If we changed the age of consent to 25

Leviathan wrote:If the law was changed and say it was legal to have sex with 14 year olds then more men would do it.

I think it's to be expected that if an illegal act becomes legal, more people will do it.

GinaSmith wrote:Often, what gives rise to changes in legislation is not gradual, subtle shifts in public opinion but populist moves on the part of lawmakers in response to sudden outcry.

Didn't you just agree with me? You wrote that the law responds to public opinion ("sudden outcry").

GinaSmith wrote:The idea of legislation reflecting prevalent sociocultural opinion is nice if a little naïve. Legislation is also used as an instrument of control, as an instrument of power, as a means of encouraging and instilling certain values

Sure, but if legislation does not have considerable public support, is it likely to be followed? That's why I gave the example of movie piracy. We're not arguing about the ways laws can be used, but about whether people decide what's acceptable based on laws. I say they don't; they primarily decide what's acceptable based on the community's opinions and values.

As evidence of this, take this forum. Its members here have ideas of what's acceptable based on the opinions and values held in this subcommunity. Clearly your (in the collective sense - I'm not singling anyone specific out) idea of right and wrong is not garnered from laws and the current age of consent.

I don't even remotely agree with OP and think there is possibly something more to his post than what is actually written.

Regardless, no, I don't think that would happen at all. People can naturally deduce the difference between an adult and a child, both physically and emotionally. In first-world countries this probably wouldn't change many peoples' opinions because the law wouldn't change when our minds realize that a woman is ready to have children.

javert wrote:Didn't you just agree with me? You wrote that the law responds to public opinion ("sudden outcry").

I'm not sure who I was responding to. If you had suggested that the law reflects public opinion, then I agree in part, but I was creating a distinction between rational, long-held opinion and opinion as a product of a wave of mass hysteria. Sometimes laws are passed because they're vote-winners, and pandering to public hysteria is an essential instrument in the politician's toolkit.

javert wrote:Sure, but if legislation does not have considerable public support, is it likely to be followed? That's why I gave the example of movie piracy. We're not arguing about the ways laws can be used, but about whether people decide what's acceptable based on laws. I say they don't; they primarily decide what's acceptable based on the community's opinions and values.

Followed or passed? I think you (or someone else) was suggesting that law is merely a reflection of public values. If that's the case, a law would be passed once a certain critical mass of public support welled up, and a majority of people would agree that that law was right and would (hopefully) abide by it.

I do agree with your 'primarily decide what's acceptable based on the community's opinions and values', but I also think a community's opinions and values are in turn steered by law. Law can be often be looked to (and referred to) as a written document of moral principles, lending credence to those principles, bolstering them, and in turn deriving credence from them. It's a two-way process, in other words. Law is a reflection of a community's opinions and values, and a community's values and opinions are steered by the law. A sort of Hegelian dialectic.

Of course, law and morality are not one and the same, but

javert wrote:As evidence of this, take this forum. Its members here have ideas of what's acceptable based on the opinions and values held in this subcommunity. Clearly your (in the collective sense - I'm not singling anyone specific out) idea of right and wrong is not garnered from laws and the current age of consent.

The moral framework that is closest to my own is emotivism: I believe that labels like 'right' and 'wrong' merely reflect how people feel about things, how they want to be treated, how they want those they love to be treated, what kind of society/world they want to be part of, etc. The so-called boo-hurrah theory. Though I wouldn't go so far as to say moral utterances are meaningless beyond this.

So I would say that morality on age of consent laws reflects how people feel about sexual activity with young persons. However, as 'young persons' is a label with no clearly delineated object (where do you draw the line and why?), we enter a grey area in which people are forced to look to outside sources to help make up their minds. The law is one handy reference point, and the shrill tenor of journalistic coverage of underage sex is another, encouraging us to see the law as a moral absolute. Indeed, I would contend that our discourse is most shrill where such 'undecidables' (to borrow a Derridean-type concept) threaten social order and cohesion. We can't (indeed, don't) agree on where we should ('should' referring here to a moral imperative) draw the line when it comes to what constitutes young persons (as evidenced by the very different ages of consent around the world), and sexuality is very powerful, so we are forced to ramp up the rhetoric to ensure people are more likely to toe the line and not question the moral absolute that surely only the age of consent law can stand in for. What else would embody it when we need a concrete number for people to latch onto?

In summary, then, my point is that law is steered by morality/opinion/values and vice versa.

GinaSmith wrote:Truth22 wasn't talking about a change in behaviour but a change in discourse. The gist of what he's saying is that people conflate ages of consent with ages of acceptability of attraction.

The idea of legislation reflecting prevalent sociocultural opinion is nice if a little naïve. Legislation is also used as an instrument of control, as an instrument of power, as a means of encouraging and instilling certain values (e.g. a conservative government passing laws that reflect conservative values rather than values held by the entire electorate - bearing in mind that in the UK a conservative majority can be obtained with far less than 50% of the vote). 'Prevalent sociocultural opinion' doesn't make a distinction between rationally held, long-standing opinion and those opinions born of sudden mass hysteria. If that assertion seems a little vague, I'd like to point out that in the UK the age of consent was raised from 12 to 13 in 1875 (after 600 years of being set at 12) for rational reasons and then raised again to 16 only a decade later as a knee-jerk reaction to W.T. Stead's newspaper articles entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. Sure, Stead's articles influenced 'prevalent sociocultural opinion', but this prevalent sociocultural opinion was the product of a wave of mass hysteria, upon the crest of which the new legislation rode. Interestingly, the government were set to amend the age of consent to 15, but instead raised it to 16 at the last minute thinking the hysterical public needed a bit more appeasement than a 2-year raise would provide.

Of course, by selecting the age 25 Truth22 is exaggerating to make a point. But given David Cameron's penchant for punctuating less popular government decisions with well-timed populist ones (more PR than PM, as Labour cyclops Gordon Brown once said), it wouldn't surprise me if the aftermath of the Jimmy Saville/BBC scandal culminates in a move to raise the age of consent to 18. Often, what gives rise to changes in legislation is not gradual, subtle shifts in public opinion but populist moves on the part of lawmakers in response to sudden outcry.

Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. Great post.

I think you're right about reactions to public outcry. Hysteria is very powerful. Right now, people tend to deny an attraction to under 18 year old girls because society falsely assumes that most with an underage attraction will cause harm because of that attraction.

All society would have to do is convince the majority that most people attracted to girls under 25 are abusers. They could simply highlight and sensationalize negative experiences/crimes between 24 year olds and 25+ year olds. For example, just interview prisoners attracted to under 25 year olds.

Then expand the use of the word pedo. Like we already do. Currently, in the media, pedo is used to describe anyone attracted to an under 18 year old girl even though the actual scientific definition is under about 10. The media could just start using the term pedo to describe men attracted to under 25 year olds.... and very few would stand against it because they would be afraid of being labeled a pedo.

I'm aware of the power of social influences to distort someone's perceptions, but somehow I doubt that the scenario you described would ever happen. 25 years old is just too old to be the legal age of consent.

-- Wed Nov 14, 2012 9:28 pm --

shipwrecked heart wrote:Regardless, no, I don't think that would happen at all. People can naturally deduce the difference between an adult and a child, both physically and emotionally.

This. One might be able to convince others that it's wrong to have sex with a woman under 25 years of age, but there would be different rationales used because people can differentiate between a child and an adult.

javert wrote:

Leviathan wrote:If the law was changed and say it was legal to have sex with 14 year olds then more men would do it.

I think it's to be expected that if an illegal act becomes legal, more people will do it.

And I think it's to be expected that if a legal act became illegal then less people would do it. That was my point

Where I live, age of consent is 16. I think most males will admit to seeing many 15-year-old females as physically very attractive - many 15-year-olds will pass for much older and female bodies look very adult often at 14-16 already. However, these males will also know that a child that age is not emotionally ready to have sex. It's ok to appreciate the beauty of a 15-year-old but it's not ok as an adult to go tell that girl that she is sexy. Nowadays a lot of girls look very adult at even younger ages, 12-13, this is due to earlier onset of puberty, common in all western nations and starting to be common in developing nations. A homo sapiens female should enter menarche at the age of 16-17 and up until the last century or so, this was the norm. These days the average is down to 12-13ish.

I do not know very many adult females who think males under the age of 16 are very attractive; males don't look very adult until much later (on average, of course).

So I disagree with the OP. I think most people are aware that children under the age of consent can be physically attractive and being physically attracted to someone who looks like an adult is perfectly normal.

When I was 16 I had a 23 year old boy friend. We were in love and together for over 2 years so the sex was emotionally healthy for me. My parents weren't bothered by it. This is the best case scenario though. There's a fear in our society that with younger teen girls often being more vulnerable and easily influenced an adult man might take advantage of that.

At 34 my boyfriend is 50. I've thought about me at 15 and him at 30 and it doesn't seem right. I would have not been ready for a man that much older than me.

As for the legislation, I agree with Truth22. Think about shows like 'to catch a predator', how they scared the crap out of guys. Society can hammer you. All it would do would change the age of the women a man would admit to find sexually attractive. I live in a state where the age of consent is 16 and there are others as young as 14.

elovena wrote:Nowadays a lot of girls look very adult at even younger ages, 12-13, this is due to earlier onset of puberty, common in all western nations and starting to be common in developing nations. A homo sapiens female should enter menarche at the age of 16-17 and up until the last century or so, this was the norm. These days the average is down to 12-13ish.

My reading suggests there is no good proof of this. This thought pattern is a precipitate of the sexual dynamics: a sort of fear of child and female sexuality. Females have been believed to be maturing younger for as long as there has been civilization.

"Young people these days --"

never underestimate the capacity of our people and society condition themselves into admitting "self guilt". 25 years old may be a little bit of a stretch, but if age of consent is moved generally from 16 (I'm using Australia/Canada/Europe general standard here) to 21, I can definitely see the society start to move to a consensus that people who are sexually attracted to anyone even 1 day under 21 years old are abominations, and should either be having their intestines pulled out, or be put into general prison population have let the double murderers have at them and get a chance becoming triple murderers, and then of course, these triple murderers now get honorable citizen status badges and get released for their good "deed" of murdering those evil "scum of the earth" who would dare to have a natural attraction toward under 21's , yes, I can imagine something like that happening, probably unlikely, but imaginable. After all, we've seen it before, today, in the US especially, age of consent is tied to age of permissible attraction.
I still remember reading that one post somewhere where a poster said, he finally stopped feeling bad about being attracted to Taylor Swift now that she is passed 21, this poster then kindly said how he doesn't understand those evil "pedophiles", whether he then wished them death or imprisonment for life I don't quite remember. It is rather sad reality, that we are becoming our own "thought polices", apologizing, and feeling guilty about the natural urges existing within us that occasionally surges. On the surface, it seemed like the society is becoming more tolerant, is it really?