Real, personal accounts of sixty Mexican women and men affected by incest and sexual violence.

In Family Secrets, Gloria González-López tells the life stories of women and men in Mexico whose lives were irrevocably changed in the wake of childhood and adolescent incest. In Mexico, a patriarchal, religious society where women are expected to make themselves sexually available to men and where same-sex experiences for both women and men bring great shame, incest is easily hidden, seldom discuessed, and rarely reported to authorities. Through a gripping, emotional narrative, González-López brings the deeply troubling, hidden, and unspoken issues of incest and sexual violence in Mexican families to light. She contends that family and cultural structures in Mexican life enable incest and the culture of silence that surrounds it. She examines the strong bonds of familial obligation between parents and children, brothers and sisters, and elders and youth that, in the case of incest, can morph into sexual obligation; the codes of honor and shame reinforced by tradition and the Church, discouraging openness about sexual violence and trauma; and the double standards of morality and stereotypes about sexuality that leave girls and women and gender nonconforming boys and men especially vulnerable to sexual abuse. A riveting account, Family Secrets turns a feminist and sociological lens on a disturbing issue that has gone unnoticed for far too long.

Gloria González-López

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