But cavalierly criminalizing sexual drive is madness!
Possibly just to advance the discussion, I found this Blog post that was spurned on by the ruling that inspired this thread was quite telling and chilling and made me feel quite badly for saying “Giggity” when I saw underage girls on TV (jokingly, but still)…
Some excerpts (note that one paragraph is fairly graphic; it is hidden with the “Spoiler” tag for those who might not with to read it):
Kids fooling around with other kids will happen and I wish more states would adopt Romeo & Juliet Laws which differentiate those cases from the Chris Hanson-types.
But really, adult men should stop fucking teenagers.
However, this example is an extreme outlier, I think. If a minor is sexually active with adults, it’s vastly more likely that she would be a 15 yo in love with some attractive 20 yo than a 13 yo blowing every single male she meets. I don’t think that general policy should be based on extreme cases.
Ideally, we should rely on judges’ and prosecutors’ discretion, but in this pedophile-obessed society and with the push for minimum mandatory sentences we can’t guarantee that a 15 yo won’t have to register as a sex offender for life for having had sex with his 14 yo girlfriend. That other extreme case is as harmful IMO as the case of the 13 yo slutting herself, and I think that in matters of justice and punishment, we should, on principle, err on the side of restraint (better to have a guilty man free than an innocent man in prison and all that).
I understand the desire, but that’s just not how US law works. States have plenary power in this regard - there’s really no mechanism for doing what you’re describing without a Constitutional Amendment. The US was only able to get states to cooperate with (kind of) national upper limits on speed limits or open container laws by tying compliance to highway funidng. Trying to mess around with state criminal law at the federal level is a political landmine and no politician would touch it without massive support, which I can’t imagine you’d ever get on this.
I’m not trying to pee in your Cheerios, I’m just pointing out that the hurdles for doing this would be almost insurmountable.
The closest you’ll get is something like the Model Penal Code, which exists, but which obviously hasn’t been adopted by the states in this regard.
Unfortunately that too has undesirable consequences. It seems to be common ground that teenagers will have sex, mostly with each other.
If there are no bad consequences, and possibly some desirable ones (housing support child support etc) from becoming pregnant as a teenager and before being able to support a child, then more teenage girls stop taking precautions and get pregnant. The boys don’t care because they do not have to support the results.
One only has to look at teenage pregnancy rates in the UK, where such benefits exist, to see what happens.
What happens? Please elabourate. Is the UK in the midst of some sort of societal collapse I was unaware of?
Right, and I would have two more points to make about that example as well:
(1) I can easily imagine a sad tale like this coming from a 16-year-old. Or a 17-year-old. Or even a naive 18- or 19-year-old. Hell, there are pathetic 38-year-old barflies with smeared mascara living this sad life every single day. People get treated shitty in this world, unfortunately; but we can’t criminalise all shitty treatment or throw all douchey guys behind bars no matter how much we might like to.
(2) On the flip side, this woman seems to be indicating that if that 28-year-old guy had treated her nicely and wanted to be in a relationship with her (and presumably if that were allowed), it would not have caused her pain. Should nice guys who are seduced by Lolitas face the same penalty?
Again, it is pretty common and maybe even standard for college freshmen girls to have this kind of exploitive experience early on, and later look back at how shitty they were treated, how naïve they were. The older guys should be nicer and not take advantage of naïve girls and just use them and dump them aside. But that is a separate issue from legal age of consent under the aegis of the criminal justice system.
OK that did come from The Daily Mail - but still worrying
But you are begging the question, or using circular reasoning, something along those lines. Your implied premise is that a high rate of teen pregnancy is inherently a bad thing; the whole point of my anti-CW premise was that it should not be treated that way. I was certainly not arguing that providing more support for pregnant teens would reduce the teen pregnancy rate!
It seems we both agree that there is an over-requirement of registering as a sex offender. But, to me, that fact does next to nothing to justify a change in age of consent laws. Change the sex registration protocols? Sure. But I still think it is better to overprotect minor from sexual exploitation than to underprotect them.
That was my point, that saying that sex offenders who commit crimes need treatment that assumes that the person can’t control their behavior. Ability to control your behavior and a free choice to commit the criminal act is traditionally an element of crimes, if not a universal de jure one then certainly an element from a moral judgment perspective. Google “sex offender treatment”. Typically each state has some sort of heavyhanded curriculum that treats every person as out of control and unable to control their behavior. To me, a person who really and truly-o does not have rational control of their behavior doesn’t belong in criminal court or jail - they need therapy. Get them therapy, then take the people who still commit these acts out of free choice and put them in jail.
The problem is that you can’t tell one from another reliably.
I do wholeheartedly agree that there is a serious over reaction to the perceived problem of underage sex. At least here in the UK the consent law is consistent, but dates, as always, are arbitrary and I can attest that there are many 14 year olds that can easily pass for over 16. Any judge that takes this into account seems to get hammered by the media.
Whatever the age - I do think that teenage pregnancy is an inherently bad thing. They may be ready for sex, but they are not ready to bear and rear a child, financially or in any other way. Why should I, as a taxpayer, pay the costs of rearing someone else’s child.
Why shouldn’t it be treated that way?
Unwed teen motherhood is associated with all kinds of social pathologies, for the mother and for her children. Even supposing that this can be fended off with increased social spending (which is rather unlikely), why incur the extra expense? What do we gain by it as a society?
Regards,
Shodan
Since we are never going to eliminate or drastically reduce teen pregnancy, we probably gain a great reduction in some of those social pathologies (I say “probably” because I am always cautious about the direction of causation when talking about correlations; however, by the same token, you should not assume that the social problems you refer to our caused by having offspring as a teen rather than both being the effects of a confounding cofactor like poverty, genetics, or familial socialisation). We also give women a chance to have a “second act” wherein they get educated and have a career after having children. And we know that infertility is much less likely to plague a woman early on, as our chromosomal and other birth defects.
I think it should be treated as a bad thing. Pregnancy is not always a walk in the park. Pregnancy has some fairly serious physical impacts, both short-term and long-term, on any woman. CiteTeen pregnancy is also associated with worse outcomes for babies. Having a baby takes significant resources; I do not believe that we should be encouraging 15 year olds (or even 18 year olds) to be taking care of a child.
I assume that you support very strong child-support laws as well?
As an FYI, The teen birth rate has dropped fairly significantly since 2007.
That depends on what you mean. As a divorced and remarried dad myself, I am not a fan of the laws as they are currently constituted and applied. I believe other than in extreme circumstances, the default should not be for the mother to have primary physical custody and the father to pay child support. Rather, the default expectation should be for everything to be split (time and costs) and for there to be no child support going either way.
I am really sceptical of this. I followed your link but the sites do not link to any abstracts. First of all, I wonder whether they have lumped everyone from 13 to 19 together. I very seriously doubt that babies of older teens have worse outcomes, all else equal.
And the “all else equal” is the other thing. Are these studies very carefully correcting for socioeconomic class, obesity, prevalence of smoking and drug use, etc.? Even after all those are screened out, it remains the case that our current social set up is for teen pregnancy to be seeing as pathological, as a failure. Therefore, it is going to be those teens that are more likely to do “irresponsible” things generally who will get pregnant and have the baby. Thus, I strongly suspect they will be more likely to eat poorly during the pregnancy, to choose poorly from the pool of potential fathers, etc.
The only way we could really know is to just grab a random sampling of teens from the population, including studious, virginal girls from the suburbs, and assign them to get pregnant and carry the baby to term. Since that will obviously never happen, and should not happen, I am going to have to take the retrospective research available with a grain of salt. Although what might actually be slightly more persuasive would be to see research on outcomes for chimpanzee babies born from adolescent mothers.
Could you cite the reduction in social pathologies that have been brought about by encouraging teen pregnancy in other societies? TIA.
Regards,
Shodan
The cites are at the bottom of the page. Not all of them are web-linkable but the page is from the CDC and relies heavily on information from the National Vital Statistics System.
Sounds like you agree that younger teens (<15 year olds) have worse outcomes so pregnancy would be a bad idea.
13-15 year olds will definitely have lower educational attainment compared to older mother since they aren’t even old enough to graduate high school! If you want to control for this, how do you plan to do so?
Educational attainment was not one of the factors I mentioned.
I notice that some posters have stated that minors can not make their own decisions. While studies say teenagers 16 and older can make their own informed decisions. However, people are not emotional mature until around 26, a decade later.
Btw, OP pedophilia is not a legal term.