From poor Bukusu baby, a critical look at Kenya’s taboo sex

A man in Bungoma recently sired a baby with his niece, much to the disgust of his Bukusu community.

A TV crew visited the family last week and reported that, because such an incestuous relationship is taboo here, the elders watched from a distance as the girl carried the pregnancy to term, then immediately after giving birth told her that they might have to kill the infant because they could not afford to live with such shame staring them in the eye.

The country went amok, with thousands asking how a poor baby could be sacrificed to cleanse the sexual proclivities of its father?

As is the tradition nowadays, a Twitter hashtag — #poorbukusubaby — was created to give people a platform to vent and, as blogger Titanium (@JewelsKenya) put it, to let the humanists “scream murder”.

Their screams, however, might not have amounted to much, because they were directed at only one case in Bungoma. And that, probably, only because it had been highlighted on prime time television news.

FATHER OF BABY

Why? Because two months ago, an elderly man was arraigned in a Webuye court to answer to charges of, as the lawyers like to put it, “having carnal knowledge” of his 16-year-old daughter.

Medical tests, the prosecution told the court, had confirmed that Simon Kituyi Wakape was the father of a baby born to his underage daughter.

What the hashtag #poorbukusubaby managed to achieve, however, was a national conversation regarding incest.

Many people are still engaging in sexual affairs with close family members despite these being regarded as social taboos, and rarely does a month pass without reports of fathers accused of impregnating their daughters, or mothers co-habiting with their sons.

Most of the times these cases are hushed up at the village or family level, meaning very few ever get to the courts and onwards to the media. But those that do, like the story from Bungoma, tend to leave a bad taste in the mouth.

In Nyeri a few years ago, two men only known by the initials PMM and SNT in court documents were convicted of having sex with their daughters and sentenced to life in prison. SNT was found guilty of being intimate with his 11-year-old daughter in 2006, while PMM was convicted of sleeping with his 13-year-old in 2005.

Dr Ken Ouko of the University of Nairobi’s Department of Sociology and Social Work says the fact that these cases are reaching the courts in a fiercely protective society means that the vice is rampant, and that there could actually be a silent crisis gnawing on families at the community level.

KILL THE NEWBORN

In Bukusuland, for instance, villagers seldom file papers at the courts. Instead, they kill the newborn and then excommunicate the father and mother.

One man who was interviewed for the TV report last week said that the death of the infant is usually attributed to malaria, but “there are various way” of making the ritual killing.

We could not get conclusive data on the extent of incest in the country, but figures from the Nairobi Women’s Hospital show that its gender violence recovery centre has been attending to more cases of sexual abuse against minors than adults since 2012.

The incest connection to these figures is based on the fact that most sexual violence against children is perpetrated by those close to them, who often turn out to be close family members who reason that girls, for instance, are too young to get pregnant, and therefore could be used for sexual gratification without visible repercussions.

SELDOMLY REPORTED

A children’s rehabilitation centre in Naivasha called Safe House reports that it receives at least four new cases of sexual abuse of minors every month, and that at least one of these is usually blamed on a close family member, usually the father.

But Anne Mativo, Safe House’s general manager, says mothers seldom want the cases reported to the authorities for fear that that would bring shame and ridicule to both the father and his daughter. These children, therefore, are counselled, treated and released back to their tormentors.

“(The mothers) feel it is their duty to keep the family together,” says Ms Mativo. “They say they don’t want to bear the shame that they were not women enough for their husbands, who then turned their attention to their daughters.”

Incest, however, is not always a victim-villain affair as there is consensual incest, which occurs between siblings and other close relatives. Still, many do not understand why anyone would seek sexual gratification from, say, his or her child.

Behavioural scientists say the reasons may be as petty as revenge on the mothers of the child victims, and as serious as mental health challenges.

Dr Lukoye Atwoli, a psychiatrist and Dean of Moi University’s School of Medicine, says that, in a social environment “that frowns upon such relationships”, most of those who engage in them “either have a personality problem or some other psychological issue”.

And, like Dr Ouko and Ms Mativo, Dr Atwoli says reported cases of incest are few and far between, yet the vice is quite prevalent and what finds its way to the judicial system is “only the tip of the iceberg”.

PUBLIC DISPLAY OF AFFECTION

Dr Ouko, on the other hand, sees the “counter-socialisation of consequential deviance” in this behaviour, where incest might result from “social rejection and discrimination directed at a man who has failed to secure heterosexual relationships”.

“When he fails to get a lover by the acceptable norms, a man might turn to relatives because they are always available and accessible,” reasons Dr Ouko.

Regardless of the reasons, however, lawyer Donald Rabala says incest is a criminal offence, and that, if found guilty, “one is liable to imprisonment for a term of not less than 10 years”.

The maximum sentence is life imprisonment if a minor is involved — regardless of whether the minor consented to the act or not — as most courts consider this a form of sexual abuse against the child. The law also criminalises incestuous relationships between siblings, whether adoptive or associated through blood.

While Rabala acknowledges the challenges of prosecuting consensual incest cases, he says that both parties could still be prosecuted, irrespective of whether either of them has made a complaint.

Tremendous effort goes into keeping consensual incest clandestine, but the parties could be charged based on such evidence as physical manifestations of the illegal sexual activity between them, including public display of affection.

The condemnation that incest receives from society, however, is indirectly proportional to the attention it has received from behavioural scientists. For a long time, studies on human sexuality have revolved around general sexual orientation and preference.

However, in recent years scholars have been concerned with sexual aberrations such as paedophilia, and from the 1970s sexual abuse studies started channelling some attention to incest. Even then, the studies were limited to victimisation mainly of children and adolescents, giving very little attention to consensual incest.

One of those rare studies is one that was conducted in 1984 by an anthropology professor, Seymour Parker, from the University of Utah, and his wife Hilda, who was an associate professor in social work at the same institution.

INITIAL BONDING

The Parkers reported that fathers who took an active role in holding, feeding and diapering their daughters in their first three years of life were less likely to abuse the girls sexually later. Thirty of the 54 abusive fathers interviewed in the study had no contact with their daughters in the girls’ first three years.

This initial bonding during childhood might explain why Dr Ouko finds an easy link between broken family structures and incest as, he says, Kenya ranks “embarrassingly” high in familial violence, and that the factors surrounding this grinding catalogue of broken families include revenge for the degenerative marital conflict.

He points out that a man’s advances on his daughter could be classified as “reactive incest”, where the father turns on the child as a form of protest for “conjugal malnutrition” by the wife.

His assertion finds easy co-relation in some of the cases that have been litigated in Kenyan courts.

For instance, PMM, the man handed a life in the cooler by a Nyeri court for molesting his daughter, had separated from his wife many years earlier, leaving him with four daughters and a son to look after.

In all cases, however, threats and other forms of manipulation are used to ensure the continuity of the abuse, and boys are equally abused, but more under-reported.

PROTECTING FAMILY

But, why does society hold such a vehement prohibition of incest? It is all about protecting the nuclear family against the negative biological results of incest, says Dr Ouko.

“Sexual indulgence with those within one’s kinship borders is perceived of as mutative risk in case the bloodline carries genetically recessive or medically polluted genes,” he explains, adding that the damage of these relationships — whether consensual or not — cannot be over-emphasised.

Also, people involved in these kinds of relationships, Dr Lukoye says, will not be able to have normal relationships, and will have difficulties adjusting to social demands.

Dr Ouko says that recent research has shown that incest might also be prompted by excessive restrictive parenting, where children are never allowed the freedom to relate with others and develop social interactions.

This, he suggests, might explain why children born to priests are more likely to be incestuous than other children.

His statements find favour in the book, Taking Sibling Incest Seriously, by anthropology professor Michael O’Brien, who argues that families in which incest occurs are normally secretive, with rigid physical and social boundaries isolating them.

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The eugenicists' argument: Incest is not a Third World problem, and has been the subject of numerous debates, literary works and research initiatives since time immemorial.

Writer Kathryn Harrison discussed it in a sensational memoir called The Kiss, in which she gave the gory details of a sexual relationship she had with her father in 1997.

Then there was opera singer and actor McKenzie Philips’ book, High on Arrival, detailing her intimacy with her father.

Movies such as the Game of Thrones do not portray consensual incest in sympathy or outrage; it is … sensational... perhaps liberating. In the much more relaxed modern society, certain scholars have termed the criminalisation of incest as eugenicist.

One of the reasons fronted for forbidding incest is that certain genes should not be carried on to the next generation, a plausible explanation that supporters of consensual incest have rubbished because, they argue, sickle cell patients are allowed to reproduce and perpetuate the defective gene.

The biological arguments: There are biological roots to the universal disgust surrounding incest.

“Highly” inbred societies face diminished reproductive success and a host of diseases passed to the next generation.

Other sociological reasons why incest is looked down upon is that close family members tend to share living space, which affords opportunities for fraternisation, and that if we loosen the taboo, it would lead to a breakdown in the family.

That thing about family: No matter how hard we searched, we could not find a case of anyone who knew of a society that did not frown on sex between siblings. Some psychologists drew blanks, while one anthropologist told us she would “get back to us”.

But, almost universally, sexual relations between parent and child or between sister and brother are forbidden. In Bali the punishment is death. Meanwhile, cousins are a grey area depending on the society.

The general rule is that the closer genetically two people are, the greater the societal aversion to their sexual relation.

But kings do it! Kings seemed to be above laws that governed mere mortals. The running joke is that most royal families suffer from inbreeding due to the unique pressures of keeping the bloodline “pure”.

It comes with the territory when you claim to be descended from gods. A lot of 20th century European royalty were related by blood to Empress Victoria, which led her to pass anaemia to several royal households across the continent.

Ptolemaic Kings who ruled Egypt at about the time of Christ’s birth were exclusively incestuous. Queen Cleopatra’s parents, for example, were siblings and she herself married her brother.

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THE WHY'S AND THE WHEREFORES

There is, surprisingly, a sea of literature about incest which answers questions like why anyone would participate in it, what effects it has on the people involved, and how anyone could remedy the negative consequences that come with such a relationship.

There are two contrasting socio-demographic profiles of families affected by incest: they may be visibly dysfunctional, with a history of substance abuse and, therefore, scoring low on the economic scale; or they could be “superficially perfect” with financial stability, very traditional where the man is the head of the house and the wife is subordinate.

It is the latter kind of family that has the most severe effects because they look so normal to the public. In fact, should an outsider discover the incest, the seemingly perfect family will deny it with great vehemence to protect their honor and reputation.

Children in the superficial family are left to their own devices, to look after themselves, and therefore to be vulnerable to abuse within and outside the family. The effort by the parents to look perfect leaves the children emotionally impoverished because of growing in an emotionally barren family climate.

The result is that the father turns to the daughter, obviously as easy target, for intimacy and sexual satisfaction, while the mother turns to her children for help in running the family.

The children lack social skills to cope with the challenges that might come with developing relationships outside the family, such as rejection, confrontation and disagreements.

Therefore, they just turn on themselves, and sometimes when discovered, parents rubbish it with “kids will be kids”, social scientist Prof Vernon Wiehe records in the journal, Sibling Incest.

Adults who suffered incest in their childhood usually develop serious personality disorders involving narcissistic, avoidant, dependent and borderline personalities.

Normally, children trapped in these unions respond by denial and dissociation — terms in psychology that mean one separating one’s normal thought process from consciousness so that one minimises and suppresses the memories of unpleasant occurrences such as abuse and shame.

Seeing that this can only be negative, is there a way out? In a safe and controlled way, psychologist Dr Christine Courtois recommends healing the incest wound, where the victim, through therapy, is assisted to recall the abuse and the feelings he or she originally attached to it.

The victim should experience rage, not in a vacuum, but as a response to the injustice committed against him or her. He or she is then made to understand that, while he or she may not erase the unfortunate event from his or her history, it is normal to grieve so as to let go of the trauma and the distorted perceptions about him- or herself that were once necessary for his or her survival.