'12-year-old negligent and responsible for own rape'

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You'd be surprised. I have attended a hearing as part of my Criminal Justice curriculum and can honestly say that you would not believe the caliber of people they allow to serve. We had three guys who'd sleep through the entire process, one man with SS bolts tattooed on his wrist (I noticed it when he went to scratch his arm), a person who probably hasn't showered in at least two weeks and a few "punk" kids who did not dress for the occasion and refused to pay attention to the case.

Allow? More like force. Many of those people wouldn't even be there if they hadn't been forced to by law.

You are not the only person here, darling. You are incorrect.


Perhaps not. But they understand more than we're willing to give them credit for.[/quote]
Not enough to be responsible for their own rape, mugging, and/or murder.


If a twelve-year-old's only experience with guns are video games where you get to press a 'reset' button and everyone comes back to life, said twelve year old could shoot someone and still have been acting like a child.


No.
First, you ask the kid why they did it; then you explain why it was wrong; then, if you think that they're still too stupid to figure it out, you punish them so that they'll learn by simple operant conditioning like a dog.


I agree with the goal, if not the method.


I pity your kids, then, and I hope that they are never assaulted because it sounds like you'd blame them for it.

They are responsible for things that a twelve-year-old should know: don't run across the street without looking both ways, for example.


Even if she had, as I previously described, gotten drunk and plastered herself to a teacher, she could not have known what that would make the teacher think and what the consequences would be. She could not 'encourage' him to do something that she had no concept of.


Or if they knew that the teachers in question had a history, and did nothing about it; or if they knew that an inherently dangerous situation was occurring, and did nothing about it. Otherwise, I actually agree with you - but pretending that the girl herself was at fault is so repulsive that it makes me wonder if the district was at fault and has no other options than to blame the victim.

Let's repeat that.


SHE WAS TWELVE.
No more needs to be said, but you keep on digging anyway:



Funny, that's exactly what you just did.


but, far more often, rapists ruin people's lives and get off scott-free.

Yeah, I kind of figured. You'll pay for that when you get older, and your kids have a choice about whether or not to be around you.
Aaannnnd we finish with:

Eeeyyeaaahh....
Hope I'm never in a room alone with you, Angel Rho.

It doesn't matter how old the person is. Consent means "no rape." Rape as commonly understood means that a sexual advance has been rejected and the attacker refuses to take "no" for an answer. That is what rape is. When you hear "no," you stop. Rape happens when you hear "no" and you do it anyway. A 12 year old who invites rather than rejects a sexual advance is consenting. And no, I don't care what the law says. Laws change. Now, sure, I acknowledge WHY we have laws, and setting AOCs avoid legal ambiguities. We accept that "12 year olds can't consent" to make it easier on ourselves when it comes to pursuing child exploitation in the justice system, but--I'm sorry--laws don't reflect reality. Kids have sex with each other before they're 12 years old. Kids that age even have sex with young adults and don't see anything wrong with it. And they don't call the cops. Unless someone tells them they should, or unless they think they have something to gain from it. They are remarkably intelligent, and I'm not sure you give them enough credit.



Guess again. All I did was point out that the victim merely acted to stack the odds against herself. No, she didn't MAKE someone attack her. But she doesn't do herself any good if she knowingly puts herself in an environment in which she has less control of her circumstances.


Perhaps, but not the point.


You believe that kids shouldn't be disciplined at all? Anyway, there's a fine line between fear and resentment. Often children are thankful that their parents cared enough to instill in them a sense of right and wrong.


Do you find it acceptable for a child to learn how to use sex as a weapon, even if the accused never even paid the child more than a passing glance, to get what the child wants? Rather than seeking justice, the system generally seems to favor the victim's word against the accused while the underlying foundation of Western justice is a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I wonder about your sense of justice. Attack on my character is ad hominem and irrational.

Statutory rape exists as a legal reality because children are incapable of consent, regardless of what they think they're capable of.
Thank humanity that the majority of people out there agree with that.

Not buying it. Sounds too much like a rationalization to me. Children consent to all sorts of things all the time. Depending on what mood the wife and I are in, like if we're both ambivalent towards doing one activity or another, or maybe we just couldn't care any less, we'll call the oldest into the room, present him with two choices, and let him decide. Now, sure, little kids typically choose the second option, so we'll ask twice and reverse the options. If he still makes the same choice, we know it's because it's something he wants and not something he's just going along with.

Or maybe mom is making a quick trip to the store. Who wants to go? Who wants to watch a movie with daddy? And one or both of the bipeds will go along with mommy.

They get choices, and they get the option to consent to some activities. Why? Because they're capable of consenting, and to my recollection we haven't made them choose among options in which there was at least one that could harm them.

I object to child sex for completely different reasons, but I should point out that preteens do explore their sexuality and even engage in sexual intercourse. From what I gather, that is becoming less frequent than it was when I was that age, but things do happen that seem to be out of the reach of the law, like when a 12 year old has sex with a 9 year old. Of course, it could be that I'm an adult and like most adults I'm not a part of that circle anymore and thus unaware of how often it really does go on. However, I know of some former neighbors of ours who had a 12 year old boy lose his virginity to a 16 year old babysitter... Anyway, like it or not, sex is a pleasurable activity for most people and kids younger than 9 can even figure out how to masturbate. So if they know it feels good and have no problems engaging in it, they certainly can give a partner the "go ahead" while they're playing doctor.

The same kid who can consent to that can consent to sex with an adult that he or she likes and/or feels sexually attracted to.

"Cannot consent" is bs. It's a rationale, an assumption and a compromise that legislatures are forced to accept. It's a "line in the sand" because an exact age at which ALL children are able to say "yea" or "nay" doesn't exist. So an AOC of, like 14, 16, or 18 is drawn up to err on the side of safety. It's the kind of language you hear from conservative, evangelical Christians to legislate morality and keep kids sexually pure. If we suspend antiquated Biblical values in our culture and society, we might find and accept that kids are capable of consent at much lower ages than we're willing to admit.


Appeal to majority. They could be wrong. Besides that, popular opinion is notoriously fickle. If all of a sudden the majority of people said that the AOC should be 9 years old, would you go along with it?

in essence culture is in large part an appeal to authority,
as is most religions.

good that we have it from the horses mouth that those arguments dont work.

At the moment I'm primarily motivated by boredom.

I never said "appeal to authority," though. Appeal to authority is "Smoking is bad because the Surgeon General said so." No, smoking is bad if smoking really is bad (law of identity). I'm talking about appeal to majority: "Smoking is good because everyone is doing it." There's also the appeal to popularity, which is somewhat related even though I typically treat the two as synonymous. Popular beliefs/practices, majority opinion, and authorities aren't inherently wrong because they're popular/majority/authority. There are often good reasons why they are what they are. It's just that it would be errant thinking to say "X is so because Y says it is." If Y can be wrong, then you need a better reason to say "X."

That's why for the purpose of this discussion I'm saying I don't care what the law says. You can't say that "X is wrong because the law says so." That's appeal to law, and laws can be unjust. What an individual in a society HOPES for in terms of law is that the laws merely formalize what we already accept as being right and wrong and proceed to outline the severity of the spankings we get when we misbehave.

Much of foundational western law is formalized Christian morality straight from the Bible. The "can't consent" argument is a poor one that only really works for kids less than 3 years old. "It causes physical harm" is a better argument. But past a certain age the "physical harm" argument doesn't work because it doesn't physically harm everyone. Same thing with the "psychological harm." It doesn't affect all children equally. So why even put an age on it and enforce the laws? Because it's wrong, Christians already accept that it's wrong, and the AOC is just a way to keep children sexually pure for a longer period of time and provide legal recourse against immoral people willing to violate them. Of COURSE kids can consent. It's the job of parents to make sure that they don't consent and keep them out of situations in which they would. All the rationalizations in the western world can't get around the fact that the non-religious "borrow" their values from Biblical morality. Setting the AOC at 14 or 16 is just a compromise--a pitiful one at that, but better than nothing at all.

And I should point out that "X is wrong because it is antiquated" is also fallacious. An appeal to tradition may have forgotten the original reasoning behind labeling something as morally objectionable, but that doesn't mean something ISN'T morally objectionable. It just means if we've forgotten why something is a problem, maybe we should take another look and see if we can't figure it out.

''thank humanity that most people agree with me' is not the same as 'I'm right because the majority of people believe what I believe.' I meant the statement literally; I find your views frankly repulsive - that anyone can consent to anything that they cannot understand
(hey, kid, if you let me vivisect you, I'll give you a lollipop!' 'sure, mister!'
...later...
'what?! He consented!')
is repulsive to me. I cannot do medical procedures on adults without /informed/ consent, which means that they have to /understand/ what is going to happen, including the likely outcome, subsequent pain and recovery time, and likelihood that something will go wrong. If someone came to me and asked me to poke them with needles, I would be criminally negligent if I thought that they did not understand what they were asking but did it anyway.

My statement was a literal exclamation of gratitude that the world is not as ugly as if it were composed entirely of people with your viewpoint.

"Repulsive"? On what basis? That sounds emotional to me. I'm not going to base my behaviors on something that only subjectively affects or disaffects someone. I can't make everyone happy, and the more I try to please everyone, the more I piss 'em all off. I need something a little more substantial than that. As in "why I should freakin' care." I think there's an answer out there somewhere, but nobody seems to be owning up to it yet.

And besides, we're talking about sex, not random medical procedures. Sex isn't inherently harmful. It's more often beneficial than harmful. In fact, research hints that sex is quite often pleasurable, almost always pleasurable for at least one participant, aids in procreation, and is often cited as a main cause of pregnancy. It's not some evil, dirty shameful act, and I strongly discourage teaching children that it is.

Now, sure, there are circumstances when a young person would feel pain and would suffer physical injury. A kid says, "hey, stop that! That hurts!" Ok, then, that's the end of it. No harm, no foul. Another person, I don't care if it's someone close in age or an adult, who disregards another person's request to stop hurting them is clearly crossing a line.

But this does not apply to all circumstances, does not necessarily always cause harm, and thus does not deserve any special treatment on this basis. To justify an AOC and make it stick, you need a stronger rationale. Otherwise, it's just empty, self-centered relativism.

I can't speak to the young woman in your original post. I have no way to know the specifics of her case, so all I can do is speculate on hypotheticals. I mean, there's really nothing about your opinion piece there that anyone is going to argue about. It's a closed discussion unless you want to make a lame if-by-whisky argument, and fence-straddling always gives me a bad case of bruised testicles. So I think a more worthy discussion would concern the merits of granting enormous power to children who lack the maturity to wield it responsibly. Apparently the young woman has a proven case of past physical abuse that has been confirmed in numerous other cases. I don't begrudge her the right to seek due justice. That's the least anyone can do. But you have a dead guy and a woman with a ruined career and dead and rotting prospects for any social life. At the very least, these people got exactly what they deserved. What's left to do? Submerge her up to her neck in a pool of nibble fish?

I mean, come on, she won't stop at making the people directly involved live out the rest of their days in a living hell. She probably knows she can't arrange to see the entire planet go down to a burning hell. But at least she can try to take down the school district. Darnit, we're going to make as many people as we can pay for this, guilty or not.

Without more information, that's all I got. Maybe the district DOES deserve it. We can't assume one way or the other.

But IF it could be shown that the girl, or any girl for that matter, in some way either knowingly, actively encouraged teachers to have sex with her, OR the girl was well aware of the danger involving certain teachers and did nothing to stay on the opposite side of the school from them, then it is entirely possible that her actions were a setup and she may even have planned for the school or the whole district to take a fall. After all, she gets a big fat NOTHING from a dead teacher. Is the school district now responsible for a dead teacher, too? I'm sorry, but this just doesn't seem sensible to me. It's certainly not how a good system of justice works. If the girl complained to admins and district board members about a certain teacher and requested to be placed in a different classroom and got turned down, then ok, fine. End of discussion. But if someone is being stupid, they deserve to be called out for being stupid. It's not their fault for getting raped. It's their fault for being stupid. There is a difference. Making a school district pay for a student's stupid mistakes, IF this is indeed the case, is not a good application of justice.

We are SO priviledged to have the one guy on the planet who knows better than the entire rest of the civilized World about the issue - right here lecturing us-and lecturing us-and lecturing us about this.

So Angelrho- since your so bent on saving the world from being sexually exploited by young children -why dont you start your crusade by freeing Sandusky. He claimed that all those young kids came on to HIM. So I guess Sandusky was telling the truth!

I fail to see the way everything AngelRho has said implies that Sandusky should go free.

okay, playah...



What do you think? Should we grant the power to young children to ruin peoples' lives simply by making an accusation that doesn't even have to be true? I mean, really, is the school district in question really responsible for the girl getting (scare quote alert) "raped" if she purposefully set them up for it? That's just mean. I don't see how the school district is culpable for anything more than hiring lawyers who've made written statements in poor taste. And, finally: Yes or no. Can young people be negligent? Is it possible that a young person's negligence can encourage evil people to do evil things or increase the likelihood that bad things will happen to them? And where do we get off saying children can't consent to anything? And why should we care what "the entire rest of the civilized World" thinks?

Screw 'em, says I. I can make my own decisions and draw my own conclusions. I don't need any appeal to majority nonsense to make my mind up for me.

I think any guy with a brain in his head who, in LKL's nightmare scenario jumps on him naked while stoned and drunk while they're alone - I'd be more scared than I've ever been in my life. We had a situation happen with a friend of my friend's family. He would get drunk and grope any girl at the party, people thought him harmless and blew him off (not literally - I mean ignored). He was in his early 20's and in the national guard. One night a friend of hours had a 14 year old niece staying across the street. He went over there, drunk, to go to sleep and she came knocking on our door saying she'd been sexually assaulted. Of course things got incredibly dark that night but what made it all even darker, aside from this guy getting his ass beat by two other guys, getting picked up by the cops, and being a registered sex offender - this girl was 12 and dating a 25 yr old Jamaican; she had a pattern. Even as things were getting messed up that night a friend's girlfriend surmised that this girl likely lead things on, he went with it, and it went farther than she wanted it to. Any time I saw that girl after that though I had cold chills, I knew she'd put a guy's life away and a different friend's girlfriend said with some horror "OMG! She could do that to anyone!".

That said I feel absolutely terrible for any male teachers who want to be there to be role models in K-6, to be at least one male face for the boys to relate to; just in the fact that they will always need to be on guard against this thing particularly if they're under 40. Its longshot, its rare, but - I have to side with LKL on this - the guy who'd say "Well....this is right in my lap...." is practicing such aweful judgment (even on that hypothetical stance) that all known penalties apply. If nothing happened and she was able to get the guy caught in a compromising position with all of the above against his will - that would be truly dispicable and disgusting, however that's also a situation where the press needs to be extremely sensitive to the privacy of both sides in such a case and NOT demagogue either way before the case has been looked at thoroughly to ascertain what really happened. Its a messed up world, you're right that kids are as capable of doing really messed up things as adults are (including murder); its just that there would still be a huge difference between a male or female teacher being come onto by a student and refusing it, trying to stay clear of them vs. engaging it as an opportunity.

Indeed. I chose not to even mention the straw man.

Naturalplastic is right about one thing, though. WP is privileged to have me here. These fine people wouldn't know what to do without people like me!