I told my kids not to win the lottery for more than $1 million. And they didn’t. Your theory hereby proved false.
I thought they changed that to, “What I’d like is I’d like to hug and kiss you.”
Yeah, the argument basically is that they can’t consent because that’s what the law says. But then if a law was passed saying that pi=4 or that the world is less than ten thousand years old, does that make those statements true? Perhaps it does, within the confines of a court of law. But you can’t change reality by just legislating it away.
Is there any medical or psychological research demonstrating some way to measure capability to consent to sex? It would be interesting if children could undergo some sort of psychological and/or medical evaluation for maturity and be individually deemed capable or incapable of consenting to sex. Eventually, the law could recognize that and say that yes, children who have been deemed capable by a doctor are, in fact, capable of legally valid consent.
Yes, fully implementing this would be a social and political landmine, and isn’t likely. But I’m interested if doctors have had anything to say other than simply pointing to the law.
The age of consent varies between 15 and 18 year old, which shows that there is no magical age everybody can agree upon.
Children can consent to sex with other children of comparable age; or, for the sake of any venue where that isn’t specifically established as the law of the land, that is how it SHOULD be.
Children can’t consent to sex with ADULTS because there is a power differential that makes it impossible to prevent coercion via intimidation, undue influence, quid pro quo considerations, and other aspects of a massively unequal playing ground.
To quote Burke, the existence of dawn and twilight doesn’t mean that there is no difference between day and night.
That’s the false premise in the OP that everyone just accepted. It’s not true. See posts 38 and 46.
Sure. The facts on the ground seem to say that anyone below 15 yo cannot be mentally ready to consent, and anyone above 18 is definitely ready to make that decision.
I suppose I’d pretty much agree with that. Where we draw the line in between the two depends on how cautious we want to be.
Not sure what “on the ground” means, but cite?
I challenge anyone to give an example of even one single study that shows a connection between adults engaging in non-violent sexual activities with children and emotional trauma irrespective of cultural conditioning. The only thing that makes sex immoral is forcing someone into it against their will. There is no stage during human development when a child isn’t able to express willingness or unwillingness with whatever they’ve been brought to be involved in. There is no stage during human development when sexual feelings aren’t possible or cause distress. The issue of consent is often used to explain why children are not able to engage in sexual activity. It is such an unimaginative and obviously wrong belief. What would a scientific study even look like that investigated the claim that there was something about sex which required informed consent? The dumbest of wild beasts have sex. Do they need to provide informed consent? Saying that children can’t give informed consent to sex doesn’t mean they would be harmed unless they were informed. It doesn’t mean they couldn’t physically do it unless they were informed. It literally means that sexual activity has some kind of feature to it that requires those involved to be informed in order to give consent. What does that even mean? How would the scientific method be employed to investigate the truth value of such a statement? Sexual activity literally means the manner in which someone experiences or expresses sexual feelings. Informed consent isn’t a feature of sexual activity. In actuality, saying that a child can’t consent is a moral statement, and moral statements don’t produce testable predictions, which means they aren’t scientific. What makes you think that there is something about sexual activity which requires some deep level of understanding in order to be able to engage in it? Having an orgasm does not require understanding. Since when has a lack of understanding been a moral barrier to being educated about something? If a child doesn’t understand calculus, is it immoral to teach them math? If a child is not sophisticated enough to engage in the polemics of politics, should they be guarded from watching a political debate? If a child cannot understand complex theological arguments, should they not be permitted to partake in religious practices? After all, many religions believe that choosing the wrong faith will have permanently negative consequences lasting all of eternity. Can a child make an informed decision about that? The thing that’s so very perverse about the consent argument is that it purports to protect children from the physical harm and the unavoidable psychic harm that would befall them if they were subjected to the “horrors” of sexual activity. Children are taught from the earliest of ages that nakedness is wrong and that one’s own genitals and the genitals of others is absolutely not something to be explored. Any failure to obey the rule of no exploration is met with ever more severe punishment the longer the activity continues. There is nothing inherently harmful about the manipulation of one’s genitals or of another’s. The rule is a complete invention. And the result of its enforcement is learned trauma. Precisely the thing that is sought to be avoided by condemning and punishing pedophiles is exactly the thing that is brought about by doing so. If a child willingly engages in sexual activity, they will consequently experience the trauma that results from inevitably observing the social outrage wrought against pedophiles. Sadly, the result is not only deep psychic harm. Additionally, the impending threat of punishment for not expressing some deep sense of wrongness for involvement in the taboo becomes a manipulative force for causing the child to take up the misguided belief themselves that pedophilia is wrong. To not do so would result in becoming a pariah, the severity of which would become greater as they got older. It just is a true fact about the world that the attitudes and punishments in place for pedophilia causes real psychological harm for children that simply explore their sexuality because they want to. It especially causes them severe psychological distress if a parent or guardian is arrested for acts of pedophilia. The emotional manipulation that society enacts on children to force them to believe it’s wrong makes them hate that parent and then hate themselves for hating them who they feel a deep need to feel love towards and even more hate for themselves for having enjoyed the sexual feelings at the time. That psychological anguish is among the greatest a person can be capable of experiencing. It’s even greater than many examples of the anguish that comes from severe injury. I have to ask, who do people think they’re protecting in those cases by being an opponent of pedophilia? The children? Or themselves from the outrage they would receive from everyone around them for not thinking it was wrong? Everyone has been manipulated through threat of punishment and fear into believing pedophilia is wrong, not because they have considered the facts. I want to really drive home the message that fear and punishment is an overpowering force which so very many of us are slave to. It shapes our beliefs and rips from us control over them as surely as a candle flame burning the hand rips from us our control over mental composure. Anyone who has never listened to the personal account of someone who felt violated and traumatized by having sex as a child with an adult doesn’t know the power these emotional accounts have at invoking disgust and anger in those who hear them. Disgust and anger towards the person who did these things to this poor victim. These people talk about the pain of having to deal with the guilt and shame of it and with unbearable depression and anxiety and anger and how it has messed them up in the head and that they can no longer have a normal life. This sort of mental scarring and anguish can happen even when a child doesn’t object to sexual activity. It can happen just from sexual touching or even just from sexual propositions and nothing more. Here’s an example of just this very thing:
A call to my childhood rapist teacher
Very young children are not capable of understanding the consequences of sexual behavior. Nor do they need to in order to safely engage in it. Parents and caretakers are well-suited to guiding the actions of the children in their care so that they do not come to harm. Children are included in all kinds of potentially dangerous activities with their caretakers. For example: hiking and camping in the wilderness, handling firearms for sport, whitewater river rafting, rock climbing, skydiving (yes there are children who skydive, YouTube it), crossing the street, learning to ride a bicycle, riding in a car, going on amusement park rides, lighting firecrackers, playing the game of darts, swimming, walking through giant crowds of unfamiliar people in busy cities… etc. If you believed that the reason it was wrong for children to engage in sexual activities was because of potential dangers, well, you’d need to explain why you are okay with the very many other dangerous things kids do. What’s more dangerous: masturbation or swimming? In everything that people do, there is the risk of things going badly. That isn’t a good reason to avoid doing dangerous things like swimming and riding in cars. There is the opportunity for a richer and more fulfilling life by doing enjoyable things, even if very many of those things carry some amount of inherent risk. But some things carry far less risk than others. Viewing pornography and masturbation are among the least dangerous things in the world. You don’t have a problem with adults doing those two things with children, do you? Why would you? It’s not harmful. There isn’t anything about sexual activity that blinds a caretaker to its potential dangers anymore than any of the other normal human activities that people do everyday. Parents and caretakers are just as able to safeguard their children from STD’s and unwanted pregnancies and violent rapists as surely as they can safeguard their children from drowning and automobile accidents and getting lost in the wilderness and shooting themselves at firing ranges and getting kidnapped in giant crowds. It is not wrong to include children into a sexual culture and to encourage them to explore in their sexuality with family and friends. There is no stage during human development when sexual feelings aren’t possible or cause distress. Even masturbating an infant isn’t wrong. There is no age for which sexual activity is inappropriate. Radically liberal sexual freedom does not include any feature to it that would result in forcing a child against their will.
But of course, almost no one is going to consider the logic of any of this. Most anyone would just dig in and refuse to think intelligently. They’ll continue to hurt little kids so that they can avoid being vilified by everyone around them. They care more about themselves and their own safety than they do about the trauma of little children.
Children can consent to having sex… with other children of the same age, with the usual disclaimers that would apply to adult consent (no coercion, essentially).
In most jurisdictions, the above is treated as an anomalous exception to the general rule that children can’t consent to sex. That’s because, generally speaking, children don’t tend to initiate sex with each other. What is, instead, the more common occurrence when sex involving children is a possibility, is that some NONchild has expressed interest. And chyildren can’t consent to sex with someone significantly older, especially not an adult. And the reason for that is the power imbalance.
Next question?
Views on children have changed like crazy, back and forth and all over the map. The thing about humans is that we mature based on how we are socialized. there is nothing really inherent about children making them incapable of making a well informed decision in regards to sex or really any other topic. History shows huge variations in childhood maturity both physical and mental. We chose to keep children innocent and guarded, we idealize the image of purity that we have put on children and so we socialize children in a way that keeps them “pure”. In reality we could socialize children in a manner that would give them the same mental capacity and maturity of a thirty year old. Their are some factors of development that do play in to things however socialization largely exasperates those factors.
long story short kids cant consent because we dumb them down to play house longer.
Irrespective of cultural conditioning? Do you know of any studies showing that the psychological long-term health of those engaging in sexual activities as children with adults is similar to to those that haven’t in societies where sexual activities with children isn’t taboo (if any such societies exist)? Otherwise, isn’t your contention that children experience harm only due to society’s belief that pedophilia is wrong just a hypothesis?
Would you agree that since society is the way it is, it is wrong to directly engage in pedophilia, since as you admit, doing so will result in the children having psychological and emotional issues later in life?
Must be nice to set yourself up so that anyone who who disagrees with you, or challenges your “logic” (which is not surprisingly entirely lacking) is just automatically a selfish idiot.
But tl;dr. Are you actually arguing that fucking kids is beneficial to society?
There is a power imbalance in every single thing adults do with children. What reason can you give for why sexual activity is unique and thus sets it apart from other activities? Is it because there is the potential of injury? Children are involved in many dangerous things everyday like riding in a car or swimming. Children can die or be maimed for life from car accidents and drowning. Almost everything we do carries some risk of injury. Sexual activity isn’t some kind of complicated social contract that requires any type of technical knowledge about anything. It doesn’t require informed consent. Almost every single thing a child does is because they were introduced to it by an adult or by another child that ultimately learned it from an adult somewhere down the line in the history of the activity. Saying that children don’t tend to initiate sex with each other children doesn’t really prove any point that sex is therefore wrong for children to do. That’s merely the consequence of not being taught it if they are very young or because of the severe punishment that parents do to their kids when they find out they’ve been having sex with some friend from school or something similar. In general, there is a power imbalance between men and women. Does that mean sex is wrong between men and women? There is a power imbalance between a high up government official and a low class, no education disadvantaged person. Does that mean a senator can’t have sex with someone from the ghetto? Your reasoning doesn’t make for a very compelling case that there is something wrong with sexual activity between children and adults.
Sexual activity doesn’t require any form of competency. You don’t need sophistication or understanding of anything in order to have an orgasm. Tell me what’s immoral about using masturbation to calm a crying infant or to just create a bonding experience with them?
In the history of the Oceanic peoples (French Polynesian islands; Hawaiian islands) there were tribes that included very young children into there sexual culture. The famous explorer Captain James Cook recorded his observations of such things in his travel’s.
The reason children have psychological and emotional issues from pedophilia is because of punishment. I would not agree that something should be illegal for the reason “if you don’t do as I say you’ll be punished”.