted in pregnancy, that did not end in miscarriage or abortion, and that led to the birth of a child who grew into an adult who volunteered for a research study.

    Either way, what number of parent raping and impregnating their child or sibling raping and impregnating their sibling would be shocking to you? Because to most people it’s probably “anything that isn’t zero”.

    • NounsAndWords@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      It’s shocking to you that rape exists? Clearly its a bad thing and shouldn’t happen, and it’s upsetting, but I would disagree that most people would be shocked if you told them “more than zero rapes happened this year”.

      • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        9 months ago

        While I agree with you in principle, I actually do think that 1/7k is unexpectedly high. If 1/10k people had an incestuous relationship, that would be low enough that I wouldn’t find it surprising. This study, if we take it to be cross-sectional, implies that the rate of incidence is much higher, at least on the order of 1/1k, possibly something around 1%. I don’t know the frequency that people of incestuous individuals have a child as a result, but the idea of it being higher than 1/7 strikes me as unlikely. Of course, multiple children can result from a pairing, so that has the potential to sway the numbers, but I’d hope that incestuous individuals are less likely to desire children from the relationship, and as a result would take a pregnancy as a sign to stop.

        • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          One in a Thousand ist still low enough that it is very likely you will never meet a person involved with this in your entire life. In the EU the rate of traffic death per 100,000 people per year is at about 7.5. So for any given person the chance of dying in a traffic accident in 13.3 years is as high as that.

          Over a life span of 80 years the probability of knowing one incestous person is as likely as knowing 6 people that died in traffic accidents at current accident rates and assuming independant and random distributions.

          I’d be more shocked to lose 6 friends to traffic accidents over my lifetime than one of them turning out to have had an incestous relationship.

          • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            9 months ago

            One in a Thousand ist still low enough that it is very likely you will never meet a person involved with this in your entire life.

            What? If I met only 1 new person every month for my entire life, I’d meet 1000 people before 85 years. If I only met 1 new person a week, I’d meet 1000 people before I turned 20. I’m a goddamn hermit, but I still rarely go more than a week without meeting someone new, and when I meet new people it’s often more than 1.

            I’ve already met people who later died in in traffic accidents, so what the fuck are you talking about?

          • phoukas@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Anecdotal, but I know at least ten people who have died in traffic accidents. I’m only 30. I also work in retail and see thousands of people a day. A whole person a day I see could statistically be a child of incestuous rape. That is pretty shocking and horrifying to me.

        • flicker@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          1 out of every 6 women in America are survivors of attempted or completed rape. If you’re shocked someone tells you they’ve been raped, it’s because they’re brave enough to say it, not because it’s statistically unlikely.

      • HeadfullofSoup@kbin.earth
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        9 months ago

        And that just rape how much “keep it in the family” and “keep the blood pure” kind of people exist ? With the expansion of far right everywhere ( and yes i always see Far right people as inbred moron ) i would say a lot

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
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          9 months ago

          You’re overplaying your hand here. Parent/child incest implies rape if the child is underage. Adult sibling/underage sibling implies rape. But incest of siblings who are similar age (whether adult or child) doesn’t necessarily imply rape. Even incest of a parent and their adult child doesn’t imply rape.

          Statistically I’d bet this is predominantly rape and you are largely correct, but by saying incest = rape you’ve overstepped a bit.

        • Worx@lemmynsfw.com
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          9 months ago

          Expanding on MagicShel’s comment: imagine two siblings who were put up for adoption at birth. When they grow up, they meet each other, fall in love, have babies without realising they are siblings. Who raped whom in this example?

          • ShareMySims
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            9 months ago

            Expanding on my previous comment - imagine investing time and energy in creating far fetched examples to somehow make incest “ok”, but instead just outing yourself as someone who isn’t.

            • Custoslibera@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              There are several examples of brothers and sisters who were adopted to separate families then become couples later in life unknowingly.

              Just google it.

              • ShareMySims
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                9 months ago

                It really is incredible and quite disgusting how many of you creeps are piping up in defence of incest…

            • Worx@lemmynsfw.com
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              9 months ago

              You implied that all incest is a result of rape. I only have to provide one example to prove you wrong.

              You are wrong; I win