Incest Is Not Cute. It’s Abuse. Why Kenya’s Festive Season is Exposing a Dangerous Normalization

Your timeline fills with jokes about sleeping with cousins, aunties, and uncles. The comments are flooded with laughing emojis and “awwww” from people you know. It feels harmless, like banter, like the kind of edgy humor that passes for wit on social media. But scroll past the jokes and look at what’s actually happening in Kenyan homes right now, in December 2025, and you see something far darker: a nation normalizing incest just as cases spike, just as children are being abused in the name of “family,” and just as influencers with proven incest histories continue to build empires while preaching morality. The festive season that was supposed to bring families together is instead exposing how broken we’ve become.

The Real Numbers: Vihiga’s Warning That Nobody Listened To

In early December, Michael Nanjira, the Children Welfare Officer for Vihiga Sub-county, sounded an alarm so clear it should have stopped the entire country. More than ten cases of incest had been recorded in his county in just a few months. Ten. In one sub-county. He didn’t mince words about what was driving it: outdated cultural practices, dysfunctional family structures, drug abuse among parents, and poverty. But the bigger problem he identified was something simpler and more terrifying: inadequate parental guidance leaves children unable to fully understand family boundaries.

What Nanjira was really saying is this: your kids don’t know the difference between a hug and sexual assault because nobody taught them. They’re sleeping in the same rooms as uncles, cousins, and grandfathers because there’s no space to do otherwise. And when something happens, nobody reports it because the shame attaches to the family name, not the perpetrator. The child learns that her pain is less important than the family reputation.

By November, warnings had already come from other counties. Malindi in Kilifi reported rising incest cases, with officers noting that many involved school-going children. When children are still in school and already being sexually abused by relatives, you’re not dealing with consensual anything. You’re dealing with a systematic failure to protect the young.

The Social Media Trend That Makes It Seem Normal

Scroll through Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter during the festive season, and you’ll see it: posts from people openly joking about wanting to sleep with their cousins. Half-joking, full-joking, doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. Every post normalizes the idea. Every laugh in the comments reinforces that this is acceptable humor, not predatory talk. Young people see these posts, see blue-ticked accounts posting them, see thousands of likes, and their brains register: this is normal banter.

What these posts actually do is groom. They soften resistance to the idea of family members as sexual objects. They make isolation of a potential victim easier because if everyone’s laughing about “sexy cousins,” then what’s wrong with acting on it? The posts create permission structures in people’s heads, especially young people whose sense of boundaries is still forming.

The sickest part is the plausible deniability. Post a suggestive photo with your cousin and get called out? “It’s just a joke, lighten up.” Get explicit and blame the algorithm. The normalization happens in that space between joke and reality, where consequences seem to disappear.

Kabi wa Jesus: The Influencer Hypocrisy That Corrupts Everything

Then there’s Kabi wa Jesus, the content creator built his brand on Christian family values, purity culture, and moral authority. Kabi and Milly wa Jesus became household names preaching marriage sanctity, godly living, and wholesome family content to millions of Kenyan followers.

In 2013, before his “born again” era, Kabi fathered a child with his cousin. Not a one-time mistake he learned from in private. According to him, he slept with “several” cousins. The child, Abby, was born from one of these encounters. For years, he denied it. He went on video calling the child his niece. He posted scripture quotes about integrity while denying his own daughter’s existence.

Only when DNA results were forced into the light did Kabi finally admit in November 2025 that yes, he’s Abby’s biological father, and yes, this all happened in 2013 with his cousin, and yes, he regrets the “false impression” his denials gave. His apology was polished, peppered with “Praise Jesus” and requests for forgiveness, but let’s be clear what the timeline actually shows: a man who committed incest, denied his child existed, built a multi-million-shilling empire preaching moral authority, and only confessed when scientific evidence made lying impossible.

And here’s the poison: young Kenyans watched this unfold. Some saw a man who got away with it. Others saw that even with proof, the consequences were just an apology video and a return to content creation. The message that landed was: incest might be wrong, but it’s manageable if you’re famous enough and well-spoken enough to apologize your way out of it.

Why It Matters: The Health Catastrophe Nobody’s Talking About

If the moral argument against incest doesn’t land, then understand the genetic one. When first-degree relatives have a child together, the risk of serious congenital disorders multiplies catastrophically. Children born from incest face:

• Increased risk of intellectual disabilities and developmental disorders, studies showing lower IQ scores across populations where incest is practiced.
• Cystic fibrosis, cleft palate, heart conditions, and premature birth.
• Stillbirth and neonatal mortality rates of twenty to thirty-six percent higher than the general population.
• Long-term health problems including blindness, hearing loss, diabetes, and schizophrenia.

This isn’t theoretical. This is documented, peer-reviewed science. When you post a sexy photo with your cousin online, you’re not just normalizing abuse, you’re creating the conditions for children to be born with preventable genetic diseases. That’s not family drama, that’s a public health crisis.

The Layers of Abuse Behind the Jokes

What social media jokes hide is the reality of incest in actual Kenyan homes. It’s not two attractive cousins flirting. It’s a seven-year-old girl being abused by her father and grandfather simultaneously until she runs to a pastor for help. It’s a mother telling her daughter that she should marry her rapist cousin because “what happens in the family stays in the family.” It’s children threatened into silence because the perpetrator is also their provider: shelter, food, school fees, basic survival.

According to Kenya’s National GBV hotline data, between 2018 and 2021, a hundred and six girls were sexually molested at home, with fifty-nine of those cases attributed to fathers. But officers admit these numbers represent a tiny fraction of actual cases. Most go unreported because the perpetrator is trusted family.

When a child can’t report abuse without losing housing and survival, that’s not a gray area. That’s systemic entrapment dressed up as family values.

The Festive Season as a Predator’s Advantage

Schools shut down. Kids stay home longer. Supervision drops. Crowded houses mean shared rooms with uncles, cousins, grandfathers. The festive season, marketed as family bonding, is when incest cases spike hardest. By December, police were already warning about surges in defilement and sexual abuse during the long holiday break.

Public Health Principal Secretary Mary Muthoni noted that alcohol abuse spikes during festive season, and alcohol is a proven trigger for domestic violence and sexual abuse. So you have decreased supervision, increased substance abuse, children with nowhere to escape, and a social media ecosystem that’s joked away the taboo around family sex. It’s a perfect storm for predation.

What Needs to Happen

First: stop posting “sexy cousin” content as if it’s funny. Understand that every like normalizes an idea that destroys real children’s lives. Influencers with incest histories need to face actual accountability, not redemption arcs through apology videos.

Second: strengthen reporting mechanisms. Kids need safe ways to report abuse without losing shelter. Schools need training to spot signs. Teachers need protection when they report.

Third: fix the cultural narrative that prioritizes family reputation over child safety. When a girl comes forward about abuse by a relative, the response shouldn’t be family meetings that blame her. It should be immediate protection and prosecution.

Fourth: educate children on boundaries. Not every touch is love. Not every family member deserves blind trust. These conversations need to start young and stay consistent.

The Line That Shouldn’t Be Crossed

Religion or no religion, god or no god, evolution or creationism, incest is still ungodly. It is abuse. It carries genetic risk. It destroys families from the inside out. It’s not funny, it’s not edgy, and it’s not a personality trait.

When you post that joke about your cousin, you’re not being funny. You’re participating in a culture that makes it easier for predators to operate, easier for victims to stay silent, and easier for people like Kabi wa Jesus to build empires on hypocrisy while children bleed quietly.

The festive season revealed who Kenyans are becoming. It’s not a pretty picture. But it’s not too late to change it.