Examples where there are two types of taboo on CSA (incest, prostitution, pornography) are often indistinguishable from other cases re. their outcomes. That is to say, a variety of forms and reactions have been recorded, with seemingly no greater burden of trauma.
Incest (family sex)
Research would appear to suggest that there is no animal analogue for a universal incest taboo "mechanism".[1][2] But what information do we have to support the idea that such a taboo among humans is biologically potentiated? And what does the literature say about social stigma and the effects on minors?
- Ramey, J. (1979). "Dealing with the last taboo" (SIECUS Report).
- "One such study, recently reported to the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting (Nelson, 1978), found certain “rare but undeniably healthy situations where incest was an obviously appropriate behavior.” She also found a high correlation between abuse and negatively perceived incestuous experience as well as a high correlation between consent and positively perceived incestuous experience. Contrary to her expectations, incest did not occur primarily in families with a high level of dysfunction, and where dysfunction was present it was seldom possible to attribute its cause to the incestuous character of the experience. Whenever the incest situation isolated two or more members from the rest of the family, there was guilt and negativity in the report. Whenever the participants felt they had the permission of the family, a positive report resulted. It is significant that Nelson found “several such families where real or implied consent openly allowed active, sophisticated lifestyles which included sexual sharing.” The Nelson study, the currently suppressed Kinsey study, and two others that I know of suggest that we do not have the whole picture of incest before us and are therefore not presently in a position to make valid pronouncements and judgments about the nature of the practice. As a result, we may be doing considerable damage to those who have been or are currently involved in incest. The blatant sensationalism of television, added to congressional hearings which equate incest with rape, child abuse, violence, child slavery, and child pornography, combine to scapegoat many people."
Innate taboo?
- O'Carroll, T., (2010). "Arthur P. Wolf: Incest Avoidance and the Incest Taboos, Two Aspects of Human Nature" Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Sexuality & Culture volume 21, pages 323–329.
- "Fraley and Marks (2010) reported three experiments, including one demonstrating that people find pictures of strangers more sexually attractive immediately after they have been subliminally exposed to an image of their own (the experimental subject’s) opposite-sex parent. The authors also noted earlier research showing that even adopted children tend to have spouses who resemble their adoptive opposite-sex parent. Being brought up with, and indeed by, that person apparently increases rather than decreases (as would have been predicated by the Westermarck Hypothesis) the likelihood of someone like that person being chosen as a mate."
- v.d. Berghe, P., (2010). "Human inbreeding avoidance: Culture in nature" Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 6 Issue 1.
- "Much clinical and ethnographic evidence suggests that humans, like many other organisms, are selected to avoid close inbreeding because of the fitness costs of inbreeding depression. The proximate mechanism of human inbreeding avoidance seems to be precultural, and to involve the interaction of genetic predispositions and environmental conditions. As first suggested by E. Westermarck, and supported by evidence from Israeli kibbutzim, Chinese sim-pua marriage, and much convergent ethnographic and clinical evidence, humans negatively imprint on intimate associates during a critical period of early childhood (between ages 2 and 6). There is also much evidence that, like other social animals, humans do not seek to maximize outbreeding, but rather to maintain an optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding. Close inbreeding reduces fitness through inbreeding depression, but some inbreeding brings the benefits of nepotism. For simple, stateless, horticultural societies, the optimal balance seems to be achieved by a combination of precultural inbreeding avoidance of relatives with an r ≤·25 and cultural rules of preferential marriage with kin with r ≥·25. Adjustment of the coefficient of inbreeding to other ecological settings seems to be largely cultural. An interactive model of “culture in nature” is presented, in which culture is seen as coevolving with genes to produce the maxiniization of individual inclusive fitness."
The sex trade (prostitution, pornography)
- Ramey, J. (1979). "Dealing with the last taboo" (SIECUS Report).
- "Drug abuse was the original concern of this investigation. During the course of the research, nine girls between the ages of 8 and 12 were encountered who admitted involvement in prostitution and/or pornography. They were not runaways. Rather, they had been introduced to their careers by relatives. Their initiation into sex seemed to be motivated by fear of rejection, their drug involvement did not appear to be associated with their sexual activities, and they did not seem to be traumatized by their early association with sex."
Further reading
