An Oklahoma woman and her biological adult daughter have both been arrested after local officials discovered the pair had married each other earlier this year, according toABC 7 News.
The woman, Patricia Spann, reportedly lost custody of daughter Misty (as well as two other children) when they were young and did not return into contact with them until two years ago. Spann also married one of her sons in 2008 and annulled the marriage two years later.
Now, both Spann and 25-year-old daughter Misty have been arrested on charges of incest, which is a felony that carries a potential sentence of 10 years in prison. The Associated Pressreported that the woman believed the marriage was acceptable because her name wasn't on her daughter's birth certificate.
Genetic Sexual Attraction is the term used to describe these encounters—feelings of intense sexual and emotional desire—after biological parents are reunited with their children after an extended absence in the other's life. In one study published by the Guardian, experts reported that these feelings can occur in over half of cases where parents are reunited with their children later in life.
Stories from those who have entered into (self-described) consensual relationships with their parents have emerged on Jezebel and New York Magazine in recent years.
One of these women, Natasha Rose Chenier, wrote a moving essay for Jezebel about the beginning of her sexual relationship with her father. She began:
My father and I often talked on the phone between visits. We had so much in common; we connected immediately. It seemed that everything he loved, I loved, and vice versa. When I first met him in person I noticed that we even had the same posture, the same way of carrying ourselves in the world. I was intoxicated by our likeness, which I never shared with my mother, or with any siblings (I am an only child). All of a sudden I had company. It was that simple. I had a dream parent, and I was over the moon.
She later wrote that it felt like "a dark spell that had been cast over" her.
