Please tell me you don’t have a dog.
^This.
There was an era where child molestation was handled pretty much like adultery or sodomy or other sexual crimes–a nasty little secret, but not the worst thing that ever happened. It might or might not merit a prison sentence.
Even into the 1980s, it wasn’t that unusual for incestuous child molestation to be handled in family court (“stay away from the kids”) with little or no prison time. Now it’s a mandatory 25 years before parole is even a possibility.
Is there any evolutionary compulsion to the fact that not so long ago in human history our lives were so much shorter so it wasn’t unusual at all for fully mature adult males, for instance, to marry what would today be considered creepily young females?
You say diddling, I say fiddling…
…and it would probably be the best thing for everyone if we called the whole thing off.
:rolleyes:
Or mightmerit the drop.
Maybe the gas chamber.
Maybe some common sense is coming back:
Back then, when such things were never spoken of, that silence gave grown adults an out, from having to speak of unspeakable things. And they used it as an excuse to rationalize that any addressing or mentioning of such events would only further traumatize the child.
Of course the reality was that just ignoring it, never speaking of it, traumatized the victim much, much worse than the pain of open revelation.
And the phrase, ‘kiddy diddling’, is odious. We have surely evolved sufficiently that we no longer should employ a rhyming euphemism that diminishes the seriousness of a vicious crime, and belittles victims.
Remember There’s Something About Amelia where the dad finally admits to the therapist that he’s been having sex with his daughter, and is allowed back home to let the healing begin. Warm gushies (now of the appropriate sort) as the credits roll.
That same year I worked in a Lutheran Social Services boys residential treatment center. One of our charges was removed from a home where he’d been punching the walls and dad was molesting little sister. Dad and sis stayed home under monitoring. One report told how he’d gotten an erection while giving her a spanking, but progress was optimistic.
I think people are more severe about 17yrs old = “legally a child” vs 18yrs old = “now an adult” than they used to be.
My guess is that after the “let it all hang out” era of the 60’s to mid 70’s, old-fashioned puritanical morality got rebranded as an obsession with victimization and trauma. Different theories, same outcome: No sex with or between teenagers, elaborate protocols of decorum to protect women, slut shaming, etc.
I’m 58. How you doin’, youngster! 
As for the OP, I think it depends on how far back in time you go. I think most people are assuming we’re talking about the last 100 years or so. I think the farther back in time you go, the more it’s seen as something young folk just have to deal with.
Oh, she shat on Gore many a time, but now it’s a no dogs graveyard.
This isn’t really true, except for political alliances among royalty and the aristocracy (which did involve very young marriages, but they wouldn’t be consummated until the couple reached their mid- to late teens, and the husband was likely to be as young as the wife). In most medieval and Renaissance societies marriage in one’s twenties was the norm for ordinary people; the young couple had to be able to support themselves, which usually meant that the man would have completed his apprenticeship and the woman would have spent several years working as a domestic servant. Life was shorter, but it was mostly shorter at the early end – huge numbers of children died in infancy or early childhood, but healthy people in their twenties certainly weren’t thinking “well, I’d better hurry up and get married because I’ll probably be dead by thirty.”
This is true. Think of all the “Sweet Little 16” songs from the 50s and 60s. Teenage girls were always lusted after by grown men, and I don’t think that’s changed. It’s just gotten confused with pedophilia and therefore people are far less open about it.
Of course even back then they’d coined the term “jail bait”.
Teenage girls were also lusted after by teenage boys. I had an affair with a sexpot a whole two years older than me at 15. Good thing no one called the cops on us then. Most of us thought it was…wait for it…normal.
When I was 19, I was in a relationship with a girl who was 15. And trust me, when I say that she was the one who seduced me, that is a fact, not Humbert Humberting.
Then again, the age of consent where I live is 16.
No one thought of it as skeevy at all, as far as I could tell. Up to and including her parents.
We were together for a while and stayed friends. “Normal” would be the right word for it.
ETA: Of course, if I was to hook up with a 15 year old at my current age, I would be a freaking perv. That I have no problem with.
Judging by some things I heard from my father and some other, even old timier cops, punishment of molesty sorts was handled extra-legally by cops from time to time, too.
True. I don’t think the social mores have changed much. Even in the past, kids were off limits, and teenagers were a gray area where old dudes who chased young women were looked down.
The difference I think is a mass hysteria about pedophiles. I was lectured about letting my 8 year old walk two blocks to the park by himself because there are “child molesters on every street”. :rolleyes: It’s a new satanic panic.
So I don’t think we’re any more “down” on pedophilia than we always were. It’s just that now they’ve been elevated to boogeyman levels where in the past it just wasn’t talked about.
Indeed, back in the 1950’s, when they were married, my dad was 19 and my mom was 16 - no she was not pregnant. It was not the norm, but it was also not entirely scandalous. I can’t help but think in today’s world this would not happen and my father would have been prosecuted…