A toddler can steal my tobbasco sauce without understanding the concept of theft.
But I still don’t have my damn hot sauce.
Why shouldn’t a seventeen year old girl have sex? What vast psychological damage is going to arise from a voluntary tryst with, say, a 27 year old man? (Who she thinks is like, soooo cute)
And I’m not going to argue that definition–HOWEVER, a successfully perpetrated fraud by a teenager (I refuse to use the term “children” here, and will be discussing the easily plausible scenario of a 17-yr-old in a bar) obviously removes the requisite mens rea from an adult who has sex with said teenager.
I also reject the premise that an adult having ostensibly consensual (as teenagers cannot give legal consent) sex with a teenager necessarily damages the teenager, ESPECIALLY in the case being argued here where said teenager is deliberately seeking out sexual partners.
While I am willing to accept QtM’s assertion that it’s possible in the rare edge case for 11-yr-olds to look of legal age, I’m iffy about that being a cutoff. On the other hand, if there is provable intent to deceive on the part of a teenager above the age of 14 (arbitrary cutoff picked both for increasing difficulty in credibly falsified age and for it being the lower cutoff for Romeo and Juliet laws in my state IIRC) then that should be a valid, statutory affirmative defense on the part of a person who had sex with said teen.
She would be getting exploited by a scumbag.
It’s really more the under 16 year olds I’m worried about, though.
The mens rea is in knowingly taking a risk that he is sticking his dick in a child.
OK, everyone seems to love the hypotheticals here; 16 year-old girl lives in a state where age of consent is 15; her family moves across state borders to a place where age of consent is 18; she has been having sex with her 17 year-old boyfriend for over a year now. So if they have sex in the original state, both are emotionally mature, cognitively developed adults, but if they have sex in the new place they are both “children” without the ability to understand anything emotional, cognitive, or otherwise? Are they both pedos now?
I am not a teenage girl. But I know plenty who have cognitive abilities. I think there is evidence of teenage chimps with more acknowledged cognitive ability than Dio will give human teens credit for.
And for Crom’s sake, stop using the asinine emotional appeal of calling minors as old as 17 cognitively and emotionally incapable “children” while accepting “adults” as having none of those impairments. Hell, I’ve dated 34 year-old women that seem to lack emotional awareness. Where is your arbitrary cutoff line for the development of physical, emotional, AND cognitive maturity? And why do you seem to insist that anyone who finds a physically mature 15 year-old attractive is a filthy child-fucker in the making? I suspect you have issues that are clouding your judgment.
All 27 year old males are scumbags? I knew I was at the time (for the precise span of one year, not a day more or less), but I hadn’t realized it was a condition held by the entirety of my gender.
Or are you just assering that 27 year old who try to sleep with women they believe to be 22 are scumbags? Or perhaps any 27 year old male who fails to hire a detective to investigate the woman first?
The only way to be certain is to spend at least ten years getting to know her first - and then it’s only the delay that can give you confidence, not your familiarity with the woman.
The really strange part here is that you still are claiming not to be opposed to casual consensual sex between 20 year olds. That’s like saying that you don’t mind when people walk across streets - but by god only criminal scumbags would ever walk on pavement or asphalt. You simply can’t have one without having the other.
Didn’t you just last page say that porn wasn’t harmful to kids?
That claim turned out to be bullshit
I pretty much agree with Dio; in practice the age of consent laws are probably wrong… in practice I’ve only heard of them being applied in egregious cases of blatant paedophilia. Bill Wyman had the inestimable pleasure of bonking a 14 year old Mandy Smith and no one minded. Maybe this is different in the US. Probably is.
Compare and contrast with our previous government’s new laws against “extreme” porn, which so far has got one guy sent to court for a cartoon of Tony the Tiger getting up to some tricks.
No, I’m not making this up 
It’s not. When did I say that it was? I was telling the facts of a particular case, not pronouncing any judgements about porn. If you think it’s proof that porn is bad for kids, that’s your conclusion, not mine.
All 27 year olds who fuck children are scumbags.
This is bullshit.
Could not possibly care any less.
I find it amusing that a 17YO, or even a 15YO for that matter, who’s got a convincing fake ID and is hanging out at bars is going to suffer great damage by fucking a 27YO. If the girl is damaged, I suspect it likely happened much earlier. The notion that a 15YO can’t be mature enough to understand what she’s doing is silly.
I don’t think you should be debating this when you apparently don’t know what *mens rea *means.
It’s impossible to have a criminal mindset if you are neither intending to commit nor aware that you are committing a crime.
It’s not an arbitrary line. It’s a biological fact that the areas of the human brain responsible for judgement, controlling impulsivity and understanding consequences are not fully mature until the age of 21 or 22.
Just because the chick has tits doesn’t mean she has an adult brain. She doesn’t. That’s not an opinion, it’s a demonstrable, physiological fact.
Or if you are a child incapable of understanding the consequences.
It’s not a crime for a child to “seduce” an adult anyway.
9 pages of this?
does anyone else expect to see a news story with Dio getting off a plane with some underage girl and excuses of how he needed help “lifting his luggage”
this debate seems to have been long over with, the only dissent being Dio.
I thought there was supposedly a warning about this kind of bullshit.
I guarantee you, nothing like this will ever happen.
you have spent the better part of 9 pages insulting every single person who doesnt agree with your personal point of view, there is no debate here at all. just a ton of reasonable people and you.
That’s fine, no one’s saying it is.
I note you conveniently ignored the relevant section of my posting.
To amplify this: an adult sleeping with a person they fully and reasonably believe is over 18 completely lacks mes rea.
Your contention that it’s impossible to be unwittingly deceived (“I am never wrong”) is of no relevance here as it is unsupported by any data. Your contention that IDs are invalid forms of age verification, when they are legally considered to be such, is also of no relevance here.
Do you honestly believe that a teenager who has decided of their own free will to engage in sexual activities with people older than themself, and in fact is faking documentation for that express purpose, is going to be “damaged” by that sexual contact? No one is talking about any scenario where the teen is being coerced or forced–regardless of their inability to fully comprehend their own decision’s ramifications, they are still the ones making that decision and further making the decision to obstruct people of good intentions from finding out their age.