Should the age of consent be lowered to 13?

Nonu I'm puzzled. Anyone promoting the benefits of pornography gets challenged on Gransnet. How does mentioning someone disagreeing amount to ridicule?

Cannot find it ??

I find this extremely sad , that we should be talking about pornography; which is a very dangerous and bad thing , as if it was about the price of cheese .

I think we're having a needless conversation here, Nonu. Yes, pornography is appalling and harmful to children. You're preaching to many converted Gransnetters!

I Don"t preach to anyone , in my book, it is live and let live .

I give up. Peace

As a child protection trainer, we cover a lot about when consent is truly consent and when it is not, but would always consider age gap in the mix - remember older women also use teenage boys and this is just as damaging.

The age of consent is an artificial construct anyway, as people develop at different rates - some girls begin menstruation before they are 10, but there does need to be an age, and I guess 16 fits the bill.. doesn't really save them from predatory males though- saddest case I worked with was a 16 year old , married to a man aged 54, and pregnant... seemed to me like legalised paedophilia.....

petallus As you say, in some cultures, thirteen year old girls can get married. Even if they wait for a year before having sex, I'm fairly sure that in a TV programme relating to this issue it was stated that girls of this age may well not be fully physically developed and childbirth can carry much higher risks for them.

No.

I wish this thread didn't have this title. So wrong.

With any title the proposal would be wrong, jings, the title just flags it up. That title does mean that those who will be disturbed by the thought have it waved under their nose, you are right there, if you will pardon the image. But the title does have to say what the thread is about.

The age of consent should stay right where it is. If under-sixteens of similar are "innocently experimenting" with sex with one another, that should not be a legal matter but a social one and cause for serious consideration by their families and other guardians and social workers. I think that is how it treated now already.

If someone a little under sixteen is having sex with someone between sixteen and twenty, then the maturity of both of them needs to be considered before action is taken.

But relations between people with greater differences between their ages shades very soon into exploitation and should be condemned and illegal. And how soon would it be before someone says, "But she was nearly 14" or 13 or 12 or 10 or whatever the new legal age became?

I still can't get my head round what possible interests in common an 18 year old would have with a 40 or 50 year old. Whilst it is perfectly legal, I am always suspicious about the power balance in such relationships, but as is often pointed out, they can both give consent.

I can only go on my own experience and 13 seems way to young, even at 18 I would not have been ready for that kind of relationship.

An interesting and I should have thought inaccurate use of the word "persecution" if that is what the lawyer actually said. She seems to have an unusual disregard for the law.

The title does not say what the original post is about - the view of "this female lawyer". The original poster goes on to say that the lawyer might have been misquoted.

The title makes it sound as though the original poster is suggesting the lowering of the age of consent.

I think it matters.

Also, looking at her quotes again, she appears to be implying that some of the celebrities that may admit or have admitted guilt may not in fact be guilty but have owned up to the offences because they concluded that "resistance is futile".

Everybody knows that successful prosecutions for rape and sexual assault are quite difficult to prove in Court. How much harder must it be then to get a prosecution when there is no forensic evidence because the incident happened many years before. Why, then, would "resistance be futile"?

Ridiculous to be debating something that somebody might or might not have suggested.

jO8 the voice of reason!

I totally agree.

j08 It's obvious the original poster was not supporting what the lawyer was alleged to have said. Given the extraordinary nature of those comments, the poster was merely questioning whether the lawyer might have been misquoted. The OP goes on to say "Continual and systematic abuse of teenage girls is not 'low-level misdemeanors'.

It does matter what the lawyer was implying. If a lawyer implies that defendants in cases like this sometimes plead guilty because they believe they will not get a fair hearing, that is a very serious, and many would say ridiculous, accusation.

The members of her chambers obviously recognise how serious her comments were as they have strongly disassociated themselves.

I'm talking about the TITLE of the thread as much as anything.

#overreaction

Surely the thread title is a classic example of a question to which the answer is always no.

It is not quite like "Have you stopped beating your wife?" though, where the answer is neither yes nor no. Perhaps it could have been phrased better.

Yes Absent. But that's not what the thread goes on to be about.

It just sounds like an unpleasant and ridiculous question.

It's really about the view of one lawyer, expressed in an online publication. Even her chambers have distanced themselves from her remark.

It's much worse than wife beating!

Obviously 13 is too young, but remember Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year old cousin, quite legally, in the 1960s, I believe. There was a bit of an outcry in Britain when the press found out.

In the later 1800s age of consent in Queensland was 12, in England 13 and in Russia 10. Imagine - 10!!! Of course, then as now, kids mature at vastly different rates.

Adults are supposed to protect kids against themselves, which is another reason older adults should never have sex with under 16 year olds.

When I was a very inexperienced 17 year old, I started going out with a 27 year old architect. I though he was lovely, but I was terribly innocent and immature, and when he realised this he dropped me like a hot brick. I was heartbroken, but I realise now he would have felt like a paedophile if we'd had sex. Some men actually do the right thing!

(2 years later my immaturity paid dividends - I went to live in Austria to improve my German, and ended up being totally fluent and without accent - this can usually only happen before the end of puberty)