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Comment by searine | Hacker News Reader

This is a tragic story, but I think the bigger issue is some places have high levels of cultural acceptance of consanguine relationships.

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Could you explain why you think that's a bigger issue than the one raised in the article:

> In the overwhelming majority of cases ... the parents are a father and a daughter or an older brother and a younger sister, meaning a child’s existence was likely evidence of sexual abuse.

Incestual children can lead to a pretty significant number of medical issues.

Cases like that described are very rare compared to 20-50% consanguinity in some communities. The disease burden from this is huge.

Not saying SA isn't an issue, but if the issue is incest, then cultural acceptance of it is the biggest offender.

I think incest is usually understood as immediate direct family relations and means SA or something close.

What your talking about with 1st cousins is called inbred. Inbred is the superset of incest. You can get that with no incest.

I guess?

Label it whatever you want. It's still consanguinity and it causes a tremendous amount of disease and the largest offender by far is cultural acceptance if it.

Consensual sex between adult brother and sister for example isn't abuse. If it results in a child it is also unacceptably likely to result in birth defects because that's 50% DNA commonality. Consensual sex between parent and (adult obviously) child is more arguable because there's a significant power imbalance which would usually not be present for siblings, but it might not be abuse.

Cousin sex is just not a big deal, and especially beyond the 1st cousins with zero removal, ie the children of your parents' blood siblings. When it comes to stuff like "She's the daughter of my great-auntie's oldest boy" it's negligible. In some societies that wouldn't be tracked, everybody is a cousin and nobody is. Americans are weird about this. Rudy Giuliani for example married his second cousin. I don't even know the names of my second cousins. If I met one in a bar I'd have no idea. But in the US somehow that counts as strange.

When cousin having kids together becomes normalized, you get a lot more defects a generation later - when kids of cousins have kids with other kids of cousins in the same family.

It is not a non issue. The communities where marrying cousins is normal do have this issue and have significantly more severe disabilities.

"Cousin" is a vague claim. A parent is 50% similarity, a simple first cousin is typically 12.5% but may be higher if they're also related on the other side (e.g. Einstein married a woman whose parents were, respectively, a sibling of one parent and a cousin of the other, that's a lot of shared DNA). But second cousins may be only 2-3%.

So there's a huge gap between "Your mum and dad both have twins, and there was a double marriage, so, she's your first cousin twice over" and "She's your great-aunt's child's youngest" and yet you might get told both people are your "cousin" for lack of convenient terminology.

I think it's implied it's a lot of first cousin stuff and if you iterate this it starts building up in goofy ways if it is kept self contained enough.

Cousin sex is what gives you the Habsburgs. It's why Jewish folk are more likely to have certain genetic disorders.

It's harmless if it's occasional, but if it's repeated over and over again problems start building up.

This is extremely common in the royal families of Europe. Many of them are the result of incest.

Not wrong. My Turkish ex's parents were first cousins. Married for 50 years and they had two kids.

No one cared. It wasn't that big deal.

It's extremely common in South Asian communities (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/10yx3va/...). The UK has a large South Asian diaspora.

Pakistan doesn't represent all of South Asia.

None of India is looking particularly good, but each state in southern India looks to have 20-25% rates of first-cousin marriages. Pretty high.

Southern India it’s even higher

The crazy thing is India has ample population to avoid this problem. It's not some isolated tribe or small island community. The reasons have to be social/political.

It’s the caste system + specific social factors.

You mean it's extremely common in Muslim countries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middl...

I love this site down voting facts if it doesn't conform to preconceived "progressive" notions.

https://wikiislam.net/wiki/Cousin_Marriage_in_Islamic_Law

Seems so. Or more to the point of how data collected in the UK might reflect this trend (from the article you link): "According to a 2005 BBC report on Pakistani marriage in the United Kingdom, 55% of British Pakistanis marry a first cousin."

There was a recent debate in the UK Parliament about whether cousin marriage should be banned. It did not succeed.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHyjdyWUOA

But there was a BBC documentary called "Should I marry my first cousin" for which the main conclusion was basically no.

AFAIK this is far more common in muslims but not in hindus, jains etc. While growing up I had heard/read that as per the Vedas you can not marry someone with whom you have a common ancestor within 7 generations. [My scientifically minded atheist parents agreed with the idea.] Of course, in practice this isn't always followed but in any arranged marriage such proscriptions would presumably be checked.

Southern India has particularly low Muslim populations - and definitely doesn’t follow that guidance.

The vedas have many sections which get widely ignored.

Edit: HN throttling is terrible. Here is a link to a couple studies [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32641190/], [https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-consanguineous...]

AP has the highest rate, around 28%

I has asked friends who would know more about South India. If you have any references about statistics and causes please share. Thanks!

I found one map that may be interest: https://araingang.medium.com/cousin-marriage-in-south-asia-f...

But note that the article is really talking about first-degree incest/pedophila/sexual abuse which is taboo in pretty much every society.

Cross-cousin and uncle-niece marriage is prevalent among Hindus in most states of South India (except Kerala). 10-25% of all marriages.

In religion, you can find your reasons for anything. e.g. In Mahabharata, Arjuna and Abhimanyu married their cousins.

I recently discovered that these relationships are legal in France. That's nuts

Same country that banned paternity tests unless authorised by a court.

Same country where a series of scandals of sexual abuse by doctors on patients under narcosis in hospitals resulted in courts deciding that sex under narcosis is not traumatic and hence not rape...

Wait what?? Is that real?

Wow… really? Eww.

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