Well, when I was a kid I had a beagle that, well if I saw her in a bar… :rolleyes:
Make the 10 year old a 14-15 year old post pubescent girl(or boy). That fits all of the previously mentioned criteria. Looks, acts, and purports to be an 18 year old in a bar with a real, if illegally obtained via fooling the DMV, driver’s license confirming it. Also, their parents, grandmother, and priest are there confirming, because they are drunk of course, that the girl is indeed 18. Then what? Still a pedophile?
Identity documents are commonly faked, and therefore do not prove anything.
So, any word on when the Kenyan Usurper will be vacating the White House?
Repeatedly demonstrated not to be a reliable generalization.
So, your argument rests upon the notion that a picture doesn’t look like the person it’s a picture of. (Or, more charitably, upon a failure to read and respond to the actual scenario presented.)
Your disbelief carries no more weight than a Bible-thumper’s refusal to believe that he was descended from any damn monkey, or that of a harder-thumping Bible-thumper’s refusal to believe that people in Australia are upside down.
Democracy: two wolves and a lamb voting on the dinner menu.
15 or 16 year olds passing as 18 year olds. Yes, that can happen, but that’s where I’m saying the adults (especially when you’re talking about guys in their 30’s or 40’s or older, not just college aged guys) have to take no chances. If she even looks like she might be underaged, steer clear (and if she’s young enough to actually BE underaged, she’s young enough to look like she might be).
Everyone knows that ID’s are not reliable ways to check age, so I think it’s disingenuous to suggest that if a guy relies solely on that for a girl he doesn’t know, that he’s doing everything he can. He’s going through the motions, but he’s not really trying.
Due diligence in law does not require “doing everything he can”. It merely requires doing everything a reasonable and prudent person might be expected to do.
(And, no, you don’t get to stretch “reasonable and prudent” to mean “one-night stands offend me, so the bar shall be set high enough to make them impossible”.)
Some young girls dress to look older. Some older women dress to look younger. People mature at different rates and have different experiences. How someone looks or how they act or how they talk aren’t perfect guides to age.
Documents can be faked with varying degrees of accuracy.
Citing what the law says is irrelevent in a discussion about what the law should be.
What most of the people in this thread seem to be saying is that the law should allow a “reasonable person” defense in this case. That doesn’t mean everyone can just say “I didn’t know”, it just means that they should have an attempt to convince a jury of their peers that a reasonable person would think the girl is of legal age.
Is there an age where this should not be allowed? I’d say no but I’d be really skeptical that it could be successful for many girls below 15. But it someone could convince a jury that a reasonable person would have thought that ten year old was older than the age of consent, they should be found not guilty.
It is entirely relevant, but you can’t put a number on it. That is what the jury is for. Nobody here has said it is okay to have sex with minors, merely that the accused should be able to plead their case in court. If some creep has sex with a 5 year old, he is going to jail for a long time 100% of the time, I can’t imagine a jury in the country that would say otherwise. If, on the other hand, a pre-20s college kid is fooled, via a large number of ways presented in this thread, into thinking a person is above the age of consent, when they aren’t, and has sex with them that college kid should be able to plead his case in court. My opinion on their guilt is not relevant, but they should have the opportunity to be heard and should have a legitimate chance of being found not guilty.
Well, then, what do you mean by your repeated use of the abbreviation “ID”?
Repeatedly supported by citation of examples, up to and including photographic evidence.
Let’s try this again, refreshing everyone’s memory about the points to which you are attempting to respond:
Extra points for explaining in detail how one is supposed to recognize these fake IDs as fakes, given that they were produced on the same machinery as any other ID and bear the photo of the people holding them.
Limited government under rule of law would be nice.
I once knew a girl (the niece by marriage of “one of my boys” after he grew up) who on her 13th birthday could easily have convinced any particiant here she was 15 – and, owing to an absent and uncaring father and an emotionally abusive stepfather, she was “buying caring with sex” from older boys regularly. Long and sad story, with an eventual happy ending. But I submit it as an item of anecdotal evidence.
Another one is someone I could, with a little effort, introduce anyone who cared to come to this area even now. As some of you know, my wife and I shared a home for the previous ten months with one of her coworkers, a widow with two teenage children and a ward. One of her son’s friends was aged 15 (now 16), was 6’3", built like a football lineman, and looked very much like he was 18. Indeed, having seen him shirtless during the summer, I can vouch for the development of his musculature being late-teen rather than mid-teen in maturation level. If this boy had handed you a fake ID claiming he was 18, I guarantee none of you would have been skeptical of it based on his looks.
It was one of the small ironies of that family and its friends that the boy described above shared a rather unusual given name with another friend, a year younger (14) than he, who was in his father’s custody after being rescued from his crack-addict mother – and owing to her having used crack while carrying him in the womb, he appeared to be about 11 physically – though his personality was emphatically 14, engaging, charming con artist variation.
The point behind telling these anecdotes, of course, is that they represent somewhat extreme cases of the truism that in adolescence, appearance is no guide to true age – not even as a trigger to skepticism.
It looked to me like you were drawing a distintion between ID cards and other forms of documentation. I already said ID cards are unreliable, so don’t rely in them.
The photographs were no persuasive to me. The children in those photos all clearly looked like children to me.
I fail to see your point here. Anecdotal evdience about people borrowing other people’s ID? So what? those ID photos did noty look like the people who were borrowing them.
Where does the government come from and who writes the law?
Only a fucking idiot would say there aren’t problems with Democracy, but as has been said by someone, it is the least worst option thus far. But that’s by the by.
The subject here is your refusal to accept that an adult can ever be fooled by a minor into believing they are older than they are.
Lots of us here, including a couple of medical professionals, reckon they can, and you are trying to fend us off with indignation and incredulity.
Yeah, and the fossil record is not persuasive to the guys who wrote Answers in Genesis. So?
OK, perhaps third time is the charm:
When I was 16, my best friend at the time (also 16) took his 21 y.o. brother’s birth certificate without his brother’s knowledge, went to the DMV, and got his picture on a license with his brother’s stats on it.
I had a friend in high school who used his cousin’s expired license to get a fresh, new NYS driving license with his photo, but his cousin’s infromation. It wasn’t a fake ID at all; it was a bona fide, government issued ID, that just happened to be obtain through fraud.
you’ve been shown repeatedly that it’s entirely possible to have a fake ID that has a picture of the person it’s a fake ID for
I’m saying I don’t find it credible for 10 or 11 year olds, or some of the other ludicrous hypotheticals posed in this thread. 15 or 16 year olds, maybe, but I still don’t care in those cases. It’s still the adult’s crime, not the child’s.
That’s why I said you don’t rely on ID’s at all. You would have a point if I’d said to check ID. I didn’t. I said ID’s are worthless and checking them is no protection.
Well, then, we’re back to the fact that your logic makes “Barack Obama was born in Kenya” as respectable a position as “Barack Obama was born in Hawaii”.
