Living comfortably with our human reality – we are animals
Putting responsibility where it is due – on the original decision-maker.

A recent incest case in Auckland District Caught brings home how some of our legislation is quite out of touch with our human reality.

When children are separated from siblings or a parent at an early age and they meet as adults, they are at very high risk of developing a sexual attachment. (For this reason, organisations who assist adoptees remaking contact with family, usually supervise first introductions, to protect them from overreacting to the intense emotions that may occur from the initial introduction.)

The separation might be the result of wartime, or adoption.

If the cause of the separation was illegal abrogation of child and parental rights to a regular relationship, or the father hightailing out of the situation to evade parental responsibility – then someone could be held accountable.

Maybe someone SHOULD be held accountable?

Wikipedia gives a dispassionate overview of this delicate topic:

Incest_taboo
Westermarck_effect

An article giving the emotional intensity of these relationships:
A Family Affair: the last taboo

Barbara Gonyo first described Genetic Sexual Attraction and distinguished it from incest. Her website relates her own intense intimate experiences on meeting her son many years after giving him up for adoption:
Barbara Gonyo

The Kiss, by Kathryn Harrison, described her father’s seduction of the author when she was twenty and their incestuous involvement, which persisted for four years and is reflected in the plots and themes of her first three novels, published before The Kiss.

WARNING: If you are “brave” enough to ask a NZ librarian if they hold a copy, make sure that you have your mother nearby to rescue you!
If you suspect that even your mother couldn’t save you from an enraged offended NZ librarian, then just read an extract:
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison extract only

I hope that two conclusions are clear:
1. When people meddle and interfere in other people’s relationships, at best they are manipulators, at worst – just relationship vandals.

2. Denying access between children and their parents is a crime, due to the consequences that result.

It is safer to discuss The Kiss, than the case recently prosecuted in Auckland, as the details are publicly accessable.

Who was it that forced the separation between Kathryn and her father?
Who aquiesced, to make the separation possible?

Under NZ law, Kathryn and her father would have both been prosecuted for outcomes resulting from her grandmother’s obsession with driving away the man…. She probably was unaware of the likely outcome.
Under negligence law, you are responsible for what you should have known was a likely outcome.
Lets prosecute each of these relationship vandals.
(I acknowledge that deterring production of children by very close relatives is wise, in times generous population. Evolutionary instincts are more focussed on ensuring species survival through times of population decline close to extinction.)

Considering the recent Auckland case, it seems that the man possibly lied under pressure from the police, equally possibly he was telling the truth. Either way, even though the woman had known about the existence of the relationship longer than the man – the jury had sympathy for her, but not for him.
Evidence is easily swept away by Sympathy

Please respect other people’s relationships.
Best regards, MurrayBacon the generous compulsive axe-murderer.