Here's a tricky one to get your head around. A 13 year-old girl has consensual sex with her 12 year-old boyfriend and gets pregnant. She is charged under Utah law with both being a offender and a victim. If she was 14 or 15 their closeness of age would have been a mitigating factor and the charge a lesser misdemeanor - not sexual abuse of a child. For similar age 16 and 17 year-olds the act wouldn't have been a crime. But, For adolescents under 14, though, there are no exceptions or mitigation and they are never considered capable of consenting to sex.
Quite clearly they were.
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2 comments:
It never ceases to amaze me that someone is deemed incapable of rational consent yet criminally liable at the same time.
Rational discussion of this is almost impossible in Anglo Saxon society because there are two philosophies screaming at the same time:
1. Puritanism: Sex is bad, children are innocent, how dare anyone put them in the same mould. They are all victims, of someone, blame someone, punish them. It's bad bad bad! You disagree? You pedophile you!
2. Radical feminism: Sex is fine as long as it isn't exploitative, and children get exploited by the media and society and we can't allow it. Don't blame the girl, she didn't know what she was doing, in fact no one is responsible at all - except the capitalist patriarchy.
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