She would have been sufficiently protected from the 20-something boyfriend by laws saying no one more than 1.5 or 1.75 years older, or younger.
EDITED TO ADD: Or, rather, laws making it entirely illegal under 12 would not have offered her any additional protections.
Age of consent - 16 for the boy or girl. Which it is already in some states.
No more than 19 for the other partner. That is a three year gap and accounts for normal teenage romances that started in high school.
Suppose a sixteen year old dates a 14 year old. Why should he be forced to stop seeing her two years later when he turns 18? By then they are in a two year, steady relationship. Expecting them to break up because of a birthday is nuts.
The reason why most of us are ‘creeped out’ by older men dating girls under the age of consent is that the older man knows all the consequences of sex, while the younger girl is ignorant to it, and the consequences for females are much greater than those of males. It is dangerous and unnatural for a human female that young to become pregnant. For most of our evolutionary history, menarche didn’t occur until late teens/early 20s due to poor nutrition and the rigorous HG lifestyle. After the advent of farming, menarche dropped, but still remained above 15 until about 250 years ago, when it dropped sharply until its current age of around 12 (although it remains higher in other parts of the world.
As this website notes,
So girls younger than their late teens should not be having sex and getting pregnant. They are not prepared for it and they were not meant to be pregnant so young. Even in our modern age, pregnancy and childbirth are the leading causes of death of teenage girls in developing countries [cite]. Even in the US, pregnant teens are more likely to not get proper prenatal care; to have a higher risk of disorders such as hypertension, preeclampsia, and other disorders; and to deliver unhealthy offspring.
This doesn’t even cover all the STDs that could render her infertile or the societal ills that result from teen pregnancies. How many grown women are convinced by their same age partners to have sex without a condom? How much easier would it be for an older adult male to convince a teen girl to have sex without a condom? What interest could a 50 year old male have in a 15 year old girl other than sexual? How is that a healthy relationship? She’s a child. She shouldn’t be able to get pregnant.
Of course, this brings up the issue of a girl that young having sex with playmates. While I don’t think anyone under 12 should be having sex (the pregnancy risks are too dangerous to a human female), it is common and natural for children between 12 and 18 to engage in sexual play with similarly aged mates. Since humans, like other species which mostly forms pairbonds, engage in sexual play with age mates when young, punishing them for engaging in sex with age mates doesn’t help the problem and is just fighting our natural instincts.
I’m wholly in agreement, but sadly US society seems to view sex as something special and magical and just dismissing it as (sometimes) sex play between curious and hormone-driven teens isn’t something they tend to do. If they people having sex play equate it with love and a special kind of bonding then having a set of laws or regulations allowing people to just casually play with each other isn’t going to work.
Try that in Europe and you’d probably get somewhere.
Just thought of another reason. When an older male takes on a younger female partner (we’ve not seen the societal effects of the reverse widespread), generally, it isn’t as if he fails to take on partners when he was that age. So, for example, in America, a 50 year old man was also dating younger girls at the younger stages and it’s unlikely that the younger men are seeking out older women in his age range. So, in effect, he’s cock blocking the girl’s generation of males. On the individual level, this is no big deal, but when you regularly allow this to happen, it results in large numbers of sexually frustrated young teenage males. Studies have shown that the number of young men denied sexual partners is positively correlated with violence. In societies with high levels of polygyny, most of the excess males are disposed of through war.
Furthermore, the only reason young females would be attracted to much older males (outside of psychological issues) would be because the older males have managed to acquire wealth and they live in a social structure where the female is dependent on the male for wealth. This results in huge social inequalities and is a terrible system for the females. If you look at the history of the United States, you’ll note that the women’s right movement is greatly helped by the dismantling of the system which required women to depend on men for resources. We’re still stuck in that system a bit, but we’re slowly emerging on it and you can see the age gap between partners reducing. For example, the difference in age at first marriage within the US dropped from 4 to 2 in the last 100 years. Cite
The age of 15-16 (16 is preferable though) should be the de jure age, but the de facto age should be 18 since there are tons of other legal issues you can run into even when the age of consent is 16 since so many of our other laws revolve around being 18 or older (taking someone under 18 on a drive w/o informing their parents could be considered kidnapping as an example. Sleeping with a 16 year old may be legal, but taking naked photos would be manufacturing child porn. Plus despite the AoC being 16 in most states, the federal AoC is 18, so I have no idea what happens if you cross state lines and have sex).
The whole concept of a power imbalance is kindof silly and arbitrary to me. A 16 year old and an 18 year old are both fairly equal wrt maturity in many ways when they are compared with someone in their 50s. But in one instance it may be legal and in the other not for the 50 year old to be in a relationship with one or the other.
But 16 as the legal age, 18 as the de facto age and laws being aware of all the gray areas that can arise (women who obtain fake IDs and lie about their age, romeo and juliet laws, etc).