[QUOTE=Thrash the Almighty]
Sex has risks. The risks same risks would have been there if my partner had been 16 or 26. Why does the 26 year old go to jail and the 16 year old get a pass?
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Because the 16-year-old is (theoretically) not equipped to understand the risks well enough to make an informed decision. When I was 15, I “knew” that sex could result in preganancy, for example. But I didn’t have the life experience or knowledge to grasp that implications of that possibility. Most 15-year-old boys don’t. So we say that they cannot consent to a sex act legally speaking, because consent, by its nature, must be informed to be meaningful.
Perhaps you did have them. But again, there is no reasonable way to judge which adolescent has them and which does not. Every teenager thinks they have common sense, man. Every one. No kid goes around thinking, “I am largely ignorant of the way the world works,” even though it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Well… I mean… it does. Every case is judged on its own merits, in court and in sentencing. I don’t know how else to say it.
And of course, if you kill someone, you’re likely to walk away only if: (1) it was an accident; or (2) you were acting in self-defense. This is because societally, we have an interest in protecting the right to self-defense, and we don’t want to jail people for genuine mistakes done with no malice or recklessness involved. These are principles by which society is well-served.
You seem to think that an adult should “walk away” from nonaccidental sex with a minor based on the defense of “the minor really wanted it.” Once again, we have no societal interest in protecting the right of an adult to bang a teenager.
I disagree. The 20-something has no idea whether or not the guy in question is going to suffer from the encounter. She doesn’t know. No one does. What she does know is that he’s shy of the legal age of consent, and that the punishment for crossing that line might be jail time (it is often not jail time, actually, in cases like this). The law exists to protect everyone under the age of consent who might suffer from the encounter, because again - the twentysomething has no way of anticipating whether she is doing damage before she engages in the act. So she should not engage in the act. This isn’t particularly unfair, or illogical.