Abstract

Recent years have seen growing interest in the moral and constitutional status of laws prohibiting incest. Inspired by new recognition of the right to engage in private, consensual, adult homosexual conduct, commentators and litigants have argued that there should be an analogous right to engage in private, consensual, adult incestuous conduct. Section “Incest as Taboo, Incest as Aversion” looks at incest as a complex cultural taboo, attracting the attention of a wide range of social scientists. Section “How Incest Is Treated in Criminal Law” considers the multiplicity of ways in which incest is dealt with across systems of criminal law. Section “A Rationale for the Law of Juvenile Incest” considers instances in which adults have sex with closely related juveniles, arguing that such cases should be treated as an aggravated form of statutory rape, rather than a free-standing offense of “juvenile incest.” Section “A Rationale for the Law of Putatively Consensual Adult Incest” considers incestuous relationships between adults, arguing that criminal sanctions are normally unjustifiable unless lack of consent can be proved. Two possible exceptions exist, however, where the incest began when one of the parties was a minor or where the parties are in a hierarchical relationship, such as between parent and child.