slowmutant wrote:
Quote:
half (50%) of sexually exploited youth who answered the questions reported that they had exchanged sex for money or goods with females.
That's prostitution, not molestation. If money changes hands, there's no way you can call that abuse.
The way the law is written, it's not considered prostitution until they're over the age of consent... the reason for this is that people below the age of consent (18 in the US) are not considered mentally competent to make those decisions. So the general thinking is that if a person under the age of consent is doing that, it's not their fault, it's the fault of some other adult or maybe more than one adult who have coerced them into that situation. In some cases that's the adult with whom they're performing the act - in others it also includes an adult who's seeking to benefit from it (pimp). The law doesn't really allow for the kind of thinking in which a teenager (much less an even younger child) makes a rational decision to exchange sex for money because they're saving up to move out of the house or because they want a new stereo or something. So if some other benefitor(s) aren't identified, the blame for coercing them is levied against the person with whom the act is performed.
The fact that the law is blind to any distinction based on circumstance or age (a teenager tends to be a bit more individuated than a pre-teen for example), makes it difficult to really assess whether women are or aren't frequently sexual predators with regard to children. I know personally I've seen a lot of news articles over the years about women (usually a teacher) being physically intimate with kids (just recently in fact), but virtually none about male sex offenders. Whether that's because they're surprising or simply because they happened, I don't know. But you can also find public web sites for various jurisdictions that will show you graphical information about the crime statistics in a given neighborhood. These usually include Megan's Law information showing the name and address of nearby sex offenders and the last time I looked at one women were pretty common. But again, the law's lack of ability to allow teenagers to share any responsibility in the act makes it difficult to know whether "statutory rape" was consentual or potentially even the child's idea (they do get crushes). There's just not accounting for "severity".
But of course the US is not the only model of legal morality in the world either... I remembered hearing that Japan didn't really have an age of consent... Turns out it varies, but can be as young as 13... except that in Japan, it only really applies to intercourse apparently, so molestation means something completely different in their culture than it does in ours.
http://legal.3yen.com/2005-07-27/is-the ... really-13/
However as previously pointed out, even in Japan children 12 and under are still not considered culpable by virtue of being mentally incompetent to decide that they want to have sex with an adult for any reason. And personally I'm pretty happy with the idea that we have some consensus at least with regard to pre-teens.
24 Dec 2008, 12:14 pm
