benji wrote:Then you'd need two different age of consent laws, one for entering contracts and one specifically for sexual activity.
That seems to me to be the best way to do it, given the criminal penalties involved with sexual activity that simply aren't there when contracting a 12 year old to mow your lawn.
3. We have situations where two 7 year olds and two 11 year olds and so on are being charged with criminal sexual conduct when there is no possible way they can understand the laws they are violating and there is no reasonable case that can truly be brought against them as to them BOTH violating the rights of the other.
This one also comes back to the register, which people are being placed on for the 'crime' of being sexually attracted to people their own age. For some reason, all the concessions granted to minors in all other aspects of law fly out the window with sex crimes.
Jae wrote:Is this common enough to warrant a change of laws?
Isn't once more than enough? How many lives have to be ruined before we consider changing the law that's ruining them? Again, for the "crime" of
being sexually attracted to people their own age.
15 is not ok anywhere.
By what non-arbitrary standard?
Even if you consider it arbitrary, the only thing stopping that sort of shit happening more than it already does is the age limit.
But if it's arbitrary, there's no reason why it happening is a bad thing. The age of consent could arbitrarily be raised to 28, if enough people think people over that age shouldn't be having sex with people under that age. It's completely meaningless.
The difference between a 20 year old being preyed on by a 50 year old and a 15 year old being preyed on by a 20 year old is that the said 20 year old in both cases has sufficient life experience to be able to make their own decisions i.e they've actually finished puberty for a start.
You'd be surprised how early puberty begins and ends these days. The fact remains that I've met 15 year olds with far more maturity than some 20 year olds, so a blanket law like that simply doesn't make sense.
I just refuse to believe that by and large, girls (or guys) who have pretty much gone from being children and are now going through puberty or whatever are capable of understanding and fully consenting to a normal healthy relationship with someone who is considered an adult.
What difference does it make that they're considered an adult? How is two fifteen year olds dating really all that different to a fifteen and twenty year old dating? In most cases, I'd suggest either the older party is incredibly immature or the younger party is incredibly mature (or some degree of each), or they wouldn't be interested in each other in the first place.
Yes there are morons who could be 30 and still not understand and consent to a normal healthy relationship with someone but that's more down to the stupidity of the individual, not necessarily the fact that the person hasn't been alive long enough to even understand what that sort of relationship would involve.
Why wouldn't a 15 year old's lack of understanding be down to that individual, too? Even if 99% of them are that retarded, that doesn't mean they're the ones involved.
Victimless act? So if some 35 year old guy figures out that by buying a 15 year old presents and telling her he loves her can get her to strip off and do whatever for him, she is not a victim? She's hardly old enough to understand that he doesn't actually have any interest in her outside of physical
Who are you to know what he wants and what she expects? If he actually
is interested in her, or if all she wants is sex, nobody's getting hurt.
and at that age could very well be the first male to ever show any interest in her.
Most people these days (at least those who would be involved in a situation like this) start dating/being interested in one another when they're 11 or 12.
When he said "getting hurt" I assumed that to mean physically btw.
Physically or psychologically, the same criteria that should be used for all laws. I won't go so far as to say emotionally, because that could give every girl I've ever rejected reason to press charges, and I'd never get out of jail.
The thing is though, there'll never be a foolproof way of handling this.
So? It will never be perfect, so let's not even fix what we easily can?
Especially when you have different ages of consent from state to state, which is completely ridiculous. That is bordering on entrapment, because someone could easily go from a state where 16 is the age to somewhere where it's 18 and suddenly they're in jail. As I mentioned before there are cases where that doesn't apply but I can see how people could get screwed over by that particular system.
I'm one of those who looks less at the fairness of the law or the application of it to individuals etc and more at the "why the fuck is a 25 year old dating a 16 year old?" side of things.
But it
should be about the fairness of the law and its application, not any arbitrary moral standard. That's how homosexuality becomes illegal.
benji wrote:You could (and would I assume) say he "encourages" the production through his third-hand consumption of it, but that's a slippery slope in my opinion if you start criminalizing things on the basis of what they "encourage" through a secondary consumption route. What couldn't you criminalize? Everything is in the ether "encouraging" criminal acts. My having fancy clothes and a fancy car "encourages" that guy to rob me. Let's criminalize fancy clothes and fancy cars!
Poor analogy. That logic leads to criminalisation of having children, not of possessing child pornography. Possession of child pornography obtained through channels other than the person in the pornographic material is the area I have most trouble with here.
"age sufficiently past puberty"
Past the onset of puberty, or past the end of puberty?
And because sexual predation on children is the most hated act after murdering a child you're not going to see many situations where a 21 year old who had sex with a mature and blossomed 14 year old gets off without at least a fine and that thing I can't think of the phrase for, where you pick up trash on the highway. But he also wouldn't have a permanent criminal record that blocks him from living places and getting employment. And there's no way for example that 35/15 guy would.
You could also easily grant judges the authority to elevate a case to criminal conduct. So if that 35 year old guy does it once he gets the fine and work time, but if he keeps showing up in-front of the judge or the act was deemed sufficiently heinous, it can be elevated to a criminal case.
I think the biggest change that needs to be made, and I mention this in my blog, is putting the sex offender's registry in the hands of the judge/jury. As it is right now, if you have sex with someone under the age of 13 in Australia, you're automatically on the register. Regardless of your own age (12), her age (12) or the age she said she was (13).
Jae wrote:I guess from my standpoint the reason to punish that guy would be to try and deter him from taking his interest any further than downloading crap from Limewire. I mean there's obviously no way to predict if he would have or not, but a pretty good way to guarantee that he doesn't is to get him in the system in some capacity and hope that being punished for just obtaining those images or whatever would stop him wanting to progress these fetishes any further than he already has.
I'd rather a paedophile watch child pornography than, knowing he's going to jail and the registry for the rest of his life regardless of his crime, figure that he might as well actually rape a child. I'm not sure if there have been any sort of studies done on it, but I'd imagine paedophilia to be much the same as any other fetish or sexual orientation - you're just born that way. Deter all you want, the urges will still be there and I'd rather give those people as many outlets as possible that aren't real prepubescent people.
The only grey area for me would be what constitutes "sufficiently past puberty" because people reach it/complete it at different ages
So why no acknowledgement of this in your blanket condemning of anyone having sex with anyone under 15?
