Worth mentioning modern age of consent laws are radically higher than where they started, even if just in the US. Initially, age of consent in the US was 10. Religious folk got it up to 16 where it remains to this day, in the federal code at any rate. Individual states adjust it up and down, and usually even more if married. Think the lowest aoc for non-marital sex is 15 in New Hampshire. Here in Missouri it's 17, though with parental consent you can marry at 15 and the aoc is adjusted retroactively. And a provision exists to marry under 15 if with judicial consent (not sure when or why that'd come up but there it is.)
Biblically, the age to marry was 12 for girls, 13 for boys (ages of adulthood for each.) One of the Mexican states has it at 12, though the rest are 18. The Netherlands notoriously had it at 12, as did Spain. Japan is 13 I believe.
Pedophilia proper, sexual attraction to prepubescents I would think is mostly about desiring that which is forbidden. Although in interviews with law enforcement researchers, convicted child rapists (who may or may not be strict pedophilies) convicts have listed as their reasoning the belief a child is more healthy and free from STIs than an adult partner. In child sexual slavery, this isn't the case however and the children being exploited have the same glut of infections their adult counterparts do.
I don't think there's any evolutionary imperative to seek prepubescent sexual partners. Generally, by definition they can't yet make children so they're not suitable for reproduction, and oweing to the fragile nature of their sexual organs with adult genitals intercourse isn't likely anything fun.
Children should be allowed to remain children and enjoy their non-sexual childhoods. Be pleanty of time for fooling around eventually. But I think many of us would enjoy our adulthoods more minus all the sexual competition and tension.
You know, I've been watching your "logic" in your last couple of posts before I was going to comment. But looking at them, it appears as if you are making an argument for lowering the age of consent or at least making adult sex with some minors legal so that it wil, in your reasoning, remove the titilating-temptation factor for the forbidden.
Which is a disturbing argument. And the near-identical argument published by the American Psychological Association in their journal in the 1990s won the dubious award of being the first professional institution/article to be officially censured by Congress for its odious proposition: that some sex with children by adults is OK....doesn't harm them.
You cite biblical precedent as a means for your softening the minds reading your posts to agree with your couched-conclusions. Couched of course under the shroud of "naturally sex with minors isn't a good idea". You forget though that a person born in those times could expect to expire in their 30s, surely no later than their 40s and often many years before their 30s if they were a woman in childbirth. In order to keep the population from fizzling completely out, girls were gotten quite young, as soon as they started cycling. But their unfortunate life-expectancy didn't afford cultures back then the time to protect their developing MINDS as well.
Now in advanced times we can protect their developing minds. And we do. We enact laws keeping a protective barrier around children and adolescents until they are 18 [in most states]. I'd bump it up to 23 or 25 if it were up to me. Their bodies may be ready for sex at 12, but their minds are not. And especially they are not with an older, grifting predator who has nothing but physical jollies and emotional abandonment on his mind..
Adolescents need the time to experiment with each other, at an equal emotional level where one isn't a seasoned sociopathic predator and the other a vulnerable piece of meat. The two adolescents can experience real compassion for each other because they are in the same boat: lack of worldly experience and a jaded affect. So their sex with each other is legally different than their sex with an adult. As well it should be. And in many states, the older an adult predator is than the minor, the worse the penalty at sentencing. As well it should be.
The laws against sex with minors are not laws based in the physical act of sex. They are law based in the emotional and psychological act of sex. No matter what the body looks like on the outside or whether or not an adolescent is already sexually active with another adolescent, they are HANDS OFF to adults seeking quick emotionless sex.
As to your last graph, 'laws against sex with minors is based on emotional and psychological aspects of sex...' that's actually completely wrong. The reasons for the various aoc's in the US is out of concern of teenaged pregnancies being a burden on the state. This is written right into California's legal statute:
"10. Q: What's the big deal and all the attention to statutory rape? Top of page
A: Recognizing the high incidence of teenagers impregnated by adult males and the negative impact of these young, fatherless families on society, California initiated the Statutory Rape Vertical Prosecution Program in 1995. The program strengthened law enforcement's ability to prosecute adult men who have sex with teenage girls - minors, under the law. Providing for higher rates of conviction, the vertical prosecution program allows the same prosecutor to follow a specific case all the way through the judicial process.
* At the time of this initiative, the state of California had the highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation
* More than 75% of all births to high school aged mothers are fathered by adult males.
* Boys under 18 years of age account for less than 1/2 of births to teen mothers while men over the age of 24 are responsible for more than 50%
* Men over the age of 20 are responsible for 5 times as many births among junior high school girls than males under the age of 20
* On an average day, 76 teenage girls under the age of 17 give birth in California
* The rate of sexually transmitted disease among teenage girls is twice that of teenage boys.
* This all translates into a tremendous drain on the welfare and medical resources statewide
* In 1993, the cost for births to teens 17 years of age or younger in California was more than 140 million dollars.
California statistic source San Mateo County District Attorney."
California Statutory Rape FAQ | Sexlaws.org
Copy of the Penal Code for California below with specifics mentions of pregnancy being the main concern.
California - Age of Consent
I don't want the age of consent in the US lowered, but I would like to see an additional provision grandfathered in nationally in the same vein as the marriage laws governing minors, namely that parens must give their consent if the teen's under 18. In effect, instead of just being able to give their consent for a marriage, they can also give their consent for a sexual relationship.
There's too many statutory rape cases and lives being ruined for what many of us did when teens ourselves, but in a time when this kind of zealotry didn't yet exist. Having grown up in California, I'm shocked to learn all the sex I had prior to age 18 was in fact illegal. But since we well know not everyone matures at the same rate, depending on the effectiveness of our parents, some will mature sooner than others and be able to make responsible decisions about having sex. If parents can already consent to their 15 year olds marrying, then logically they should be able to consent to those 15yo's having sexual relationships too.
I'd also like something nullifying any criminal charge when it's two kids doing anything consensual. For the sake of such a provision, if it's two close-in-age kids, they CAN consent to sexual activities with one another, but not with adults. Thus preserving the spirit of such laws, while reducing the number of pointless prosecutions making teens sex offenders for doing what most every teen around the world does by default. This would include so-called sexting and child pornography arrests when all that happened was two kids sent naked pictures of themselves to their bf or gf.
We're actually much more sexually conservative and repressed now than just 20 years ago. And it's turning the current generation of teens into felons for what all of us got away with. Recent HLN bit about some 6 year-old who pulled his pants down on a dare getting busted and now on his school record he has a sexual offense rap. That's just stupid but indicative of where our country's sexual hysteria has brought us. Because of newer technology not extant when our laws were written governing sex, we need new laws addressing it, and more sensible definitions of what's a crime, and what's normal sexual development and experimentation.
