It is difficult to accept that incest is the banal act of a completely ordinary person; and that it constitutes a genealogical crime, a specific form of child abuse (control, trauma, etc.).
The impossibility of seeing incest as a criminal sexual practice was remarkably demonstrated in an ethnographic study carried out by Léonore Le Caisne in the provincial village where the Lydia Guardo case took place.
The villagers perceived the Guardos as completely ordinary, a family like any other, with a hard-working father who was respected and looked on kindly, even though he did not hide his paternity from the villagers, shopkeepers and institutions. For the villagers, bound together by gossip, incest was a banal matter of procreation between a man and his daughter: ‘he was making children to his daughter’. They failed to see the asymmetrical relationship of kinship and age that constitutes this paternal incest: behind the gossip, the criminal practice of incest was passed over in silence.
