aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, September 29, 2007
It’s time to abandon the myth of the “age of consent”
William Saletan writing in Slate:
In Georgia, 21-year-old Genarlow Wilson is serving a mandatory 10-year jail sentence for aggravated child molestation. His crime: When he was 17, he had oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. In Utah, polygamist leader Warren Jeffs has been convicted as an accomplice to rape for orchestrating a sexually coercive marriage between a 14-year-old girl and her 19-year-old cousin. In Michigan, a 53-year-old prosecutor is in custody on charges of entering the state to have sex with a 5-year-old girl.
This is the reality of sex with minors: The ages of the parties vary widely from case to case. For more than a century, states and countries have been raising and standardizing the legal age of consent. Horny teenagers are being thrown in with pedophiles. The point of this crackdown was to lock up perverts and protect incompetent minors. But the rationales and the numbers don’t match up. The age of majority and the age of competence are coming apart. The age of competence is fracturing, and the age of female puberty is declining. It’s time to abandon the myth of the “age of consent” and lower the threshold for legal sex. [READ ON]
