Incest was & still a very controversial issue, people tend to have strong opinion about it. They associate incest with child molestation, but there is another side of incest that most people tend to ignor, that is consensual incest.
Here two articles that deal with this topic, the first one from the British newspaper The Guardian, it is a very long article, I'll post some of it & the rest you can read from The Guardian. The second article from Wikipedi & it address the issue from legal point.
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Forbidden love: Can sex between close relatives ever be acceptable?
Johann Hari on the queasy issue of 'consensual' incest
Johann Hari
Guardian
Wednesday January 9, 2002
It was a Friday night a few months ago. Rob was standing on my doorstep, ashen and trembling. He still couldn't speak even as he sipped at a mug of tea after my flatmate and I had ushered him into our front room.
We could not guess what had happened, but a feeling of dread was fast forming in our minds; we could only assume that something terrible must have happened to Rob's fiancee, Karen. Gradually, his powers of speech
returned and the story emerged. Something had happened, but that something was terrible to Rob himself, not Karen.
Now, you have to understand that Rob and Karen were the most balanced, wholesome couple I knew. They had recently moved out of their flat while it was being redecorated, each returning to their respective family homes for a couple of weeks. That Friday, she had left her keys at his place by accident. He was passing by her parents' place later that night, so he stopped off and rang the doorbell.
No answer. So he let himself in to leave the keys, with a note, on the kitchen table for her mum and dad to return to her. Only, the house wasn't empty - he heard some movement in the front room. In an instant,
he blundered in on Karen - the woman he was due to marry - having sex. With her dad.
Not her stepfather. Not her adopted father. Her actual, biological dad. She was 22 years old. There was clearly no coercion taking place.
Three weeks passed. Rob had called off the wedding - obviously - and was trying to put his life back together. One morning, he got a call from Karen, asking if they could meet up to divide their mutual belongings, the accumulation of over three years'cohabitation. He agreed.
Predictably, when they met, an argument began. "I don't know why you think it's so odd!" she screamed. "I know lots of people who do this." That stopped Rob in his tracks. "Who?"
And it began to spill out: that she had made contact with lots of people over the internet (and consequently in person): boys, girls, fathers,
mothers, who are sleeping with their kin. The internet is value-free: it doesn't care or know whether you are selling a secondhand car or buying arms. If you want to get in touch with someone, it makes no moral
distinction between anti-globalisation protesters and convicted paedophiles. So now there are chatrooms and websites that are de facto support groups for people engaged in incest. And what they want is to normalise what we have long considered to be profoundly
abnormal.
It was on this basis that Karen said Rob was "overreacting" - she had insinuated herself into an online "community" of people who reassured themselves that they were not freaks. Rob and I spent a few nights gawping at the disguised but fairly developed pro-incest (or, to be more accurate, pro-tolerating incest) areas of the net in an attempt to understand Karen. The exponents of incest that we talked to in cyberspace were very keen to draw a distinction between "consensual incest" on the one hand and abuse, rape and paedophilia on the other. Consensual incest, we were told by "JimJim2" from Ontario, is "when two
adults who just happen to be related get it on.
You can't help who you fall in love with, it just happens. I fell in love with my sister and I'm not ashamed ...
I only feel sorry for my mom and dad, I wish they could be happy for us. We love each other. It's nothing like some old man who tries to **** his
three-year-old, that's evil and disgusting ... Of course we're consenting, that's the most important thing. We're not ****ing perverts. What we have is the most beautiful thing in the world."
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Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adult incest
Incestuous relations between adults, such as between an adult brother and sister, are illegal in most parts of the industrialized world. These laws are sometimes questioned on the grounds that such relations do not
harm other people (provided the couple have no children) and so should not be criminalized. Proposals have been made from time to time to repeal these laws — for example, the proposal by the Australian Model
Criminal Code Officer's Committee discussion paper "Sexual Offenses against the Person" released in November 1996. (This particular proposal was later withdrawn by the committee due to a large public outcry. Defenders of the proposal argue that the outcry was mostly based on the mistaken belief that the committee was intending to legalize sexual
relations between parents and their minor children.)
In the wake of the Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558 2003) decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, striking down laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy as unconstitutional, some have argued that by the same logic laws against consensual adult incest should be unconstitutional. Some civil libertarians argue that all private sexual activity between consenting adults should be legal, and its criminalization is a violation of human rights — thus, they argue that the criminalization of consensual adult incest is a
violation of human rights. In Muth v. Frank (412 F.3d 808), the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted the case applying to homosexual activity, and refused to draw this conclusion from Lawrence, however — a decision that attracted mixed opinions.
In France, incest isn't a crime in itself. Incestuous relations between an adult and a minor are prohibited and punished by law, but not between two minors or two adults.