No sex until you can understand the consequences, for better and for worse, of doing so.

Some 12-year-olds can. Some can’t. Some 30-year-olds still can’t. I love my father, but his ‘love-’em-then-leave-’em’ behavior before and after I was born is still pretty common in the American black community, where a strict, repressive upbringing is often the norm. Men become ‘players’ as a way of avoiding all that pesky emotional entanglement that some in this thread are positively afraid of preteens learning to negotiate — their parents usually forbade any discussion of sex, owing to a lot of religious shame.

So where do they go to learn about it? Where does any kid whose parents never talked to him about sex go for information? Their friends, who are often just as uneducated about sex as they are. This is where fatuous ideas like ‘You can’t get a girl pregnant if you have sex standing up’ come from.

Then the consequences of their actions and this avoidance later bite them in the ass: wage-garnishment for child support; having to deal on a frequent basis with women they no longer care much for because they were ignorant enough not to use condoms.

Women in this situation have it pretty bad as well: not enough knowledge about their own bodies to say no when they don’t want to, or knowledge about alternatives to pregnancy to avoid producing children they aren’t mature enough to care for, as well as STDs and other problems.

How is all this avoided? By making kids aware of the consequences of sexual behavior, good and bad, as soon as they hit puberty. Tell them that it can be fun. Tell them that it’s one small aspect of self-knowledge. Tell them also that it’s not paranoid to ask their partners to be tested for STDs before they engage in any sexual activity. Tell them about the financial and emotional costs of raising children. Balance is essential — too many sex-ed programs in this country focus entirely on the negative costs of sex.

Twelve years of age is about the right time to make condoms available, as well as information about the pill (not so sure about actually distributing the pill to middle-schoolers, though. I don’t think young bodies need to have their stabilizing hormones screwed with. Just tell them to ask their family doctor for more information). Kids need to know what those funny feelings are, and how to deal with them, from people who can give them accurate information. To those fearful of letting children experience ‘emotional entanglement’? Friendships, and the loss of friends, also provide some practice in dealing with this.

Trying to keep children sexually ignorant for as long as possible doesn’t produce mature adults. It makes crippled adults who have trouble making informed decisions.

I disagree that sex is inherently dangerous because of emotional entanglement … blah blah. There’s just nothing that special about sex.”

I completely agree. The only reasons why sex might damage kids emotionally is caused by the taboos and stigmas that society places on it. Without these taboos and stigmas, sex would be nothing more than an enjoyable thing to do that could also potentially
cause disease and pregnancy.

OR it could damage kids because of their emotional entanglements with that person. But it is not the act of sex itself that causes this, it is the relationship with the person.

Let’s say two 12 yr olds are dating. They don’t go past holding hands and kissing on the cheek, but they break up, leaving one 12 year old in an emotional entanglement.

Yes, sex can cause emotional entanglements but it is not the act itself that does this, it is the situation. A relationship gone bad could just as easily cause an emotional entanglement, but does that mean we should not allow 12 year olds to date? Or have friendships? Because those can cause emotional entanglements as well. Does that make these things morally wrong? Should we not approve of kids engaging in these activities because they could potentially cause someone to get hurt? Of course not!

Because I think it’s an important perspective, and because I think we always need to consider the collateral effects as well as the direct effects of changes, I’m thinking about it like this:

Say the rape case happened in this Maine town discussed in this very thread. Say the jurors on that case read the article linked above. Say the victim in the rape/fgm case was at that same school.

Would the jurors be less likely to convict the rapist? Would they be more likely to see the girl as sexually receptive, even to a much older man?

I think they would.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the conclusion should be “…therefore we should not give birth control to 12 year olds.” In my opinion, the cost/benefit ratio is still in favor of BC.

It’s more of a reminder that we need to consider and prepare to deal with the collateral damage that may happen even from things which are overall a GOOD idea. Maybe giving BC and teaching sex ed will mean that we simultaneously need to be even more careful than before of whether or not young children are pressuring each other into sex, for example. Or that we need to focus more on potential juror bias.

I’m asking you not to post in this thread again until you’ve been hanging around a bit more, and are a little more familiar with the terminology and dynamics. Thanks in advance.

The laws are actually much more complicated than that. Depending on your state, children under 13 are treated differently than children 13-17, and offenders who are closer to the victim’s age are also treated more leniently (in some cases, not as criminals at all).

After all, if it’s never okay for kids to be having sex, no matter who it’s with, then that just lends credence to (to use the mother’s argument from the other thread) the whole, “She’s out of control! I had to do something!”

No, it really doesn’t. The point of the other thread is not that the mother had a justifiable concern about her child’s sexual activity; it’s that the mother reacted by sexually mutilating her daughter, and apparently ignoring the fact that her own boyfriend was raping her child.

Would you claim, Myca, that a person who said “Toddlers shouldn’t pick up and eat bugs off the sidewalk” is ‘lending credence’ to a mother who tried to control her toddler’s stuff-everything-in-my-mouth habits by sewing the child’s lips shut? Especially if the mother’s boyfriend were feeding the kid beer?

No rape apology in the thread. Thanks.

I suspect that rape apology is a term of art around here; just to clarify my views:

We as a society are very punitive towards convicted sex offenders, above all those whose crimes involved children. I believe we’re much tougher on them than any other western democracy. We sentence them to very long prison terms, and significant deprive them of civil rights afterwards. Those are simply statements of fact, without moral judgment. They don’t necessarily imply that we have a more just society in general, or even an adequate determination to supress sex crimes.

Most of this toughness is because of tough-on-crime posturing by politicians: virtually nobody is willing to defend adults who have sex with children, no matter how harsh the penalty assigned to them, so they’re an easy class of offenders to beat up on.

I mention these facts not to apologize for rape, or to argue that our laws are fine as written, but rather as evidence for what society’s view of sex with children is. The extravagant penalties and oppobium we dispense demonstrates that our society’s consensus view is that sex with children is never justified or excused. We treat it as settled that children under 16,17,or 18 [depending on jurisdiction] cannot consent.

Saying “12 year olds can sometimes consent” undermines that consensus and it’s therefore sufficiently spooky that people don’t want to consider the possibility. The issue, to be clear, is that this would philosophically undermine our notions of statutory rape, not that it would immediately undermine it in court.

“We label them sex offenders, and generally wreck their lives.”

No rape apology in the thread. Thanks.

I hope that isn’t rape apology. I consider a person going to jail both a wrecked life (if even only for the time involved) and a just punishment. If he’s going to wreak my life with rape, label him a sex offender and wreak his life, please.

I think the point Ari was making is that the basis of statutory rape is that a 12 year old can never consent. If at any point, including in this situation, we say that a 12 year old can consent to sex, we might need to be concerned whether it will make the statutory rape legal definition blurry. Power is certainly an issue, but I’ve yet to see a statute that specifically talks about the definition of power rather than the definition of consent.

I suspect this is a valid concern. New York may provide a good example regarding this issue. In New York, the age of consent is 17, but there is an exception:

“It shall be an affirmative defense to the crime of rape in the second degree as defined in subdivision one of this section that the defendant was less than four years older than the victim at the time of the act.” (see link)

In this case, it looks like a state has defined when a minor may or may not consent to sex, without gumming up statutory rape definitions.

(And regarding the original post, I still think that BC to twelve year olds without specific parental consent is way too tricky. Depending on the BC used, it needs to be taken responsibly every day, and I doubt the clinic would be able to oversee the child’s use of the medication every day. I can’t imagine responsibly prescribing anything but an injection or an implant to someone that young.)

No rape apology in the thread. Thanks.

The difference between the two scenarios is ‘power.’ I’m not going to be super patient on the issue of “oh, teh poor adults who sex up 12 yr olds, how we ruin their lives,” so you might want to go into lurker mode if this still isn’t making sense. I’d rather not derail.

Talking about children sexing each other brings out something that’s bugged me for a while. As a society, we’re happy to put adults who have non-overtly-coerced sex with teenagers away for long prison sentences. We label them sex offenders, and generally wreck their lives. We do this because we think the younger parties can’t meaningfully consent and because we think that even if the younger party believes they have consented, they haven’t.
If twelve year olds can’t ever consent to sex, then twelve-y-olds doing eachother is rape. Maybe not prosecutable because of age, but still rape. If they can sometimes consent, that offers a very powerful defense for conduct we don’t want to make defensible.

I think you get into enough logical tangles once you start down that path that we as a society prefer to make that sort of thing unthinkable — or at least, we as individuals often try not to think about it. I suspect that’s part of the horror that the topic induces in many discussants.

It’s actually a fascinating subject, and I”m trying (semi successfully) to write a post on it that’s not 10 pages long. I think of it as the

“Should we take account of people’s really shitty behavior when we make decisions, and if so, how much?”

question.

Saying that it’s okay for women to have sex with whoever they like whenever they like shouldn’t weaken protections against rape . . . because it’s about consent and power and abuse. Same thing here.

—Myca

I don’t know about that. Oh, I agree with you that it shouldn’t happen, but sometimes–and especially when it comes to protecting children–I’m more in the camp of “face reality, and work with it.”

And reality is that societal attitudes have a lot to do, IMO, with how people approach these things.

Take the “women are free to sleep around” thing. Clearly women ARE free to sleep with whoever they want. Women SHOULD BE free to sleep with whomever they want, at any time–or not.

But the “she was a slut anyway and asked for it” defense was actually a horrifically effective defense, because of the way people think. And to the degree people buy into the “an average women is perfectly likely to be trolling bars for hotties, just like an average man” belief, I think they’re more likely to believe the rape defense of “it was consensual.”

For adult women, it’s totally not my call; they’re adults, and I (hope) made it clear that I think they are free to do whatever they want, and it’s really not my business. I’m just using your example to illustrate the kid issue a bit better.

After all, if it’s never okay for kids to be having sex, no matter who it’s with, then that just lends credence to (to use the mother’s argument from the other thread) the whole, “She’s out of control! I had to do something!”

“But . . . she was being raped by your boyfriend.”
“Yeah! AND she was having sex with a kid her age! Out of control, I tell you!”

For me, I think of this the same way I think about rape. Saying that it’s okay for women to have sex with whoever they like whenever they like shouldn’t weaken protections against rape . . . because it’s about consent and power and abuse. Same thing here.

—Myca

First, a caveat: I am most certainly not not not trying to attribute the below issues to anyone who commented above.

New question., brought to mind by this revolting situation: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/archives/2007/10/31/woman-recieves-no-punishment-for-nonconsensually-piercing-her-13-year-old-daughter%e2%80%99s-genitals

I’m wondering if a general sense that 12 year olds are “ready” for sex or that it’s “OK” for them to have sex would have a negative impact on the ability to convict folks for statutory rape. I get a gut feeling that it would.

Why? Well, there are two ways to look at it. One way is to define kidsex as “kidsex”, i.e. something that’s different from “real” sex.

But if you define kidsex as merely a certain type of “real” sex, then you’re saying it’s OK, generally speaking, for kids to be having sex. Which makes it harder IMO to convince people that kids (who are often the target of rape, esp. acquaintance and interfamily rape) weren’t acting consensually.

If kids are “nonsexual” then they don’t (can’t) consent. If kids are sexual beings–getting condoms, on birth control, making sex their own choice–then obviously they can consent in theory. The question then becomes WHO they consent with, as opposed to whether they can consent at all. And “they didn’t consent because it’s the wrong age of sex partner” is much more difficult to sell than “12 year olds do not consent to sex.”

It’s almost like spin. Because laws and this sort of thing affect juries, like it or not. Is it worth discussing as a cost?

Again, let me make it crystal clear that I do not attribute this goal to anyone here, including those folks who supported kidsex above. But it is more than a side note I think, and worth considering.

Mandolin Writes:

October 26th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Jamila, I already said once — no more tax/UHC on this thread.

I missed the post where you said that.

Don’t worry, this is my last post.

I don’t mind if Jamila answers Thene’s question, but I don’t want any more declarations of free market sensibility, etc.