Okay for a 14 year old boy and 23 year old woman to have sex?

[yosemite]

@Mr2001

As for the first part, I’d say you need to know about fertility and pregnancy, contraception, STDs, and have some idea of how sex is perceived differently by men and women and the effects it can have on a previously nonsexual relationship.

And would you also have an ability to personally be responsible for the consequences of the sexual relationship (i.e. supporting a kid from an unexpected pregnancy)?

Do you seriously believe that many 12-13 year olds are able to completely be able to support a kid on their own? (And by “on their own” I mean, with zero, 0%, none, completely NO parental help or support.) How many kids would be able to do that, do you think? Do you think that the kid should be expected to prove that they can support an unwanted child before they start legally having sex, or would you just hope that they could handle it, or suppose they could handle it, or perhaps it’d be okay they’d promise to get an abortion (if they were female, but of course they could change their mind later and then what)?

Or, are you still figuring that the parent of the minor child who might end up with an unwanted baby would still be obligated to help their kid out? Is this your idea of the child being “responsible” and “able to handle sex”?

These are also some questions that some others here should be asking you about, I think. And I hope they’re able to squeeze some specific answers out of you.

[Ms2001]

@Zagadka

In many cases, yes.

You really don’t know much about child abuse, do you?

You really don’t know much about teenagers, do you?

Nothing, but as BoringDad points out above, it is a happy number that we agree on that people are responsible enough to make decisions for themselves.

As he also points out, it is an arbitrary choice.

But that’s beside the point. You said that an adult’s mere say-so can convince any minor to say yes. Do you believe that also applies to 18 and 19 year olds? If not, why would you think it applies to 17 year olds, since you know that nothing magical happens at age 18?

How do you prove coersion if the kid says yes? Is the adult to know the kid means no but is being coerced? How do you present this in a court of law?

The same way you present it in any other rape trial.

We’re already in sticky enough situations with date rape cases that no one can rule on accurately.

Yes, it’s a shame that in some cases, there isn’t enough evidence to convict a guilty person. But like I said, that’s the price we pay for having a fair justice system. To do otherwise would be to abandon the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty.

Now, kids are supposed to grow up having been abused and magically always know to go to the courts and magically have their strong word against any adult? Sounds like a South Park episode.

Magically have their strong word? What are you talking about?

We differ in that I know that 13 year olds aren’t capable of responsible decision making. You don’t.

In other words, you’re prejudiced against young people. What shocking news.

You think you are responsible now as you were at 13?

I am probably more responsible now than I was then. And I will probably be more responsible in the future than I am now. I may even be more responsible in the distant future than in the near future. What does that have to do with tattoos?

[Zagadka]

@Mr2001

You really don’t know much about teenagers, do you?

I know as much as you. Actually, more. How much about child psychology do you know again?

But that’s beside the point. You said that an adult’s mere say-so can convince any minor to say yes. Do you believe that also applies to 18 and 19 year olds? If not, why would you think it applies to 17 year olds, since you know that nothing magical happens at age 18?

No, by then they are mentally developed. You are the one talking about bedding a 12 year old.

In other words, you’re prejudiced against young people. What shocking news.

:rolleyes: Yes, children and young adults are often incapable of making responsible decisions.

This is shocking news to you?

I am probably more responsible now than I was then.

Thankye.

[Zagadka]

THAT’S IT!

I knew you reminded me of someone -

hellothere. Accusing me of being an “extremist multi-racist.” Yea, I’m prejudiced against kids, because you know what? They’re not as responsible as adults. There is no magical line, it is different with each person, and we estimate it at being 18.

That is why we don’t let you and your NAMBLA buddies go around screwing kids. They aren’t capable of rational decision making that is expected of adults. We protect them via the law from predators who seek to abuse them.

[Ms2001]

@Zagadka

I know as much as you. Actually, more. How much about child psychology do you know again?

Enough to know that teenagers don’t always do what adults tell them to do. You can pick that up just from watching TV or visiting a school, for god’s sake.

No, by then they are mentally developed.

So, if an adult can convince 17 year olds to say yes, but not 18 year olds, and nothing magical happens in between… how exactly does that work? No one is mentally developed at 17, and everyone is mentally developed at 18? You can’t be serious.

Yes, children and young adults are often incapable of making responsible decisions.

Often, but not always. I will happily deny the right to make decisions to those children and young adults who are incapable of doing so, but I will not deny it to the ones who are capable.

[Zagadka]

Say, Mr2001, what makes the difference between a 16 year old, a 12 year old, and an 8 year old?

Also, I assume that you are of the opinion that children should be held to the same legal status as adults?

[Ms2001]

@Zagadka

That is why we don’t let you and your NAMBLA buddies go around screwing kids.

Look, pal, this ain’t the pit. I have no desire to screw kids and I’ve never even met anyone in NAMBLA. If you want to sling insults, do it someplace appropriate.

[Zagadka]

@Mr2001

Enough to know that teenagers don’t always do what adults tell them to do. You can pick that up just from watching TV or visiting a school, for god’s sake.

So teens can’t be coerced?

So, if an adult can convince 17 year olds to say yes, but not 18 year olds, and nothing magical happens in between… how exactly does that work? No one is mentally developed at 17, and everyone is mentally developed at 18? You can’t be serious.

Oh, now we’re limited to 17 year olds? I thought you wanted to be able to screw 12 year olds?

Often, but not always. I will happily deny the right to make decisions to those children and young adults who are incapable of doing so, but I will not deny it to the ones who are capable.

You understand that you can’t have it both ways, right?

Or do you want to be made National Sex Monitor?

[Zagadka]

@Mr2001

Look, pal, this ain’t the pit. I have no desire to screw kids and I’ve never even met anyone in NAMBLA. If you want to sling insults, do it someplace appropriate.

Saying that you are buddies with NAMBLA is like saying Sam Stone is buddies with Republicans.

You disagree with NAMBLA’s position, then? How is theirs different from yours?

[yosemite]

@Zagadka

Oh, now we’re limited to 17 year olds? I thought you wanted to be able to screw 12 year olds?

Zagadka, I vehemently disagree with Mr2001, just as much as you do, but in my many GD battles with him, I’ve never gotten the impression that he is personally interested in having sex with 12 year olds. I do not believe that he has that inclination.

I think this is an issue of having some dreamy, unrealistic view of how “oppressed” children are, because they can’t have everything their hearts desire before age 18, and also a unrealistic view of how much some children can really handle. And there’s also (in my opinion) this annoying expectation that the parents of these kids will still help out when things go wrong: as in, an unexpected pregnancy. For that, he’s given me the impression in the past that he thinks the parents of these kids should help out. (So much for the child really being “ready” for the responsibilities of sex—how “ready” are they if mommy and daddy have to help them out of a scrape?) In my opinion, that’s more of an interesting issue, and one worth exploring. The implications that he personally is interested in having sex with 12-year-olds is way off base, however.

However, he doesn’t seem to want to distance himself from some of the content on the NAMBLA site, which is amusing and ironic, I must say!

[Zagadka]

@yosemite

Zagadka, I vehemently disagree with Mr2001, just as much as you do, but in my many GD battles with him, I’ve never gotten the impression that he is personally interested in having sex with 12 year olds. I do not believe that he has that inclination.

Neither do I, which is why I said “be able to,” not “to.”

BTW, Mr2001, how old ARE you?

[Ms2001]

@Zagadka

Say, Mr2001, what makes the difference between a 16 year old, a 12 year old, and an 8 year old?

Age, primarily. There are some traits that tend to correspond to age, but everyone matures at a different rate. While I would be comfortable generalizing about 8 year olds, I would not be comfortable generalizing about the capabilities of 12 or 16 year olds.

Also, I assume that you are of the opinion that children should be held to the same legal status as adults?

Sure, when appropriate. With rights come responsibility, and the adult responsibilities that a person has should be proportional to the adult rights he has. I don’t support trying minors as adults today, because minors don’t have nearly the same rights as adults today.

So teens can’t be coerced?

Now there’s a non sequitur. Anyone can be coerced, but I don’t think the average teenager is going to submit to sex he doesn’t really want just because an adult asked him to.

Oh, now we’re limited to 17 year olds?

They’re minors, aren’t they? You said any minor.

I thought you wanted to be able to screw 12 year olds?

That is about the most inflammatory way to put it.

You understand that you can’t have it both ways, right?

Er, why not? People who can safely drive a car are allowed to drive; people who can’t are not.

@Zagadka

You disagree with NAMBLA’s position, then? How is theirs different from yours?

Their web site is heavy on crap and light on real position statements, so I’m not even sure what their position is. I agree with the bits I posted before, but I’m somewhat troubled by the fact that their main focus is sex with boys, and they never seem to define whether these boys are adolescent or prepubescent.

@Zagadka

BTW, Mr2001, how old ARE you?

I’ll be 22 next month.

[Zagadka]

@Mr2001

Age, primarily. There are some traits that tend to correspond to age, but everyone matures at a different rate. While I would be comfortable generalizing about 8 year olds, I would not be comfortable generalizing about the capabilities of 12 or 16 year olds.

So you ARE biased against an age group, you just have some conclusion that people reach maturity around the age of 12.

I don’t know how you arrived at this conclusion, and the only cite you will give is (to paraphrase) “I felt capable of making decisions at that age” despite your own admitted lack of knowledge in the field of child and adolescent psychology.

So what makes it OK to have sex with a 12 year old, but not an 8 year old?

Sure, when appropriate. With rights come responsibility, and the adult responsibilities that a person has should be proportional to the adult rights he has. I don’t support trying minors as adults today, because minors don’t have nearly the same rights as adults today.

When “isn’t it appropriate”?
Should every kid who picks a fight be arrested for assault and face a felony charge in federal prison?

Er, why not? People who can safely drive a car are allowed to drive; people who can’t are not.

So, you are in favor of a sex license?

Their web site is heavy on crap and light on real position statements, so I’m not even sure what their position is.

It is basically the exact same as your position.

[Zagadka]

(and I might add, the “heavy on crap and light on position” term can be applied to more than their website, unless you start linking to peer reviewed youth psychiatry journals about the miraculous capability 12 year olds developed overnight to make rational decisions)

[Zagadka]

I’m going to bed now, so flame away, but I may offer you one piece of advice.

Spend some time around kids - as an adult - before judging whether or not they are capable of making their decisions. I don’t mean a little time. I mean, a lot of time. Entire weekends with them. Become a camp counselor, volunteer with the Boy Scouts. Do something.

Most kids just aren’t capable of being mothers or fathers, or dealing with STDs, or creating stable non-abusive relationships (with peers, much less with ADULTS). Kids (and I mean in your target 12-15 age group) have strong tendancies to be very overemotional, take things very personally, and be very reckless with their actions. They don’t consider the consequences, and even without sex in the equation, life can become difficult enough.

Would you allow a child to purchase a gun?

Establishing poor sexual habit in a juvenile stage of development will in most cases lead to poor sexual habit as an adult - and let me be very clear about this - there is a distinction between being a juvenile and being an adult. Some kids may cross this line at 16, some at 18, some at 20, but the laws are there for their protection.

The same reason you don’t arrest a kid for every crime they commit is the same reason they don’t have the right to free and open sexual practice. They make very poor choices, act rashly, and don’t think things through.

I don’t have a problem with a 15 year old having sex with his 14 year old girlfriend. That is natural. It can lead to its own problems, but there is nothing you can do to prevent it.

I do have a problem when you want to allow an adult to have sexual relations with a 12 year old kid. The kid does not have to know what abuse is. They may not know they are being abused. They may like the attention that the cool 20 year old guy is giving to them. They may feel special because of it. That does not make it undamaging. This is how sexual predators work - they get the kid to like them, to agree to their wishes, to think it feels good, to not tell mommy and daddy. They rely on the fact that the kids can’t make these kinds of decisions. They prey on that.

Removing the only legal protection that these kids have chills my bones. Is it unfair to the few early developing kids? Yea, probably. They can live without it, or they can do it behind their parents backs like they’ve been doing for thousands of years.

It is a minor inconvenience that, in reality, rarely comes into effect in teenage life. Very rarely, given the amount of sexual activity among teenagers.

But the law is there not to protect the 17 year olds from the 18 year olds. It is to protect the 12 year olds and 14 year olds from the 27 year olds who want to abuse them.

I get the feeling that you feel like you are preaching some kind of manifesto for the freedom of teenagers to have free love. That’s fine, I had sex when I was underage myself. But you are destroying an entire legal process that is the only thing protecting kids who can’t yet think or speak for themselves from adults who want to use them.

You ask what NAMBLA’s position is. It is exactly what you say. Loving relationships between men and willing youths. The problem is, the youths are willing because they do not understand the gravity of what they are doing. They think there is a nice man they’ll call “uncle” who buys them ice cream and toys and likes to hug and touch them a lot. That is how a child thinks. They, like you, see nothing wrong with the sexual liason between an adult and a minor.

It is wrong, though, because the minor is not able to think properly for themselves. They don’t understand what they are doing when they perform sexual acts on the older men. They don’t know the meaning behind them. They don’t know what being touched is, other than it feels good and gives them an erection.

Is that fair to them? They will grow up with this. Many hide it, like those abused by the priests. They are ashamed of their sexuality and blame themselves. They develop problems with sexual performance. There are tremendous psychological attatchments to sex.

Do some reading. Get some experience. Then come back and preach about how fit children are to make decisions like this.

[Voodoochile]

Im not sure how people got this reversed, but she was not the one in the position of power; he was. As soon as they had sex, he had the power over her, not the other way around. He, literally, was fucking authority. He had her career in his hands at the same time he had other things.

What power had she over him? What, give him an F in reading class? 14 year olds arent stupid, the kid had to be aware that she had far more to lose than he did. No, the power was in his hands. If anything, I think a good case could be made that this is an issue of a male taking advantage of a female when she was in an emotionally delicate state. Show me a 14 year old who is stupid enough to think a junior-high or high-school teacher can have a lasting bad effect on them enough to be coerced into having sex and Ill show you a 14 year old in 5th grade.

Hell, shes only 23, barely out of childhood herself. The older I get, the less of a difference I see between a 23 year old and a 14 year old. Kids are kids.

And yes, I for one recently have a daughter. I believe, and will tell her so, that if something feels good, and she think she wants to try it, to go for it. Thats how one learns. If she doesntlike it, great. If she does, great. But then Im raising a human being, not a unit.

The fucked up people in this world are the ones who hold themselves back from trying things they want to try because of social beliefs or attitudes or public legislation. If you dont pee in the shower because of what other people would think, youve got something seriously wrong with you. If you want to try smoking pot, can get it, but dont just because its either illegal or perceivedly socially unacceptable, youve got something seriously wrong with you. If youre a teenager, with someone, turned on and want to have sex but dont because of something as stupid as current cultural/social beliefs about marriage or even just ‘what your friends might think’, youve got something wrong with you.
If there is a current widespread psychological problem, I think it would be some peoples fear of not being socially accepted, of being outside the norm, or being ostracized. I would imagine that psychologists would try to deal with this by helping the person understand that social/cultural beliefs are as substantial as farts, and try to build up the persons obvious lack of self esteem, rather than facilitate an even deaper plunge by essentially agreeing with the person and waving the vistom flag over their head. If no one is above society that means no one is beneath it either.

Who the hell cares if some people have sex a year ealier than the norm? So the hell what? Not being like everyone else is something to be proud of, not worried about.

Yes, of course real abuse happens ands its bad and its wrong. The stickler I think is how one defines coercion. This is where the current trends in psychology (we cant really call them understandings) differ from the average person as evidenced by many posts on this board. Im sorry, but the fact that she was his teacher is not enough for me to think he was coerced, current laws be damned. Actually no, current laws not be damned; its because of current laws that he was the one with the power, not her. Look whats happening to her as compared to whats happening to him; how could one think she was the one in the role of power?

[erislover]

@vanilla

Children are easily intimidated by adults when they tell them to do something.

Because we have made sure that kids have no power over their own lives. We have the power, they don’t.

They canot make cosenting choices especially about sex.

I think you do two disservices. One, to people who have actually been abused, children and adults, and two, to kids every day who are trying to learn about their world but are stymied by restrictive parents and laws.

Thankfully, this is a minority opinion and rejected by most thinking adults.

I think you’d be surprised by what “most adults” think. Something tells me you don’t have a direct pipeline to the intimate thoughts of every warm-blooded american.

[erislover]

@Zagadka

Face it. Children and young adults are not capable of making responsible decisions about life-changing events, including sex. Removing the legal protections that guard them from adult predators, abusers, and molesters is simply asinine and outrageous.

Bullshit through and fucking through. There are adults that are incapable of making responsible decisions, and a whole lot of 18 year olds have fucked up their lives because all their training wheels were suddenly removed. It’s disrespecting every thinking kid out there to call them incompetent, and it is offensive to children and adults who have actually been abused to suggest that every 14 year old getting his dick touched is traumatically scarred. I don’t know what your healthy view of sex is, but it sounds downright scary to me. I shudder to think what I would think of women and sexuality if I had been raised under your approach. Before you said all males are molesters or rapists or whatever. Wonder why.

[erislover]

@yosemite

I think this is an issue of having some dreamy, unrealistic view of how “oppressed” children are, because they can’t have everything their hearts desire before age 18, and also a unrealistic view of how much some children can really handle.

As opposed to Zag’s no-bullshit, ultra-realistic and well-documented view that abuse stops at 18 and people are suddenly responsible? Please. I’m sure every psychologist in the world feels comfortable with arbitrary limits on when someone is “competent” to make decisions.

Note I didn’t say “good” decisions, because last study I checked ( :rolleyes: ) showed that no one is guaranteed to make good decisions at any age.

[plnnr]

[QUOTE=Zagadka]

I don’t have a problem with a 15 year old having sex with his 14 year old girlfriend. That is natural. It can lead to its own problems, but there is nothing you can do to prevent it.
QUOTE]

This, too, makes a complete mess of your argument. You claimed that children younger than 18 can’t make an informed decision as to whether to have sex or not; therefore, you should have a problem with 15 year old boys having sex with 14 year old girls. The boy is older than the girl, can certainly be intimidating and be seen in a position of power over here, and is guilty of statutory rape.