22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

[Murphie]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

You're right, Jarre. It does vary from as low as 16, to as high as 18. Which makes it seem even more arbitrary. It looks to be dropping all over the country, which is interesting. Maybe lawmakers are realizing that kids today are pretty mature, and might possibly be ready for this kind of decision-making.

You know, that or they decided that enforcing the laws required too much work, as (late) teenagers are going to try to have the sex.

Still, the purpose of Age of Consent laws are the same. They are there for the protection of someone not considered emotionally capable of handling certain activities.

[Feba]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Murphie: So then, with these people that are not considered emotionally ready, which location has the correct cutoff age?

[DakAttack]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Dak: So then, with these people that are not considered emotionally ready, which location has the correct cutoff age?

Fixt.

So then, I don't believe there's an exact cut-off age where you're suddenly capable of handling such a relationship, but there's probably an age where most can handle it. Legally, I believe sexual relations should be held off until eighteen. That's when you're considered an adult, and you're responsible for all of your actions. If you're sixteen and knocked up by a twenty-two year-old the issue will be between your parents and the twenty-two year-old, not yourself.

To be completely honest, stupid people shouldn't have all the rights and freedoms as the intellegent. I don't believe it's conducive to a healthy society. The right to engange in a consenting relationship at the age of sixteen shouldn't translate into 'It's time to have sex, make babies, spread AIDs, and tax our welfare system'. A proper education should be first and foremost above all things. I still look back at my high-school days and wonder how I was ever making the right decisions without knowing what I know now.

[Feba]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Dak: I want murphie to answer that for a reason. Although it would really be much easier to just kill all the stupid people.

[Telera]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

In 1275 the first law in the UK was set regarding an age of consent, this was 12. this stayed in force until the 16th century when this was increased to 13. The Main reason was that this was the average age of females who'd be able to give birth as they were msotly "mature enough for their body to produce a healthy baby"

Bizarre on their part. Just because a girl starts menstruating at 10 doesn't mean the rest of her body is physically capable of the strain of gestation and birth. The entire reason birth was such an iffy time for women of earlier centuries was about half because of lack of good medical care and half because they were popping out children far before their bodies were truly 'prepped'.

Menstruation can start, again, very early in some girls. The body runs certain checks, various other things, but one thing that isn't 'checked' is the width of the hips and by extension, the birth canal. Since a female's puberty 'state' doesn't really finish off until 18-ish, it's actually physically a bad idea to impregnant most women prior to that point. It becomes less certain and more of a lottery on whether the child can be supported to term without stressing the mother physiologically, as well as an issue of whether or not the child can even fit out of the birth canal, or if it will literally get suck and kill both.

I can even vouch for this. My hips were still expanding up until I was about 18-20. But my cycle started years prior to that. In slender women like myself, birthing a child before the widening has completed is dangerous to say the least. In 'big boned' women, it may not be such an issue.

However, with a life expectancy of all of 40/50 back then, it was practically a necessity to keep humanity going that women wed and birthed children so early. So it wasn't like they had much choice in the matter.

[Murphie]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Murphie: So then, with these people that are not considered emotionally ready, which location has the correct cutoff age?

None of them. Because there is no set day when you're suddenly ready. But they had to set an age limit, so they did (I'm sure they didn't just pick a number out of a hat), and that leaves us where we are now.

[Jei]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Telera - I don't think people would know about all that back in the 12th century :/

[Telera]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

I know they wouldn't, that's basically what my final sentence was a summation of. It was a fact of life, really. You didn't live long, children had a high mortality rate, and basically they didn't have much choice. Not if we wanted to carry on being a species at any rate. :p

But at the same time they were taking awful risks they weren't even aware of that often did kill mother and child. Thankfully, we advanced in medicine. And live long enough that we don't have to wed off our half-matured girls to progenate the species.

[Aksannyi]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Hell it's hard being a parent now, and I'm 26. I can't imagine being half my age and attempting to run after a three year old and 20 month old.

[WishMaster3K]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

I'm only on page 2, but I wanted to throw this in there-

There are people I know in college that probably have trouble wiping their asses. I doubt 16 years old is legal age to consent for anything other than tickets to a Chris Brown concert.

[Feba]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Because there is no set day when you're suddenly ready. I'm sure they didn't just pick a number out of a hat.

Which is exactly my point. There is no set day, nor is there even an average day-- there's not an ounce of research or intelligent reasoning behind their decisions. The age is just what the majority of society found they didn't want to go below at the time.

[Murphie]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Which is exactly my point. There is no set day, nor is there even an average day-- there's not an ounce of research or intelligent reasoning behind their decisions. The age is just what the majority of society found they didn't want to go below at the time.

I'm sure there actually is research and reasoning behind it. Contrary to what you may believe, or are trying to intimate with this conversation, laws aren't just made randomly. There wasn't a room of guys sitting around saying "Um, 14? No, too low. 15? Hmmm. Almost. 16? Oh, I'd hit that. Ok, 16 it is!"

Lawmakers (and the people who elect them) believe that your average teenager isn't intellectually or emotionally equipped to make those kind of decisions before a certain age. Sure, there are going to be those who are ready sooner than others, but again, the law errs on the side of caution, because that makes more sense. It's to protect children and teenagers from sexual predators, or from being forced to consent to things that they haven't been prepared to fully understand the ramifications of.

[Taskmage]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

I'm sure there actually is research and reasoning behind it. Contrary to what you may believe, or are trying to intimate with this conversation, laws aren't just made randomly. There wasn't a room of guys sitting around saying "Um, 14? No, too low. 15? Hmmm. Almost. 16? Oh, I'd hit that. Ok, 16 it is!"

I dunno, that doesn't sound entirely unplausible. Or possibly that someone just used an arbitrary number that sounded right to them when drafting the proposal and others didn't find it worthwhile to dither over the detail.

[Murphie]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

Someone below the age of 18 cannot sign a contract. They can't buy cigarettes or alcohol. They can't vote. They can't rent a car. These limits are in place to protect young people from getting involved with something that we as a society have decided that they aren't ready for. These ages weren't randomly decided on, so why on earth would age of consent be?

The general moral philosophy behind age of consent laws is the assumed need for the protection of minors. It is a common belief in many societies that minors below a certain age lack the maturity and/or life experience to fully understand the ramifications of engaging in sexual acts. These fears may include but are not limited to resulting pregnancies and psychological or physical damage. There is an ongoing debate in many cultures regarding child sexuality as it relates to age and an appropriate age of consent.[1] It is these debates that have informed the various laws in different jurisdictions and account for their disparity. Different cultures regard minors engaging in sexual activity as anything from normal to deviant behavior in need of correction.

So, not random. Just based on differing ideas of morality, depending on the society in question.

edit: And I'm well aware that Wikipedia is hardly the definitive source, but the articles in question seem pretty unbiased.

[Taskmage]

Re: 22 year old guy having sex with a 16 year old girl

I found this site with a table of ages of consent for the various states. Anyone's guess as to its accuracy but I don't feel like doing real research.

Anyway, the table includes some oddities that I find hard to believe are carefully considered and researched. Montana for example has the age of consent set at 16 for females engaging in a heterosexual relationship, but at 18 for females in homosexual relationships or males regardless of the gender of their partner. Are females ready at an earlier age to participate in sexual activity that may result in children as opposed to not? That seems backwards to me. New Mexico takes the opposite tack, allowing homosexual relationships one year before heterosexual relationships become legal.

Edit: Assuming both legislatures were working with the same access to hypothetical scientific data on the subject, it seems to me that the best explanation for their diverging paths would be based on the political and cultural climate in the area towards homosexual relationships, which I would call arbitrary since it's derived from what is ethically passable rather than some calculated number. Even haven considered research on the subject, it still basically comes down to basically picking a number out of the air.