To say that minors cannot consent is absolutely horrifying to me. I would have felt ‘raped’ of my free agency to choose if I had been told as a minor that I ‘cannot consent’.
I was a minor. I consented. I was a sexual being just as I was a human being. Minors have to do non sexual adult things ALL the time. I still see adults well into their 40s and 50s who are immature compared to me when I was a minor. So age is a non-factor.
While I DO acknowledge that child sexual abuse occurs as does trafficking and that paedophiles exist out there, when my thoughts and actions and consent when I was a minor is ERASED and my decisions deemed irrelevant, I don’t know how to feel about it.
Reactions in the exact order of how I felt when I read ‘Minors cannot consent’ : Confusion. Anger. Understanding. Annoyance. Anger.
Some minors do adult non sexual things and make adult non sexual decisions all the time..sometimes because they don’t have a choice. Why is it that when it comes to sexual consent, the same minor does not have any agency?
I am trying to understand. It is difficult for me to accept that I am a non-being as a minor.
Please don’t start a flame war. I really want to understand why this is so and communicate as to why the blanket ‘minors cant consent’ is disempowering and has not really made the world a better safer place.
I also want to know what is a better and more effective solution to child sexual abuse(or any kind of sexual abuse) to replace ‘minors cannot consent’.
It isn't that minors are non-beings - it is that they're not fully developed yet, so they need protections. Where we draw that line is up to the law and culture of any location, but it exists.
When we are minors, we are mentally deficient to be sexual beings. When we are adults, we are also told that we have no control or reproductive choice over what we do with bodies.
I hate to sound like this..because I don’t think of myself as a vocal feminist..I have always considered myself a rational being.
With that hat on, it seems to me that the female human being has no choice or agency and their physical bodies are mere vessels for the male of the species to fornicate, procreate and to be generally unobtrusively abiding by the rules made by the opposite gender.
That’s very upsetting to me.
I could tell a five year old that if they do something Santa will bring them gifts. That could be something completely reprehensible but they have no sense of right and wrong besides what I might tell them at that age.
At age ten, they are more capable of deciding that on their own. As you get older you become better at that and more autonomous. But at a young age the only things you know are what adults tell you is true. That's an extreme amount of power the adult has.
At some point we call people adults because we expect them to now have this responsibility and decide for themselves what they think is best for them because at a certain age we believe a majority of those young people should be autonomous. But that age is a guess and fairly arbitrary. Is it 17? 18? Probably somewhere around there. Is it 5? Nope.
So you have to draw the line somewhere. It sucks if you're an incredibly mature 16 year old, but if you are, then waiting two years to have sex with someone much older than you shouldn't be an overwhelming burden if the social benefit is greater for those less mature or in potentially abusive situations.
I see no problem at all with a rational, vocal feminist. Many people enter the latter category after considering the issue with rationality. It would be insulting towards those people to assume they didn't enter into it rationally.
Being young is not a mental deficiency. There are 17 year olds smarter than a legion of 70 year olds will ever be. Saying all young people have a mental deficiency has no bearing on reality.
I don't event want to weigh in on the age of consent debate here, I've just always hated the constant shitting on young people and their intellect just because their young. I hated it when I was young and grown adults who weren't that smart were clearly threatened by me, and I still hate it now that I'm older.
So you can say that 17 year old exceeds some adults and it may be true, but current neurological science suggests that 17 year old has not yet reached their full mental capacity.
Suddenly I remember why teenage years were so hard.
The natural next question is, "where's the line?" A 20 year old and a two year old is obviously wrong, but a 25 year old and a 75 year old seems okay, if a bit weird. And yes, not every person the same age has the same amount of experience and maturity.
But here's the thing: the law can't take that into account. The law needs a bright and clear line, so you can know how not to break it. And so even though there's not really a difference between 17 years 364 days vs. 18 years, one can consent to sex with an adult while the other cannot. Just like one day makes the difference between being able to vote, or drink, or get a driver's license.
Is a measure of puberty sufficient to give consent? I am not saying that it is..but perhaps it’s closer to a better situation.
Older societies had coming of age ceremonies and welcoming pre pubescents into young adulthood. Perhaps there was more value in the old traditions and rituals that we have given up in our modern times. It clarified to a young adult the changes that happen physically and hormonally..an opportunity to talk about things and take personal responsibility. A responsibility that means freedom as well as risk.
I am just throwing this out there..we have handed over societal bonding over to the state and legal system. It has certainly made us weak. And allowed more predation of the truly vulnerable while curtailing the freedom of those who are aware of risks and responsibilities.
> Is a measure of puberty sufficient to give consent? I am not saying that it is..but perhaps it’s closer to a better situation.
The problem is, how do we measure "sufficient"?
If we just mean people's opinions, we can be more nuanced — for example, I think a grown person who has sex with an 18 year old is just as gross as one who has sex with a 17 year old, but I don't have an exact line in my head as to when it would become okay. Everyone's exact line will differ, and that's okay too!
On the other hand, if the law is trying to measure "sufficient", then we need something objective because people need to know when they would be breaking it. "Puberty" is pretty squishy — for example, do we count when a boy's voice deepens? When he starts growing facial hair? Whereas if we measure an objective fact like age, then if I know that fact I can be 100% sure whether or not I'm allowed to have sex with this person.
I agree with you that age an imperfect measure of maturity, which is what we really care about. But it seems to be the best measure we can come up with that's both objective and correlated.
Why?
> The law needs a bright and clear line, so you can know how not to break it.
Why does that need a "bright and clear line"? There are plenty of things that are illegal where there is no "bright and clear line" in that same sense, and that seems to work just fine, and actually even better in many cases. Like, I dunno, tax fraud is in principle tax fraud even at a single cent, but it's absolutely not "you paid all the taxes you owed, you are fine, you under-reported one cent of your income, now you lose your job and go to jail".
> And so even though there's not really a difference between 17 years 364 days vs. 18 years, one can consent to sex with an adult while the other cannot.
Which seems to be the case. Now, why is that a good approach?
> Just like one day makes the difference between being able to vote, or drink, or get a driver's license.
So, maybe we should fix those as well? Why shouldn't you get a fractional vote starting at age 10, increasing linearly to a full vote at 18, say?
There is absolutely a bright and clear (albeit very complicated) line for tax fraud. The IRS probably won't go after you if you underpay by a penny — but you're still breaking the law if you do it intentionally.
>> And so even though there's not really a difference between 17 years 364 days vs. 18 years, one can consent to sex with an adult while the other cannot.
> Which seems to be the case. Now, why is that a good approach?
Because — with regard to statutory rape — if I know someone's age I can be 100% sure whether or not I would be breaking the law by having sex with them.
In other words: There isn't a bright and clear line?
> The IRS probably won't go after you if you underpay by a penny — but you're still breaking the law if you do it intentionally.
In other words: There isn't a bright and clear line?
Like, you are claiming that there is, and then provide the evidence that there isn't. All you are showing is that there is something that you want to call a "bright and clear line", but then you don't show anything in reality that actually matches that description in any meaningful sense.
> Because — with regard to statutory rape — if I know someone's age I can be 100% sure whether or not I would be breaking the law by having sex with them.
OK, so suppose we were to make the rule that if you under-report your income by any amount, whether intentionally or not, whether knowingly or not, you go to jail for ten years. That would be a bright and clear line, right? If you know that you reported all your income, you can be 100% sure whether you are going to jail. Why wouldn't that be a good approach? Or would it be?
>> There is absolutely a bright and clear (albeit very complicated) line for tax fraud.
> In other words: There isn't a bright and clear line?
There is. A “bright and clear line” means a test is objective, not that it’s simple [1].
>> The IRS probably won't go after you if you underpay by a penny — but you're still breaking the law if you do it intentionally.
> In other words: There isn't a bright and clear line?
There is. Just because something is not consistently enforced doesn’t mean it’s not clearly illegal. Cops may not fine you if they see you jaywalking, but you’re still unambiguously breaking the law if you cross the street outside of the crosswalk.
> OK, so suppose we were to make the rule that if you under-report your income by any amount, whether intentionally or not, whether knowingly or not, you go to jail for ten years. That would be a bright and clear line, right? If you know that you reported all your income, you can be 100% sure whether you are going to jail. Why wouldn't that be a good approach? Or would it be?
Most crimes (although not statutory rape) require intent to be shown [2]. No justice system is perfect; innocent people get convicted and guilty people go unpunished. A good law should allow people to unambiguously know when they would break it.
Except you were obviously not using the phrase in that sense? There is absolutely no contradiction between "objective" and "taking into account many details of the individual case". There is absolutely no problem with writing a law that objectively specifies that the punishment for "17 years and 364 day" is going to be only marginally worse than for "18 years", for example, which you used as an example for why a "bright and clear line" would be necessary, and that that would mean that you have to have to have a strict cut-off point between hard punishment and no punishment at all.
> There is. Just because something is not consistently enforced doesn’t mean it’s not clearly illegal. Cops may not fine you if they see you jaywalking, but you’re still unambiguously breaking the law if you cross the street outside of the crosswalk.
In other words: There isn't. If you are breaking the law, but there are pretty reliably no consequences, in which sense are you then breaking the law that would be relevant to this discussion?
> Most crimes (although not statutory rape) require intent to be shown [2].
In other words: For most crimes, there is less of a "bright and clear line", and things generally seem to be working well, or even better. So, how is that a justificaton for having more of a "bright and clear line"?
> No justice system is perfect; innocent people get convicted and guilty people go unpunished.
Well ... sure? I am not sure why you mention that?!
> A good law should allow people to unambiguously know when they would break it.
I am not sure I would agree with that. I mean, yes, ideally, people should be able to know in advance what would constitute breaking a given law and what would not, sure. But the problem I see is that this ideal goal is in conflict with other goals of a legal system, such as being just. And "bright and clear lines" in the sense in which you are using the phrase tend to have very nasty side effects in that regard, because they massively increase the probability that honest mistakes that harm noone are punished the same as premeditated harming of another human, but also that someone intentionally doing harm that just so happens to be on the legal side of the "bright and clear line" goes unpunished.
So, I would agree that laws should be as objective as possible in describing what is illegal. But at the same time, circumstances should always be considered so as to avoid injustice that results from overly simplistic rules being applied. That doesn't mean that judges should make arbitrary decisions, though, in that there is no problem with at least attempting to codify the details of how to justly judge individual cases rather than settling for the simplest rule possible. While you might never be able to codify all the possible things to consider, that does not mean that the only other option is to make a simplistic rule.
Let me quote you:
> But here's the thing: the law can't take that into account. The law needs a bright and clear line, so you can know how not to break it. And so even though there's not really a difference between 17 years 364 days vs. 18 years, one can consent to sex with an adult while the other cannot.
So ... your argument was what exactly? That the law could not possibly spell out a more complicated rule than "below 18 is illegal", because ... it is impossible to do so in the English language? Or what?
As it happens, statutory rape law is already more complicated than a cutoff at 18. There are often exemptions for people who are married, or close in age. But the line is still objective — a “bright and clear line”, so to speak.
If that is what you meant to say, you really didn't explain that well in your original comment, as you explicitly claimed that the law could not take details into account, rather than that it should specifically avoid subjective criteria. After all, it is perfectly possible to take into account the fact that not all people of the same age have the same maturity without resorting to subjective criteria--such as by making the transition from legal to illegal sufficiently smooth in terms of possible punishment that the punishment statistically scales with the probability of the sexual interaction being with an immature person: While that obviously does not perfectly match the consequences to the actual maturity of each individual, it would give a much better correspondence between punishment and the abusiveness of the relationship overall than a hard cut-off, while still being based on objective criteria.
Now, you are right that the law is actually usually more complicated than a single hard cut-off, but it seems that it's often still doing a poor job due to lack of nuance.
We don't give 12-year-olds a 2/3 fractional vote because a) that introduces a ton of complexity for not much gain, and because b) children are essentially legally "owned" by their parents so the odds of their compulsion to vote a certain way rise dramatically. (Some people didn't want to give women suffrage last century because they figured it would just double the exact ratio of the existing men's vote tallies. And now a century later we have wives that still vote only to please their husband.)
Some things might work -- I don't think this would fly in the US but maybe you could allow 19-year-olds to buy beer (not liquor) like in some states in the 70s.
But how does that work for kids and sex? You want to embed the "first base, second base" junior high sex metaphor into the LAW? A 19-year-old can fondle a 16-year-old's breasts but not her genitals?
Again: "bright" and "clear" have legal and common-sense context here.
Which might be true or not, but in any case does not support the claim that it is somehow inherently impossible.
> and because b) children are essentially legally "owned" by their parents so the odds of their compulsion to vote a certain way rise dramatically.
Well, no, children are not in any sense of the word owned by their parents. Compulsion should not be possible in any sane voting system, as elections are secret. What remains is that chances are that the younger a person, the more their parents tend to have influence over their decisionmaking, which might be a reason to limit their ability to vote accordingly. But you might have noticed that people don't switch from "no clue how to make an independent decision" to "completely mature and independent" on their 18th birthday? So, if your goal is to limit their political influence according to their independence/maturity, why is a hard cut-off at 18 the best solution?
> Some people didn't want to give women suffrage last century because they figured it would just double the exact ratio of the existing men's vote tallies.
Which is obviously a bullshit argument? You don't want to change who can vote because you fear that it won't change the result of the election? And the solution is to make sure that the result of the election doesn't change? Wut?
> And now a century later we have wives that still vote only to please their husband.
See above, secret ballot and all that.
> But how does that work for kids and sex?
Well, the claim was that the difference between "17 years and 364 days" and "18 years" was not a meaningful difference in reality (I would agree), but that somehow it was impossible to make a law that takes that into consideration, and so we don't have any other choice but to have a law that maps one of those to no consequences at all while the other is life-ruining. Which is obviously bullshit, as you obviously trivially can make a law that specifies that the punishment, say, linearily increases from none at 18 years to whatever the maximum is at 14 or whatever. That would be perfectly objective criteria that statistically map much better to the actual lack of maturity of the victim, without any hard cut-off where insignificant differences in the facts of the matter (and thus honest mistakes) result in massively diverging consequences.
> The law needs a bright and clear line, so you can know how not to break it.
But that isn’t true in reality for kids/adults close in age, nor is it a fixed line for every jurisdiction in the states. You actually have to know the law.
> But that isn’t true in reality for kids/adults close in age, nor is it a fixed line for every jurisdiction in the states. You actually have to know the law.
Of course you have to know the law. But the law is well-defined, and you can figure out with 100% certainty whether you'd be breaking local statutory rape laws given your age and your partner's.
I suppose it's possible that there exists an unclear statutory rape law somewhere in the world, but most laws are written to avoid ambiguity. Can you cite a U.S. statutory rape law where it would be ambiguous whether or not sex qualifies as rape given the parties' ages?
Anyways, given that the girl Minsky allegedly slept with was 17, I’m not sure why the underage argument came into play at all given what I know about federal law, at least. But then IANAL. Anyways, all the articles I’ve read about Minsky in this affair say trafficking was involved but not specifically child trafficking, so I wonder if the fed’s case was based more around the trafficking and coercion aspects and not the ages of the girls involved
Also, another thing to consider: age of consent is often different when prostitution is involved, so guy could have legal consensual sex with a 16 year old, but not if they or someone else paid for it.
If you have an example of a set of ambiguous statutory rape laws, please cite it. Otherwise, I think this conversation has reached a stalemate.
Two common exceptions are: 1) similarity in age, and 2) sex with spouse, if married.
Exceptions can have their own exceptions. For example, if a 17 year old has sex with a 25 year old, it may be legal for an exception based on similarity in age. However, the law may also prohibit that exception if there is sex between a teacher and a student in the teacher's class.
So martinky24 was wrong in writing "Minor's cannot consent". It's an understandable wrong, as those exceptions aren't really that relevant to the topic at hand.
But jelliclesfarm is also wrong in thinking the argument is that minors are "non-beings". Minors are beings with fewer freedoms than adults. Depending on their age, they can be forced to attend school and to follow juvenile curfew laws. They can be prevented from purchasing alcohol, and from driving vehicles, or having a full-time job.
All of these remove some of their free agency. Just like restrictions on who minors are free to have sex with.
In most states, the law is not written "it's illegal to have sex with a 15-year-old PERIOD." Instead, the law is usually "it's illegal FOR AN ADULT to have sex with a 15-year-old."
You are correct that -- for states that a) don't have the "for an adult" clause and b) don't have "Romeo & Juliet" clause -- the law as written DOES imply both kids are guilty. And I'd bet the cost of a nice dinner that, in some of those jurisdictions, both kids in a case like that WERE charged.
The bottom line is that your agency wasn't removed as a minor, you were just left with the same choice as many other minors, to obey the laws regarding drinking, smoking, pornography, etc. Or to break them in order to gain whatever you felt you were being denied. The laws were written to punish people who exploit minors, and the consequences of those crimes pretty much always fall on the adult in the situation (for good reason).
When I was 17, and unable to vote or see certain movies, or 20 and unable to legally buy alcohol, I definitely felt like my freedom was abridged, but it didn't make the laws behind those immoral, it just made them slightly unfair. And that was for some low stakes stuff compared to sex trafficking or adult exploitation of children.
1. I don’t want anyone to be ‘raped’ by ‘free agency. I was speaking of consent. Can someone be raped while being a minor? Of course. Age has nothing to do with whether one can be raped. One can be raped as a minor just as a 50 y/o ..dare I say..male can be raped. Age also has nothing to do with sexual desire or urges either. A 12 year old boy can be horny and a post menopausal woman can snap shut at the rumor of sex.
Rape should be about consent. Not age.
2. It is infantalization of young adults and taking away their instincts and consequently the ability to provide consent that is confounding to me. Biologically, sexual instinct begins way before puberty.
3. Creating ‘laws’ is a symptom of a society failing to manage itself. Shame and shunning used to work before. Every law automatically includes a legal loophole. Laws make society weaker, not stronger. It is the mass handover of power to the state..power we should have over ourselves as citizens and society.
Human beings may be holding super computers in the palms of our hands, but our instincts are still cave man instincts. The human instinct that seeks sexual pleasure also seeks justice and revenge and disgust.
How many rape victims have been screwed over by the ‘system’ that the law is supposed to uphold?
4. So something is wrong with the legal system that lets more people slip through the cracks by ‘failing’ them. I am not condoning rape.
I am just saying that it is wrong that minors should be deemed ‘mentally deficient’ to give consent.
5. When my body says that I am ready for sex and the law says no, I am being denied my right.
6. Jewish infants are circumcised without their consent. Is that sexual assault or rape? Young girls suffer genital mutilation in the same name of religion. Why doesn’t the law step in and make it illegal?
7. Voting or alcohol consumption are not biological imperatives. Children are..to an extent..property of parents until they can fend for themselves. To curtail freedom to consent by law is actually also curtailing freedom of ownership of their instincts. When did the courts and the state start taking over the role of parents?
8. Let’s take Greta Thurnberg. She is a child instructing adults. Some of us are ok with that. Others aren’t. The same girl if she had consented to have sex with a non-minor while she was a minor in the USA would have been considered ‘mentally deficient’ to give consent.
9. I am not..for even a second..condoning rape. I am just concerned that the advent of an biological instinct when it is earlier than the age of consent is a handicap to a young adult.
What are you thoughts and I hope I had clarified my position.
Your argument might well be that the age of consent is too high. That's fine, it's arbitrary. But there does need to be one to prevent all sorts of horrible things from happening.
And no, the laws don't prevent everything but that's not an argument that they shouldn't exist at all.
I am not arguing that.
I am just saying that a minor not being able to consent due to their alleged ‘mental deficiency’ due to age(as suggested by another poster above) is dodgy.
Ok. Let’s take an example of an actual ‘mentally deficient’ person...even an adult. Don’t they have sexual urges and biological needs? Are they capable of consent? What does the law say about that?
Sexual urges are no different than hunger or thirst. I want to know why sex has a more special status than food or water?
Let’s not criminalize kids being kids because of some strict morality code.
The case under discussion was a minor and some guy at least a decade older; not two minors.
> There are no subtleties. Minor's cannot consent
But, no, there are actually subtleties.
> He was trying to argue the subtleties of child rape. There are no subtleties.
Virtually everyone knows there are subtleties around statutory rape in general! But you're missing the forest for the trees here. We're not discussing statutory rape in general but the specific instance that Stallman was defending. You're technically correct in that the very last sentence of martinky24's comment was literally inaccurate, but you are wholly incorrect in your understanding of the spirit of the comment and subsequent dismissal of the rest of it.
The subjects Stallman was discussing are not ambiguous first principle pseudo-persons of nebulous or similar ages. They are an old guy and a coerced, underage girl. Period. There is no subtlety here.
I think this way of describing it expresses more the position that the occurrence is unfortunate, and all else being equal, best avoided.
To say “two 14 year olds had entirely consensual sex with eachother” seems to possibly express that the occurrence described is not unfortunate.
Also, If a 12yo and a 15.5 yo did, I think we very well might say that the 15.5 yo committed rape, even though neither person was an adult, Yet if both were 12, people wouldn’t call it that.
So, I don’t think it is only if one party is an adult. Also if one party is substantially closer to being an adult.
Isn't that just a misreading though? You're applying a connotation that isn't there. Many of us don't associate "consensual" with "A-ok" (e.g. I'm anti-pornography).
Though the topic is beginning to cause me more discomfort than it was. Guess I wore through my “discuss uncomfortable topics without feeling uncomfortable” reserves.
Edit: That isn’t a complaint about what anyone else is doing though. I am merely noting my own limitations, and no one needs to do anything to accommodate them in this instance. Continue on as if I hadn’t mentioned them?
A teen shared a video of her own legal sex act, convicted as child pornographer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20854920
And it's especially horrifying because she got convicted because she wanted to try to stop someone else from spreading it all over the school. It was just supposed to be seen by a few close friends.
All that I really know is that I am grateful, once again, to have been a teenager in an age before the proliferation of smart phones and social media.
> Let’s not criminalize kids being kids because of some strict morality code.
On the one hand, the law is very clear because there needs to be a clear line in the sand to decide if people get sent to jail or not. On the other hand, there are clearly open cultural questions about what we should get angry about. Pick any standard you like, and the majority of the world currently disagrees.
In my country of Australia we seem to be using 16. So in Australia maybe there was no crime at all. I dunno, I havn't looked in to this sort of law very deeply.
Minors cannot consent because society has removed that right from them.
Now I suspect we may agree on the general outcome of these rules, but I do find these 'religious' arguments distasteful, regardless from which camp they get issued.
Agreed. And if a war, plague, or comet wipes out 80% of the population tomorrow, suddenly "minors" will be 13, and no one of these people so adamant here will bat an eye.
Here's a chance to have a reasoned debate about an important issue, where constructive conversations and solutions could be devised. But instead, the conversation devolves into a flame war.
If anyone is interested in spitballing some type of new novel restrictive grammar to enable having constructive conversations about hot-button issues, I'd love to help: https://github.com/treenotation/jtree/issues/52