I was reading the pedophile pit thread and wondered about what societies have considered as acceptable ages of consent across human history. Is the notion of a specific minimum “age of consent” a modern notion or not?
I think the Prophet Muhammad married a girl at 12 or 13 so that’s the youngest I’m familiar with. Before the early 1900 the Hindu’s of the Indian sub-continent didn’t appear to have any age of consent law before it was imposed on them by the British after a tragic incident.
Re two secondary questions -
1: What is the earliest age generally considered safe for a girl/woman to give birth?
2: If being married at 12 or 13 is the social norm in a particular society is the modern nation of psychological harm due to young marriage a moot issue as they would have nothing to be stimatized about or ashamed of?
For much of history, the ‘age of consent’ was about the same as biological puberty, typically 13-15. (That’s happening earlier now, under modern nutrition/medical care, but the age of consent is being raised by many governments, for some reason.)
Nut the only ‘consent’ needed was that of the father – the girl’s opinions were not consulted. Such arranged marriages were negotiated by the parents of the young people.
Many royal marriages were arranged, and betrothal ceremonies held, with princesses as young as age 3 or 4. But we don’t really know when those marriages were consummated (that wasn’t a fact that was publicly recorded, generally), but we can guess based on when a pregnancy occurred – that was generally about the same age as others, around age 17-20.
[noparse]t-bonham@scc.net[/noparse] answered the first question correctly. It’s our culture that is the oddity. Almost every previous culture everywhere thought that legitimized sex (which normally meant marriage, although other arrangements occurred) could start as soon as the girl could produce children.
I’m not sure we can properly answer the second question.
It’s not true even today that the harm caused by underage sex with an older man is because they are stigmatized. It’s a far more diffuse issue of their place and role in society and what the expectations are for a girl, both internal and external, in regards to sexuality, romance, love, and age-appropriateness.
You can’t impose those retroactively on someone of another time and culture. If the notion of sex and legal marriage with the idea of producing babies was the norm for all post-pubescent girls then societal attitudes wouldn’t match ours.
That doesn’t mean that 13-year-old girls couldn’t have other problems wrought by the process. Basic changes - leaving a parent’s house, learning to take care of a home, childbirth, child care - all could be traumatic even in the best intentioned circumstances. Sex itself is a powerful generator of emotions and interpersonal relations and I imagine that many younger girls could be overwhelmed by the experiences, especially with an equally inexperienced groom. Royal brides, who could be sent to another country with another language and strange food and customs and be taken by a stranger to produce heirs while he kept a string of mistresses for pleasure, obviously had these problems in overabundance.
And the place of a women in her society, which was in many times and cultures a baby-making machine with no other rights, inflicted its own toll on women for centuries.
It’s rarely the sex that causes the problem. It’s the totality of society’s attitude about the appropriateness of certain types and varieties of sex that creates issues. Age is just one small variable in the larger picture.
As others have said, many early marriages were not consummated for quite some time. The idea of an engagement period is at least partly a result of a traditional betrothal in the early teens that might not be consummated until the mid to late teens.
As for psychological distress… I think it’s always going to come down to the girl’s feelings of choice in the matter. If a 13 year old willingly fools around with another 13 year old, it’s a totally different scenario than a formerly trusted 40-year-old man forcing himself on her against her will. If a young bride looks forward to her early wedding, it will be a different experience than if she feels her family has pushed her into something she doesn’t want.
Ultimately, the damage comes from feeling that you are not safe or not in control.
The lowest current age of consent that I know of is 13 - in Japan and South Korea. There are probably more countries that don’t have the concept at all.
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet was 13, and her mother (who herself had been married at that age) is pressuring her to get married. So presumably that was considered reasonable in Shakespeare’s time.
Actually, as Peter Laslett pointed out years ago in a chapter on the subject in The World We Have Lost, such early marriages, while possible, were highly unusual in early-modern England. This is almost a textbook example of how literary sources cannot be assumed to be reliable evidence for actual historical practice.
According to wiki, Aisha was 6 or 7 when she was betrothed, lived with her parents for a few more years, and consummated the relationship at the age of 9 according to most sources with one source saying she was 10.
Actually it wasn’t all that reasonable or common in Shakespeare’s time unless you were royalty or a noble. Most women didn’t marry until their late teens/early twenties. Shakespeare was making fun of the aristocracy. Juliet being considered an “old maid” at 13 is something his audiences would have found hilarious (including nobility).
The ages of consent for marriage under common law (inherited from canon law which in turn was inherited from Roman law) are 12 for girls and 14 for boys. I don’t know if any US states still have marriagable ages that low, but it’s not uncommon in the USA for a state to have a lower age of consent for marriage than for sexual activity. Granted statutory rape laws don’t apply to married couples, but it’s still bizarre.
King Henry VII of England’s mother (Lady Margaret Beaufort) gave birth to him at the age of 13. He was her first and only child, but it was her second marriage (though she didn’t recognise her first marriage, since it was contracted before she was 12 years old)
Is there any consideration of the fact that in the past people lived much shorter lives, so there would be inherent social pressures to marry and produce offspring sooner? Even if said “social pressure” was some kind of unspoken precedent?
Life expectancy was shorter, but that doesn’t mean that people lived shorter lives. Nowadays, almost everyone lives to about 70 or 80, so the life expectancy is about 75. Where you get life expectancies in the 30s is not from everyone dying off when they hit 30, but from about half the population dying in infancy or early childhood, and the rest living to the same grand old ages we do now.
I did not know this. So they were really talking aboput average life expectancy? I always thought that people would die off more readily in their forties due to things like tooth decay and the effects of bearing 19 babies and getting winded early and then getting killed during the next joust.
Well, there would be considerably more people dying at every age, due to the much lower level of medical care. A minor injury gets infected and without antibiotics your chances are much sketchier than they are today, and etc. But those who did reach a ripe old age were getting pretty much as old as most people do today. People dying before they reach their three-score and ten years would be viewed as dying prematurely, even if that happened far more often than it does now.
According to Wiki, the age of consent is 12 in the Philippines, Angola, and (surprisingly) the Vatican.
Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and a few other countries have no official age of consent. All sex outside of marriage is illegal. There is no official lower age limit for marriage, but the parents must give consent.
Tooth decay doesn’t kill you. And the radical cure (pulling the tooth) is nearly always effective, and was done even by prehistoric caveman societies.
Jousting was popular only for a fairly short period of history (1066-1600’s) and involved only a few nobles. Killing them off, even all of them, would have little effect on average life expectancy.
But bearing 19 children – that would kill you. Mostly the birthing of them, actually – complications of childbirth was a major cause of death for women at that time.
Well maybe the reason things have changed is b/c we now understand the psychological impact of older man and young girl pairing.
Thing is…I look back at when I was a young teen, and I cannot believe how freaking naive and young (mentally I was) I thought I knew everything…and I look back and I was a big dork back then!