Originally Posted by
Denise
9-12? It may have something to do with the way having sex affected those children mentally in the long term. A lot of research has been done, it isn't a random number thrown out there for the heck o fit. A lot is taken into consideration. Take a 13 year old, and a 16 year old, the mentality difference is huge.
Childrenh aren't mentally equipped to deal with sex and all it entails.
You seem to have a heck of a lot of faith in legislators... Whatever research there is now about sexuality in adolescence, most of the laws were written before that anyway. For one thing, if there were an obvious "right" age of consent, why does the legal age vary so much? There are places where the age of consent as low as 12, and others where it's as high as 21. Also, many places have a higher age of consent for homosexual relations than heterosexual ones (even though children often experiment with other children of their same gender rather than the opposite one). There are also often exceptions that have an exception to allow children, or at least girls, to be married before the age of consent and have sex with their spouse. There are places where it's still illegal to have sex outside of marriage, or to cheat on your spouse if you are married. The laws don't come from the research - they come from an essentially arbitrary, or at least unscientific sense of the morality of sex.
Now that's not to say that there shouldn't be a legal age of consent, only that the current laws in most places really aren't particularly based on empirical research. Having sex in childhood can obviously do quite a lot of damage, but I think it's more a matter of the emotional and psychological circumstances under which the contact took place than exactly how old the kid was. For one thing, people mature at different rates, but more than that, what's most damaging about underage sex is generally going to be things like being pressured or manipulated into it, not having wanted to do it at all, or it being the result of some pathological process. It's normal for kids to experiment to some extent, and if it's totally consensual for both kids, it's not particularly damaging... it's more when kids are tricked or forced into having relations with someone much older than them that it tends to do a lot of damage.
Of course, sometimes a teen who seeks out a relationship with an older person. A lot of people would say that they're looking for a parent figure or whatever, and often times that can be true, and that kind of relationship can definitely be damaging (it's one of the major things that pimps use to control child prostitutes), and it can also just lead to an unhealthy kind of relationship, especially if the older person is looking for someone to depend on them, in that it kind of impairs the younger person's ability to grow up and gain independence and stuff. But I think it's also possible even with that kind of relationship for both people to be happy with it, and as long as they're happy and are able to function well enough and everything, I don't see anything wrong with it.