The case of alleged family incest in Mpumalanga, which has shocked South Africa, is not an isolated case, with authorities warning that incest occurs countrywide.
A Durban teenager has to live with the humiliation of his cousin walking in on him while his own father was masturbating him.
In another Durban case, a 20-year-old woman has pressed charges of indecent assault against her father. The alleged acts included oral sex and the insertion of his fingers into her vagina. The acts of incest took place from when she was six until she was 16.
"Incest is a real problem," said Childline Director Joan van Niekerk. "While there are many cases of father-and-daughter incest, we are also seeing a lot of father-and-son, and older-brother-and-younger-sister sexual interaction."
"Father-son sexual interaction happens more frequently than people would like to believe. It leaves the child with a distortion of his own identity and sexuality. They grow up thinking they are gay," she said.
According to police statistics, about 15 000 South African children under the age of 18 were raped last year. This year, Childline has already referred 600 KwaZulu-Natal children for therapy after they were sexually assaulted.
Authorities warn that 50 percent of all cases of rape and sexual assault on children under the age of 18 are committed within the immediate family.
Van Niekerk said a spate of young women coming for help after having been impregnated by their fathers or brothers was of great concern.
"At times there is a lot of pressure on the victim to retract her statement or to not disclose the offence. For example, there have been cases where a girl has fallen pregnant with her brother's child and, because the parents love both of their children, they refuse to go to court," said Van Niekerk.
When parents come across their adolescent son sexually interacting with his sister, they do not take it seriously enough and think he is just "experimenting".
Van Niekerk said most incest cases were prosecuted as rape and sexual assault, causing incest cases to be severely under-reported.
Durban regional court senior Public Prosecutor Val Melis deals mainly with sexual offences against minors.
She said there was a backlog of 400 cases and about half of these were sexual offences within the family. Many of the cases involved fathers being accused of raping their daughters. There were also many offences involving brothers and sisters.
The University of Natal's Psychology department Professor Bev Killian said social conditions played a role, with factors such as high stress levels, unemployment, alcohol and substance abuse and a lack of adequate social support structures contributing to the incidence of incest.
Head of Pathology at the Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, Professor Runjan Chetty, said that when close relatives inter-bred, they risked the concentration of "bad" genes in their offspring.
These recessive genes could cause deafness, blindness, enzyme defects and muscular and skeletal abnormalities.
If the recessive genes carried lethal aberrations, then the baby could be stillborn or die shortly after birth.
Three of the accused in the Delmas incest case were on Friday granted bail.
The family's father, Robert Fedder, 65, was released on his own cognisance, while his 60-year-old wife, Elsina, was released on R500 bail.
One of the bail conditions was that they must stay with one of the couple's 10 children in Witbank and will only be allowed into the Delmas district for the next court appearance on September 22.
They must also report to the Witbank police on Mondays and Fridays. They were banned from the Delmas district as police fear they might interfere with state witnesses or tamper with evidence.
The Fedder's son, 40-year-old Jan, appeared in court on Friday morning. His case was postponed until August 29.
He and Heibrecht are accused of incest for the past 16 years.