YouthRightsRadical wrote:Romeo and Juliet laws are one of the biggest bits of hypocrisy I've ever seen. Either someone is capable of providing informed consent or they are not. There is absolutely zero value in a law which tells early bloomers that they are REQUIRED to seek their sexual partners from among the population of people who are deemed by society to be incapable of providing meaningful consent.
This is spot on. If I (male, late 30s) cannot have sex with a 15-year-old girl because she is deemed incapable of giving informed consent, and yet, due to a close-in-age exemption, a 17-year-old boy is allowed to have sex with her, then the argument of lack of competence to give informed consent is rendered invalid and the protectionist motive called into question.
Aside from invalidating the argument of lack of competence to give informed consent, close-in-age exemptions discriminate in two ways. Firstly, from the perspective of the minor, they discriminate against minors who might prefer an older partner. The 15-year-old girl who finds herself not attracted to teenage boys but rather to men will discover that expressing herself sexually with a chosen partner is an option forbidden to her and her partner, whilst her friends who prefer boys their age or slightly older will be permitted to express themselves sexually with their partners. Secondly, if the grounds for a close-in-age exemption are based on a (cultural, unsubstantiated) assumption that an older male’s motive for wishing to express himself sexually with a young adolescent girl could only ever be predatory, then this again constitutes unfair discrimination. For example, are we to assume that a 17-year-old male’s motives for sleeping with a 15-year-old female are unequivocally more chaste or noble, or might we instead reasonably assume that a male in his late 30s could be more stable, more balanced, less governed by his penis?
The whole thing is a sham. And besides, as Waites shows in
The Age of Consent, informed consent is a very recent addition to sexual offence laws. What we call the age of consent may have been around for quite some time, but it has only been termed as such in recent decades. The motives prior to about the 1950s were to protect female virginity (a prized commodity) and to prevent what were deemed to be unholy acts. Even as late as the 1970s judges were requiring women to have put up a serious fight for a rape charge to stand.
The bottom line is that if we want to preserve this notion of a statutory minimum age for sexual activity being predicated on a presumed ability or inability to give informed consent, we have to mean what we say. Close-in-age exemptions make a mockery of the idea.