"But children, as I have noted before, are unable to give informed and responsible consent."
One of the concerns I have over these debates is that the issue of consent tends to hinge upon a disturbingly arbitrary concept; that of the age of consent. As Peter Coveney documented in 'The Image of Childhood' attitudes towards childhood tend to have been quite fluid, with much of the modern view of children as an innoncent tabula rasa free of corruption being remarkably modern. As a concrete example, the Victorians set their ultimate age of majority at twenty one. Until very recently, the age of male homosexual consent in Britain remained frozen at that date until it was first lowered to eighteen and then to sixteen. This equalised it with the age of heterosexual consent (there is no age of consent at all for lesbian sex; another anomaly).
Many of the arguments made quite viciously in favour of the inequality were patently false, concerning the lack of ability for a sixteen year old to make informed decisions (those being exactly the same ones I see being used here). The entire problem with an age of consent is that no-one can effectively determine when it should be set; there are those who observe that with the age now set (almost) for all at sixteen it still does not correspond to the sexual behaviour of the population where fourteen frequently is (according to some studies) the age of first sexual contact. In other respects the age of majority remains all over the place; one can join the army or have sex at sixteen but one cannot vote until eighteen. The joke was that two sixteen year olds can have sex, but not smoke afterwards. As an aside, I seem to recall that the age of consent in Holland and Japan remains lower than in the rest of Europe or North America.
By and large I have my suspicions concerning whether children are capable to giving informed consent, and I am unsure of how basing law upon the degree of assault and/or coercion rather than a standard age would be feasible, but I cannot help but be nervous over a debate when that age cannot be decided by any method other than sticking a finger up in the air and deciding which way the wind is blowing.
---- This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25803>
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