It need not even be added here that an elder brother sexually abusing his younger brother would probably not even be brought to light in the house.

Consider Pankaj’s case. Pankaj’s elder brother who is married, with children, is a well-known businessman in Ahmedabad. Pankaj was four years old when he was moved in with his elder brother from his parents’ bedroom. He shared this bedroom with his elder brother who often watched blue films featuring men and women, women and women, big men and little boys and girls. The brother masturbated while watching these movies, without exposing his organ to Pankaj. He never asked Pankaj to watch the movies, though Pankaj could clearly see the screen on the other side of his brother’s bed. He did not even touch Pankaj.

Pankaj has grown up to have nightmares involving sexual acts with naked little children. He is married and cannot have sex with his wife without watching a pornographic movie. Pankaj’s young and pretty wife is now also his brother’s mistress.

‘Brother Nature’ is so serious an issue that it almost can’t be found as a case history; that carefully does it get swept away under the family carpet; with that alacrity is the girl despatched to her ‘own home’ once she completes college; that younger brother, oh that was his initiation to life. There are also some powerful myths associated with the ‘Brother Nature’ phenomenon which are dealt with by counsellors Simon Hackett, Bobbie Print and Carol Dey who work with sexually abused young people in England.

These myths encompass views such as:

• sexual abuse rarely takes place between siblings due to the notion of the incest taboo
• sexual contact between siblings can be explained away as experimental
• sexual contact between siblings may be inappropriate, but is usually minor in nature
• young men who actively seek child-victims outside the home are more dangerous and have more problems than those who abuse siblings
• sexual abuse between siblings will go away if left alone, it should be dealt with by the family or can be managed by simply pointing out its inappropriateness
• sexual abuse between siblings is a symptom of an overly close sibling relationship
• sexual contact between siblings has an erotic content
• sexually inappropriate behaviour between siblings can happen, but is often a one-off, unplanned mistake, with no abusive intent

Generally speaking, older brothers who sexually abuse their little sisters tend to commit more acts of abuse over longer periods of time. There tends to be almost no direct disclosure in the home about this. If it comes out when the victim is still a little girl, the parents simply physically separate the two into separate sleeping enclosures for the night and treat the entire situation as either an effect of too much sex and violence on television (who shows brother-sex on television?) or go through a few pangs of guilt as a parenting default; the victim is forgotten. The older brother also tends to have other victims, inside the house if there are other younger sisters, or outside the house in the form of younger female relatives. His abuse quickly develops into hard-spectrum, that is finger or penile penetration; brothers are more likely to commit penile penetration than those who sexually abuse children outside the family. As mentioned earlier, invariably the brother tends to be the oldest of all the siblings as also ‘trusted’ by the parents, confirming the power dynamics of the abuse. David Finkelhor in his 1980 paper, ‘Sex amongst siblings: a survey of prevalence, variety and effects,’ says, ‘The younger the victims of sibling sexual abuse, the more extreme the lasting effects.’