This thread got me thinking. Suppose you have a mentally handicapped 25 year old who has been officially diagnosed as having the mental capacity of a 12 year old. Would/should having sex with that person constitute statutory rape, either legally or morally? And let’s push it to an extreme – say you’ve got a 25 year old with the mental capacity of a 5 year old. Is it moral/legal to have sex with them, even if they claim to be willing? On the one hand it would clearly be easy to manipulate and exploit a person in this situation. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem quite fair to deny these people any and all sexual experience for their entire lives. What do you think??
This is more of a factual question than a great debate probably. Yes, it can be illegal to have sex with someone who is above the legal age of consent but mentally handicapped to such a degree that they can’t give meaningful consent. If I can dig up any info on how exactly the line is drawn I’ll post it here.
I have questions about that, myself. Especially concerning birth control. It hardly seems fair to deny a person sex, but if they are not capable of caring for children, who is responsible?
I think that it should be noted that one doesn’t need to be aged in order to feel sexual pleasure. Toddlers are known to masturbate and it is not uncommon for prepubescent children to harbor sexual urges and have orgasms. However, just because a ten year old knows what sexual pleasure is and even seeks it out doesn’t mean an adult can have their way with the child. I believe that the same would hold true for an incapable adult, at least morally and probably legally.
But then does that mean that we deny mentally handicapped people access to any sexual pleasure with another person…forever? For the rest of their lives? Isn’t that denying them some kind of fundamental human right?
I’m really on shakey ground here, but is it not the case that minors can have sex with other minors, but the legal trouble happens if a minor has sex with an adult? To apply that analogy to the mentally handicapped, is it more acceptable if a mentally handicapped person has sex with another mentally handicapped person, rather than a person of normal intelligence/capability?
Not entirely, no. The law would look mighty poorly on parents who allowed their six-year-old children to copulate with the neighborhood kids, for example. The children would not be prosecuted (for obvious reasons), but I’m guessing that the parents probably would be.
Things do get murkier as the children approach their teens; however, the point remains that sex between minors is not tolerated outright.
While this is not entirely moot, I note that most such individuals probably don’t get much TLC, ifyaknowwhatImean. That same intellect problem makes them very unlikely canidates for, ah, mushy stuff - with normal peeps.
My ex (who dated and married our 15 year old babysitter) worked at a home for mentally retarded teens and adults. He said they’re getting lots of sex all the time. The girls were almost all on the pill (without their knowledge…theoretically they might refuse to take it in order to get favors or privileges – so they thought it was better they didn’t know they were on it). It is probably illegal in most places for a mentally competent adult to have sex with a mentally retarded person. I have no cites, but I recall seeing this issue in the news on more than one occasion.
My wife, who is a pscyhotherapist, worked for a time at a facility for the mentally retarded in SC. She’s got first hand experience in this so I’ll ask her tonight and report back.
I think this is a very grey, very difficult area.
Some mentally handicapped persons could have consequence-free sex. Some couldn’t. Some are able to express “consent” (even if not legally binding consent). Others aren’t.
With teens, if there’s a blanket “no sex” policy at least they’ll grow out of it. It’s not a permanent state. It may be unfair, but at least it’s not forever.
The Better Half’s family all do adult foster care in Michigan–have done so since the 1970s–and whenever a mentally handicapped female resident displays interest in sex (usually she develops a serious crush on another, male, resident and there ensues a lot of hugging and kissing), she is put on birth control. It isn’t something that is run past her as an option, it’s, “Here’s your pill you take every day”, generally without explanation, since she wouldn’t be able to really comprehend it anyway. (When a male resident gets horny about another female resident, and she doesn’t reciprocate his interest, they are simply separated–one is moved to a different home.)
Possibly, but what you’re missing is that usually these people have family members, and those family members would, in my experience, be extremely upset to find that their mentally handicapped daughter/sister/sister-in-law/niece living in an adult foster care home was being permitted by the home’s operators to be sexually active, perceiving (correctly) that she was only 5, or 12, years old and thus not capable of adult consent. The birth control is not intended to enable sex; it’s to prevent conception, as it is widely acknowledged that “if they’re gonna, they’re gonna”.
But the home’s operators do their best to keep track of her, and to put various monkey wrenches in the machinery of rendezvous: there was the horny lawn-mowing resident from House #1 who was not permitted to come in the house of House #2, as there was a female resident in House #2 who was all too happy to accomodate him out in the tool shed. She used to peer longingly at him out the windows as he mowed the lawn, she not being allowed to leave the house while he was there, with him peering wistfully up at the house. And yes, she was on BC pills.
And you say, “Oh, the poor things, why not allow them some happiness?” Well, because she had a sister and BIL who would have gone ballistic if they found out that her “Boyfriend”, who she talked about all the time and who they thought was just a harmless fantasy, was an actual up-against-the-wall lay, out in the tool shed.
There are also taxpayers who would be extremely upset at any condoning of sexual activity in a taxpayer-funded institution, so officially, it doesn’t happen, and steps are indeed taken, most of the time, to see that it doesn’t.
But that doesn’t address why they should be denied in any moral, or even legal sense. It only explains why caregivers pervent them from having sex. Families go ballistic over a lot of things. Most people pay taxes for things they find offensive. So aside from the fact that the Director will get yelled at, or there will be irate letters to the editor, what is their justification?
I’m sorry, but I can’t think of this as being right. Maybe it made the brother-in-law and the taxpayer happier, but it’s still not right.
I think some enlightened families understand this and depending on the degree of handicap, allow them to date and marry (supervised marriage, of course). To tell you the truth, I think it creeps most people out. I think it reminds them of small children doing it, which in a sense, I suppose is accurate.
Actually, it’s not “not right”, it’s terribly wrong.
Well, in the case I was referring to, She was mentally and emotionally about 12 years old, and He was mentally and emotionally about 14. In real life, how would you feel about a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old having a long-term sexual relationship?
If they were going to be that age forever, I would try to get used to the idea.
IMHO, assigning equivilant mental ages to handicapped people, especially in the instance of sexual maturity, is unhelpful.
Why is it “unhelpful”? If you need to make a judgement call about whether a person is capable of understanding something, it’s a basic procedure to ask, “How old is he? Does he really comprehend what’s going on here?” A parent disciplining a child, a judge sentencing a teenager, an employer interviewing teenage summer help–they both ask the same question.
You can’t just look at a handicapped person and not make some kind of categorization of functionality, because they’re all different. You need to have a yardstick, a way to determine what’s the best thing to do with this person. Someone who’s only 5 years old inside his head shouldn’t be given an apartment and a bus pass and a job at the Shelter Care workshop. Conversely, someone who’s 14 years old mentally shouldn’t be cooped up all day every day in the foster care home with only the TV for company, and meals to look forward to.
So you use this yardstick for sexuality as for everything else in the person’s life–whether he’s expected to be able to brush his own hair, potty himself, feed himself, read books to himself, get himself to work on time. Why discard the yardstick just for this one aspect of his life? Just because he’s sexually mature doesn’t mean he’s capable of understanding the consequences of his behavior. Suppose the Lawn Mower is given free rein to roger the Wistful Maiden out in the tool shed whenever he feels like it–is he going to understand that this doesn’t mean he has a license to roger anything female that he feels like, with its attendant possibilities of venereal diseases, pregnancy, and date rape?
And what about the Wistful Maiden? If she’s only 12 years old inside her head, is it fair to allow him to use a 12-year-old for what amounts to nothing more than sexual release, given that she (let alone he) couldn’t possibly understand anything about the realities of an adult sexual relationship, nor about the reasons (disease, rape, etc.) why she shouldn’t just go out and get routinely laid by anything in trousers?
Unless you’re going to argue that they don’t need to have an adult relationship to go along with the sex, in which case I guess I don’t have a talking point here.