Over a period of twenty-eight years, in Ile-de-France, a father raped his daughter and gave her six children. The inhabitants of the working-class village where the family lived and the father worked— politicians, shopkeepers and customers—“knew” about this and shared the information with one another. How can we explain why nobody put a stop to this situation? After conducting fieldwork over a one-year period in the village, the author hypothesizes that incest and violence, committed by a father on his minor and later adult daughter, can become so embedded in daily village life that they lose their criminal characterization and become an ordinary event.