Crisis Intervention With Child Survivors of Maternal Incest

Crisis Intervention With Child Survivors of Maternal Incest

Abstract

Many individuals widely recognize incest in society; however, not all forms of incest are common. For instance, maternal incest is one of the rarest incest and is not frequently reported. Maternal incest is a traumatic activity that might result in significant and lasting mental consequences for the child survivors. This paper explores the crisis intervention with child survivors of maternal incest. Child survivors are forced to be quiet and not speak out about the abuses they encounter because of the fear of being the reason for destroying their families. Proper crisis intervention techniques will be essential to enable the child victims to navigate the incest event and live better lives. Using social and community health workers, an intervention with full confidentiality can be implemented to help the victims.

Introduction

Parenting is one of the critical aspects of a child’s life because it enables them to live a good life and develop. Nevertheless, sometimes parents fail and involve children in several cases of abuse, such as sexual abuse. Child sexual abuse comprises a variety of sexual behaviors to the child. It can be started by an outsider or a person with close contact with the child, including the family member. Intrafamilial sexual abuse is what is referred to as incest. Sancak et al. (2021) defined incest as any abusive or manipulative sexual activity among family members or even relatives. Therefore, incestuous actions will comprise all unacceptable sexual behavior, ranging from touching to intercourse.

Incest has a long history because it is dated back to the beginning of human civilization. For example, in the bible, it is stated that Cain, the son of Adam and Eve, married his sister Awan. Also, the Lots daughters sleep with their father. Several other occasions of incest were practiced, especially in royal families (Haliburn, 2019). For example, during the ancient Egyptian dynasties, the royal families utilized incest to maintain their descendants from the same royal lineage. Nevertheless, the problem of rape was explained around one thousand BC in the bible concerning the story of Amnon, son of King David (Koenig, 2019). Amnon raped Tamar his sister.