How we’re learning the true prevalence of incest

In today’s The Big Story podcast, for years the numbers cited on how common incest was in families were simply assumptions, but the age of voluntary genealogy tracing has led to a reckoning.

Sarah Zhang is a staff writer at The Atlantic who wrote about how DNA tests are uncovering the true prevalence of incest cases. “[Incest] is certainly not common, and the rate is still low when you think about the millions of people who live in, say, the United States, but it’s probably a lot more common than a lot of us would think, or would like to think,” says Zhang.

Voluntary tests are leading some people to find out, in an awful way, that they were the children of incest. When they do, where can they go for support?