Ill be the first to be on your side when you are arguing that often, the culture of adult domination will cause children to do things they would not otherwise do. But simply claiming that they do not have the factual ability to make decisions about their lives and bodies does not make it so. After all, most of the sex that adults have outside of an explicitly committed relationship is for reasons other than being in love, so to be claiming that adults have so much more of a handle on the emotional impacts of sex is false.
Now, sex is so unimportant and confusing to most children that we will not gain much by legalizing it. But that does not mean that there are not exceptions, or that most children who actively and willingly engage in free contact with adults will invariably be forever condemned to nightmares of the horrific rape. In fact, I’d say that in most situations where a child initiated non penetrative sexual contact, they’d be less messed up if the adult engaged in it and no one found out than if they engaged in it and they were found out and the child were dragged through an investigation and trial and the adult were sentenced to 10 years in prison and the child were taken to less-than-useless “therapy” where they were told over and over that they were a victim. Of course, the best solution is for adults to not engage in sex with children. But if that does occur I’m not sure which solution of the above would be better for that child in the above scenario.
I don’t know what the sentence are, honestly. I’d say that for factual coercion with non penetrative sex it should be a couple-so years in medium or light, at least, more depending on circumstances. Without either factual coercion or penetrative sex I have no idea if there should even be prison time but the question is how do you tell them apart, especially if the children do not want the contact and are being threatened by those with a supervisory relationship over them if they tell.
Then you have a skewed up worldview. You don’t see any difference at all? I can think of plenty of times in my life where situations would have had a tremendously immenser psychological impact on me if there was a threat of violence, and I see no reason why we should not be careful to treat the various forms of forced and unforced sexual contact between adults and children as morally* different for that reason.
- You might remember me as the guy who thinks that most felonies deserve the death penalty (including forcible rape, oddly enough,) but that we should not apply it for practical reasons. So this is an example where the “moral versus practical” decision might still apply but toward harsher sentencing rather than lighter.