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This article originally appeared on VICE Alps

I met Tom* through his psychotherapist, who is a friend of mine, but he didn’t want to meet me personally. He was worried I would judge or insult him. That’s how others have reacted when he’s told them about himself. He does want to speak about his life though – he says he wants to get the truth off his chest. So we arrange a Skype interview. He turns up in dark sunglasses and a hat to protect his identity. He promises he’ll tell me everything, as long as I don’t reveal his personal details. If I did, I would be putting his freedom at stake.

Tom’s profile picture shows him and his girlfriend, Lena. She hugs him from behind, lovingly kissing him on the neck. He is smiling, twining his fingers in her long, brown hair. Strictly speaking, nothing is wrong with this photo. It shows two people who love each other – a relationship based on mutual attraction.

But Lena is Tom’s sister and for most people this changes everything; the photograph actually becomes criminal evidence. “I’m scared of people finding me disgusting,” says Tom. He looks away from me and claws at his fingers. He’s been in a committed relationship with his sister for twenty years. “There’s nothing that I haven’t heard before. People have called me a desecrator, sister-fucker or simply retarded. And all that’s come out of the mouths of people who were at one time my friends. Even if society won’t recognise us, we exist and there are more of us than you think.”

Rotraut Perner is a psychotherapist who has worked, among other things, on various incest cases since 1975. “In most cases, my patients were very shy towards strangers,” he says. “They clearly exhibited social anxiety and tended to stay at home. This of course was often linked to their back story: most of them weren’t allowed to meet up with other people as children because their parents were either very jealous or very stern – limiting their children’s movements.”

Tom and Lena grew up in a small Austrian village. They lived in a huge, white fairytale house that came with a dog on the front lawn. Their mother was a housewife and their father a civil servant. The kids were well-behaved, went to school and did their best not to attract negative attention. In their family there were no quarrels, while smiles were obligatory. Otherwise what would the neighbours think? At some point Tom realised that he wasn’t perfect. Lena too. “I started getting real feelings for her when we both entered puberty,” said Tom. “She was blossoming. Sometimes I would watch her getting dressed in her room and always felt ashamed of myself afterwards.”

Relationships between siblings are defined by envy, rivalry and admiration. All those feelings are linked to certain fantasies. Whether or not you make those fantasies a reality, depends on how good you are at evaluating reality in the first place. People in incestuous relationships sometimes lack that skill.

Tom reassured himself that curiosity about the female body is normal. He wasn’t attracted to his sister but to women in general. But his feelings kept growing stronger. Meanwhile, at 17, Lena got her first real boyfriend. “That was hell for me”, Tom confesses. “I hated each one of her boyfriends’ guts. Lena used to cry because I wouldn’t get on with them. Today, I know that it was pure jealousy.”

After a three-year relationship, Lena’s boyfriend cheated on her. In the middle of the night she stumbled into Tom’s bedroom. He was already asleep and was woken by her sobbing. To console her, he fetched some wine from the cellar. After the first glass, came the second and then the third in quick succession. Intoxicated in the moment, Lena cuddled up to his shoulder.

In Rotraut Perner’s view, this is not abnormal per se. “From my professional experience, it’s not true that people don’t find their siblings attractive,” the psychotherapist says. “Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. More importantly, relationships between siblings are defined by envy, rivalry and admiration, along with the need to cuddle or have secrets from the rest of the world. All those things are linked to certain fantasies – some of them induced by pop culture and the media, others by their upbringing and family situation. Whether or not you make those fantasies a reality, depends on how good you are at evaluating that reality. People in incestuous relationships often lack that skill.”

In the case of Tom and Lena, their fantasy soon came to life: “I can still remember it like it happened yesterday,” says Tom. “She looked up at me and asked why other men can’t be more like me.” That’s when it happened; Tom felt sure that he and Lena were not just siblings. But before he could make a move, Lena leaned in and kissed him. Tom pushed his sister away. “What the hell are we doing?” he screamed. Lena started to cry.

The following days were torture for Tom. Of course they could have just blamed it on the alcohol but was it really a one-off? His thoughts just wouldn’t leave him alone. He begun to remember specific situations: “It became clear to me that Lena and I were always flirting. I always used to take it as a joke but it couldn’t have been. All these strange situations suddenly became crystal clear.”

He now knows that he used to watch Lena getting dressed because he was keen on her. He wasn’t just aroused because she’s a woman, but also because he had feelings for her. Lena and Tom have since spoken about the incident a lot. Lena’s told Tom that she would leave her door open on purpose so that he could observe her. She was trying to seduce him – yet, that only became clear to her after their kiss. “I was relieved to find out she felt the same about me,” said Tom. “We could be happy together. But of course that was a kind of utopia. In reality, our love was a curse – it still is.”

It was then I realised that we’re criminals.

Incest is a criminal offence and it, generally, means intercourse between close relatives. In Austria – where Tom and I are from – incest between parents and children can be punished with a prison sentence of up to a year, and incest between siblings up to six months (Austrian criminal code, Paragraph 211). In the UK, incest is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

When Tom slept with Lena for the first time, it wasn’t just an act of love but also a criminal offence. “It was then I realised we’re criminals. But Paragraph 211 punishes consenting adults for entering relationships with other adults. We’re not forcing each other into anything.”

For Tom, this paragraph is a huge, black cloud hovering above him. He can’t understand why he should be sent to prison. “Since when is disgust a reason to imprison others? Nobody would make someone serve time for having sex with a cake, just because someone else found it disgusting.”

Of course, there’s also the biological dimension of incest laws. For Professor Franco Laccone, a doctor from the Institute of Medical Genetics at the Medical School of Vienna, this concerns inbreeding more than incest. “From a biological standpoint, there’s no other danger in incestuous relationships, besides the increased probability for genetic disorders,” he says.

“Relatives share a common gene pool that becomes more and more similar the closer the blood relationship is,” Dr. Laccone explains. “Of course, everybody carries what we call ‘silent mutations’, which are completely harmless. The problems start only when you carry the same mutations, in the exact same genes. The risk for this increases significantly between relatives. If the parents are first degree cousins, the probability for recessive genetic defects increases to 6 percent, while healthy non-related parents have a risk of only 3 percent for handing down such defects.”

For mothers, getting pregnant from incestuous intercourse is approximately as dangerous as getting pregnant as someone with trisomy, Dr. Laccone explains.

For years, Tom has been preoccupied with the legal status of incest. When Patrick Stübing issued a constitutional appeal against incest laws in Germany in 2008, Tom rejoiced. He really believed that the law could be repealed. But the appeal was rejected. The German Federal Constitutional Court gave the following reasons to justify why the incest laws should not be changed:

• Public health reasons (namely, the safeguarding of a diverse gene pool).
• In addition to its historic importance, this law protects supposed vulnerable parties against trauma that could arise even from consensual sexual acts.
• The avoidance of sending out the “wrong message” to the public through decriminalisation.

For Tom the third reason is based on arbitrary societal norms. Today there’s another piece of writing he regards as vital. Hans Jörg Albrecht, Director of the Max-Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law, has rigorously tried to disprove the most common rumours surrounding incest in an empirical comparative legal analysis report. Albrect’s writings are Tom’s Bible. “The majority of people think that Paragraph 211 for the Prevention of Incest serves children who are yet to be born, says Tom. “They are just so wrong. They assume that 100 percent of children who arise from incestuous relationships are handicapped.”

What kind of person is in love with his sister? It’s unbelievable what a taboo can do to your feelings of self-worth.

But there is in fact an increased risk: Children of related parents can suffer from autosomal recessive genetic defects. It is unknown, however, how high the risk is with parents who are related compared to those who aren’t.

“I would understand it if you told me: you are going to prison because you are endangering your child,” Tom goes on. “But my child is healthy and my wife and I love each other voluntarily. Therefore all good reasons for punishment do not apply.”

Tom and Lena kept their relationship a secret for several years. “For a long time, we thought that we were sick. What kind of person is in love with his sister? It’s unbelievable what a taboo can do to your feelings of self-worth.” Tom became depressed.

He briefly separated from Lena and a little later he tried to kill himself. Lena found him unconscious in the bath with sleeping tablets beside him. He was saved but that was a moment of self-realisation for him: “Something had to change. I felt like I lived in a bubble.”

So, Lena and Tom decided to move out of their parents’ home and far away from anyone that knew them. Today they share an apartment in Germany. Their new friends think they’re married. Recently, they gave birth to a little girl. “Lena had to declare the baby’s father as unknown. We didn’t want to risk anything. There’s no way I’ll let them put me in prison and take me away from my family.”

*All names have been changed by the editors.