Josh Duggar comes from a large brood. He has eighteen siblings. He is the eldest of ten boys and has nine little sisters. The Duggars have admitted that Josh molested four of those sisters. In such a large family, it's easy for siblings to become close. There can't be too much personal space in a home filled with so many family members. It would be much easier for a sibling with an incest problem to commit a sex crime in a household like that. I grew up as only one of three kids (I'm the youngest, my sister eldest, and my brother is the middle child), and I admit wholeheartedly that my brother and I didn't have very strict boundaries while growing up. There were plenty of opportunities for incest.
We were socialized to be close to each other when we were young. As small children, we actually slept in what was similar to the Victorian era concept of a nursery. Does anyone remember how Wendy shared a nursery (basically a playroom/dorm) with her two little brothers in Disney's "Peter Pan?" She became upset after her father told her she had to start sleeping in her own room, because she was too old for the nursery. That's the type of place my brother and I slept in when we were young. It wasn't a baby nursery; it was for young kids of either gender. Our nursery had kid's books, a small TV set, and it was quite large for a couple of little ones. We used to build "nests" with our blankets and share the room. I don't remember the exact age at which we stopped sleeping in there, but it was well before puberty and well after it is normal for a brother and sister to share a room together. We were both in elementary school by the time we finally departed for separate bedrooms. Still, I was never sexually molested by him. Maybe he was too young? Josh Duggar was fourteen years old at the time he molested five girls. My brother was far from the teen years when we stopped sharing a room, so incest wasn't even in his vocabulary.
Throughout our entire childhoods, even into the teen years, my brother used to use me as a pillow. If we were in the backseat of the family car for a long time, he would fall asleep on my shoulder. I don't know why he thought I was a pillow or why he fell asleep so easily in the car, but I was always his designated human pillow on long drives. It got to the point that I wouldn't even notice him when he fell asleep on my shoulder. I would daydream and then suddenly notice he had passed out and turned me into a pillow. But even though he didn't mind using me as something to sleep on, he never once groped me in the backseat. Perhaps it was because we weren't alone in the car, and our father might have yelled at him if he saw him committing incest in the rear view mirror?
This one is more controversial. My brother and I went on a two week vacation with our parents. We all shared a hotel room together. My brother was thirteen and I was eleven. There were two queen sized beds, so my parents asked for an extra bed for my brother to sleep in. I went to sleep in a large, spacious, queen sized bed by myself, and my parents shared the other one. The next morning, I saw my brother was in bed with me. I sleep like the dead, so I didn't notice him get into bed the night before. He explained that he saw a giant centipede go by in the middle of the night, and he didn't want to sleep that close to the ground anymore. He slept in the big bed with me every single night of that vacation, and my parents didn't care. Neither did I, but I recognize as an adult that a teenage boy sharing a bed with his pre-teen sister would look creepy to a lot of people. Still, I was never molested, and I slept perfectly fine. So did my parents, who were incredibly unconcerned with the possibility of incest.
When my brother and I were both teenagers, it was deemed inappropriate for us to share a bedroom while visiting our grandparents. He slept in the living room, and I slept in the guest room. However, sometimes we were both in need of an afternoon nap. There was only one quiet room for him to use, and that was the guest room. So we would go to the guest room, shut the door, and sleep in its one bed together. My grandmother was visibly unnerved by this and even commented that she thought some people would think that's inappropriate. My brother didn't understand this, commenting that sleeping isn't inappropriate. Grandma wasn't weird for thinking it was inappropriate, but that doesn't change the fact that my brother and I really were just sleeping. He never molested me, and Grandma let it go. Though I imagine worries of incest lurked in dark places within her mind.
I don't know why Josh Duggar molested his sisters, or if it could have been prevented. My own brother probably had more opportunities to molest me than Josh Duggar ever had with his sisters, and yet my brother never used any of those opportunities for that reason. It would be nice to have some answers as to why some boys will commit incest with their sisters while others will not (even with incredibly loose boundaries). My brother and I were a recipe for incest, but nothing ever happened between us.