16/12: Pro-Reform's position on AMSC

[Red Rodent]

Perhaps Red Rodent, who seems to be soft anti-c, could write an article about his experience in 'safeguarding'.

Well, I've no work tomorrow, so I'll try and commit something to digital storage.

[Fragment]

I posted a long reply over at BoyMoment in response to some of the feedback we got. I thought it was worth cross-posting here.

Wow! What an amazing response. I was a little bit nervous about posting this, because it seems a little more "serious" than the general mood of BM. But I'm so glad that so many people took the time to read it and reply. It's also made coming back to reply a little overwhelming, though, because I have so many people's ideas to engage with. I really do appreciate the responses though and I hope this reply will do everyone justice.

1) First of all I'd like to say that I'm extremely happy that a few people that identify as "anti-c" are coming out in support of this proposal. One of the reasons Brian and I proposed 16/12 is that we want to try and find more common ground between pro-c and anti-c people. No-one is 100% anti-c after all (that would mean no sex for anyone!)- the question is "what age is appropriate for sex". Some people answer 18, some answer 16, some 14, some 12 and some even lower. We felt that "people who have started puberty have the capacity to make decisions about sex, but they might need a little extra legal support" was a fairly reasonable position, even for people that think we need to err on the side of caution to protect minors.

2) Regarding close-in-age exemptions (Romeo and Juliet laws), we didn't feel there was a need to talk about them much. 2/3 of states in the US already have such laws, as do countries like Australia, Canada and Japan. These laws are good because they recognize the sexual feelings of teenagers. They are better than a blanket age of consent of 16/18. However, they also don't make a lot of sense to us. "I'm 13, I can understand about sex enough to be intimate with a 16 year old. But if my partner is 26 suddenly I don't understand sex anymore." If informed consent is required to be sexually intimate the age of the partner doesn't seem relevant. For pre-pubescents playing doctor, rather than it being a matter of age of consent laws it should be a matter of 1) age of criminal responsibility and 2) prosecutorial discretion.

3) Regarding LBLs I would say there are two arguments. One is practical and one is ethical. On the practical argument, quite simply society isn't ready to recognize any kind of sexuality in pre-pubescents. In the 1900s even the lower-end age of consent laws were around 12 or 13. Many people in society do recognize a certain level of sexuality in pubescent boys and girls, though. So it's partly just a matter of setting goals that are achievable (Even 16/12 is radical by modern societal standards). A change in societal attitudes towards childhood sexuality and replacing a strict age of consent with other kinds of checks might be an ideal solution. NAMBLA and other groups advocated for that. But they failed. Is it better to stay ideologically pure or to fight for incremental change? If society can accept adolescent sexuality more openly, I feel that DOES help LBLs because the discussion of "childhood sexuality" becomes one step closer. I've also talked to a few LBLs who have said "even though I prefer younger boys, if was legal I'd like to find a 12-year-old YF".

As for the ethical argument. I honestly can't say that I know 100% where the line around sex should be drawn and I don't think anyone can say based on our current research. I think 12 as a line is a fairly "safe" one. But there is a point at which I think sexual intimacy is too dangerous to be worth the risk. If you have an exclusive sexual interest in penetrating newborns, then I'm sorry, but I can't advocate for you. Apart from the physical harms there are also social harms too. If society changed these social harms would probably disappear. But if we just wait for society to change we'll probably be waiting a long time, so instead we should look at the harms now.

[Quoted the Finnish data here as seen above in this topic]
As you can see the rate of negative reactions drops a LOT after 12. And for girls (this proposal isn't just about BLs), over 70% had a negative reaction to sex before 12 (even in cases that were non-coercive). I don't want kids to have bad experiences with sexual intimacy, so I think that it'd be unethical to suddenly remove restrictions on pre-pubescent sex. Let's see how society changes with the acknowledgement of adolescent sexuality first.

4) Incest is basically similar to the LBL discussion. In an ideal world there would definitely be some kinds of incest that aren't harmful. Firstly, society will have a much stronger aversion to incest cases than non-incest. Second, I think incest carries much higher risks than non-incest. In non-incest cases, the minor usually has a safe place to go to if the sexual contact turns out bad. Our proposal isn't just about allowing cases that are good, but it's also about making it easy for minors to be protected by cases that are bad. "If it's forced you can punish the perpetrator using rape laws" is true, until you remember that it can actually be quite hard to get a guilty verdict in cases of rape. It can also be hard for a minor to report certain cases. If it's a case of a parent and a child, and the child wants to say "no", how easy is it for them to say "no"? Their parent still controls most of their life. A ban on parent-child incest is about respecting the difficulty a minor in that situation would face and making it easier for them to seek accountability from their parent if they want to. I don't think all parent-child incest is inherently damaging, but the relationship is an especially unique one and I don't think the benefits outweigh the risks. If non-incest AMSC was allowed, then MAPs would have a potential sexual outlet and wouldn't need to involve their own children.

5) Just regarding the former Netherlands model, or the current Germany model (in which 14-15 is legal if the adult doesn't exploit the minor's lack of sexual self-determination) they are kind of what we are aiming for with this proposal. Technically you could say that we wouldn't be "legalizing" sex with 12-15 year olds, rather that we are adding steps before prosecution is permitted. We did consider the "rebuttable presumption" model. Uruguay actually has that for 12-14 year olds - "guilty until proven innocent" in a sense. We decided against that though because we felt that it undermines one of the fundamental principles of criminal justice. Rather than consent being something you prove in a court subjectively determined by a judge/ jury we feel it's better to codify, in law, what the consent of a 12-15 year old should look like. We think that offers the best balance between respecting the sexual agency and autonomy of adolescents, while still offering them heightened legal protections.

Of course, if this just remains a proposal amongst MAPs it'll never go anywhere, nor be picked up by any media, let alone government. We need more than that, we need activism and outreach. So that's what we're trying to start working on at Mu. NAMBLA got a substantial amount of media attention back in the day, but their radical anarchist approach to things was part of the reason they were never taken seriously. They were trying to rewrite the whole of society's script on sexuality while being a group of only a few thousand members, only tens of which were front-line activists. I still don't know exactly the right path for engagement going forward, but having a clear policy goal at least gives me a sense of direction. I hope that perhaps, for others, a clear policy like 16/12 might have the same effect.

[Pharmakon]

As you can see the rate of negative reactions drops a LOT after 12. And for girls (this proposal isn't just about BLs), over 70% had a negative reaction to sex before 12 (even in cases that were non-coercive).

Unless I am overlooking something, Rind's data does not support a claim that over 70% of girls under 12 reacted negatively to minor-older sex even in cases that were non-coercive.

One problem for us with using Rind's figures is that he does not in general separate out coercive sex. This makes sense given his purposes, but since 16/12 does not advocate abolishing the current ban on coercive sex, an analysis excluding those cases would be more relevant for our advocacy.

Rind found that 13.6% of girls and 10.7% of boys reported their experience of minor-older sex included coercion (Table 4; girls 138 out of 1011, boys 29 out of 270). If we assume that this percentage applies in all age ranges, then excluding cases of coercive sex, the percentage of girls reacting negatively would be 68.3%, which is not over 70%.

Perhaps, however, coercive sex was more common when the girl was under 12. If the rate of coercive minor-older sex for girls under 12 was double the rate for girls of all ages, then the percentage reacting negatively in the remaining cases would be only 62.3%. If it was triple, the negative rate would be only 53.6%.

In performing these calculations I assumed that coercive sex would always produce a negative reaction. This may seem intuitive, but Rind's data contradicts it. Even girls reacted negatively to coercive minor-older sex only 77.5% of the time. Boys, astoundingly, reacted negatively only 37.9% of the time, and actually reacted positively almost half the time (48.3%)!

As Rind points out in a footnote, the Finnish questions and answer percentages are available online (2013: https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=en; 1988: https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=en; 2008: https://services.fsd.tuni.fi/catalogue/ ... anguage=en). But this information does not permit even gender breakdown, much less determining frequency of coercion by age group, and it appears that the entire dataset is only available to those with an academic affiliation. Having this dataset might allow us to answer this and other questions.

[Fragment]

Rind found that 13.6% of girls and 10.7% of boys reported their experience of minor-older sex included coercion (Table 4; girls 138 out of 1011, boys 29 out of 270). If we assume that this percentage applies in all age ranges, then excluding cases of coercive sex, the percentage of girls reacting negatively would be 68.3%, which is not over 70%.

Perhaps, however, coercive sex was more common when the girl was under 12. If the rate of coercive minor-older sex for girls under 12 was double the rate for girls of all ages, then the percentage reacting negatively in the remaining cases would be only 62.3%. If it was triple, the negative rate would be only 53.6%.

In performing these calculations I assumed that coercive sex would always produce a negative reaction. This may seem intuitive, but Rind's data contradicts it. Even girls reacted negatively to coercive minor-older sex only 77.5% of the time. Boys, astoundingly, reacted negatively only 37.9% of the time, and actually reacted positively almost half the time (48.3%)!

I'm aware that coercive encounters are included in the numbers I cited, but as you also note, it's impossible to pull them out.

Also, on a more practical note, even with them pulled out the under 12 age group is still quite high, well above 50%. While the data definitely doesn't support the blanket prohibition and "every child a victim" mentality of society, I think if we're being honest we need to accept that not all the data comes out as a strong endorsement of AMSC.


I also think there is a very open question as to the impact of permitting consensual sex on the rate of coercive sex.

One argument says that with no legal outlet, some men resort to coercive means that they wouldn't otherwise use if AMSC was legal. This is one of the arguments BLR makes in The Push. That adults who engage with minors priortize "safety" over "consent".

Another argument says that if the door to AMSC was opened the total number of intergenerational relationships would increase and so coercive relationships would also increase as a function of that. By endorsing AMSC on any level even though you aren't endorsing coercion, you are opening the door to relationships where, in the heat of the moment, coercion is possible.

I think that both arguments may be true to some degree and we don't know the degree to which each is true. While "rape is illegal regardless" is true, legal changes would definitely have a non-zero impact. Of course, on the flip side of that we have the damage caused by the prosecution of consensual cases to not only the adults, but also the minors who are gaslit by victimology.

As the article says The key factor in determining an appropriate age of consent is managing the tension between prevention of harm and respect for autonomy. Moral panic paints it as a black and white issue with clear answers either side of 18 or 16. But reality is more complex, and not universally in favor of those of us advocating for reform.

[Fragment]

Another post from BoyMoment concerning incest and the overall philosophy of 16/12.

I'm not denying that positive parent-child relationships can exist. But we need to be honest about the data. Using the above data again, in adult-minor sex involving a girl 80.0% had a negative experience if the older person was a relative. This was only 52.3% for "strangers". For boys it was 33.3% with relatives and 19.8% with strangers.

In a perfect world we'd be able to stop all the negative cases and allow all the positive cases. We could prosecute each case perfectly and abusers would go to prison while everyone else would be free. But in the real world we can't catch everything perfectly so we either "over-protect" (and ban some of the positive cases) or "under-protect" (and allow some of the negative cases).

The current system over-protects, I think most of us agree with that. The laws are too inflexible. The punishments are too strict. Especially in the US. And extra strictness doesn't even seem to be doing much to stop abuse. MAPs are left with NO legal ways to express their desire for intimacy, and extremely harmful acts are treated virtually identically to acts of love and affection.

Pro-reform seeks to change that. Not to let MAPs do anything they want, but to balance the sexual rights of MAPs and children with appropriate safeguards. In a sense it's a "harm reduction" approach, rather than the current "harm prevention" approach.

Incest simply doesn't justify the trade off of benefits vs risks. I've never met a MAP that is ONLY attracted to their own children. So 16/12 will still give more options than the status quo. Maintaining a prohibition on incest does reduce those options, but only slightly. And it helps to prevent some of the worse outcomes in a fairly high risk situation (while I do acknowledge that some cases of incest can lead to positive reactions as per the Finnish data).

16/12 and pro-reform is about looking at things scientifically and saying "what changes have low risk but high benefit- let's start there". It's the equivalent of decriminalizing possession of a small quantity of marijuana instead of legalizing all illicit drugs.

[Harlan]

We did consider the "rebuttable presumption" model. Uruguay actually has that for 12-14 year olds - "guilty until proven innocent" in a sense. We decided against that though because we felt that it undermines one of the fundamental principles of criminal justice...

The right decision, because automatic guilt is a bad and vicious practice. It is very easy to blame a person and stop there under external pressure. Automatic guilt leads to phenomena such as cancel culture. An accusation should not make a person guilty by default, the one who makes the accusation must prove it. This will help to train people to make accusations immediately, and not after 15-20 years, when nothing can be proven, but automatic guilt still makes a person guilty.

[Pharmakon]

There are, imho, three general reasons for caution in interpreting negative reaction data in the Finnish survey and in Rind's analysis of it.

First, and most important, negative reactions, especially among girls, are likely to be a product of prevailing erotophobic norms. In his 2023 paper comparing the Finnish survey with a German survey of reactions to first heterosexual coitus, Rind, citing an observation from Felson's 2019 analysis of the Finnish data, comments:

...girls, much more than boys, are sensitive to cultural norms regarding sexual (and other) behavior, and hence more likely to be biased toward less favorable reactions in a disapproving cultural-social environment....

Second, the Finnish survey, while by far the best evidence available on this topic, was itself extremely biased towards erotophobic outcomes. Its title, "Child Victim Survey," reflects this bias, confounding the distinction between children and adolescents that 16/12 relies on and conforming to the victimization narrative central to Child Sexual Abuse ideology.

Third, in an effort to ensure his results are not biased toward positive outcomes, Rind adopts a "conservative" approach to the data under which "priority in coding was given to more negative, or less positive, reactions." Note, for example, that the Finnish participants could classify their negative reactions as "very negative" or "fairly negative," a distinction Rind collapses into a single category.

With regard to the 72.6% negative reaction among girls to minor-older sex that happened when they were under 12, in addition to including cases of coerced sex, this figure also includes two other categories of experience which Rind found to produce high negatives: sex with a relative and non-contact sex.

Sex with an older relative produced an 80% negative reaction among girls. However, only 7.8% of girls with minor-older sex experiences (80 out of 1020) reported such sex. (The 16/12 proposal does not advocate abolishing the ban on incest, though it appears from the data publicly available online that much or most of the sex with relatives reported was not with caregivers.)

Non-contact minor-older sex produced a 50.3% negative reaction for girls. Rind reports that 17.6% of the minor-older experiences of girls were of this type (181 out of 1028). This category, created by Rind, combines responses to three survey questions: "What happened: Request or suggestion to do something sexual"; "What happened: The person showed his/her genitals"; and "What happened: You showed your genitals." It's questionable how much of this should be categorized as AMSC at all (to the extent the "C" stands for "contact," none of it should).

If these cases, along with coercive experiences, were removed from consideration, the percentage of negative reactions by girls to minor-older sex occurring before they were 12 would be smaller, though without reanalysis of the data it is impossible to know by how much.

As one more illustration of the caution necessary in interpreting Finnish negative reaction data, those of us who are male boylovers should note that, while the data in general supports the receptivity of boys to minor-older sex under almost any conditions, the highest negative result for boys -- 51.3% -- was when the older partner was male. We are right to at least partially discount this as representing the homophobia that remains a part of how boys are taught to understand masculinity. But we should remain alert to the many factors that should lead us to be similarly skeptical about other negative results.

None of this means the Finnish data do not support 16/12 in drawing a significant distinction between child and adolescent sex. They do. But being honest about the data should also mean being honest about the many limitations of the data.

[Jim Burton]

Four, it is not dealing with concrete outcomes such as psychological well-being; these are subjective responses, much like asking a child to rank different flavors of jelly bean.

[Fragment]

Four, it is not dealing with concrete outcomes such as psychological well-being; these are subjective responses, much like asking a child to rank different flavors of jelly bean.

This is where Rind's 1998 analysis, or Daly's 2021 dissertation come more into play.

No single study will ever really give enough information to suggest a specific course of policy. But the preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that the general population is engaging in quite a few cognitive distortions in order to justify their opposition to AMSC (especially where the minor is an adolescent).

[Fragment]

First, and most important, negative reactions, especially among girls, are likely to be a product of prevailing erotophobic norms.
...
We are right to at least partially discount this as representing the homophobia that remains a part of how boys are taught to understand masculinity.

While I agree, I also think that if a proposed policy relies too heavily on changing heavily entrenched norms about sexuality it becomes too ambitious a project. That's why even if incest resulted in equivalent outcomes to non-incest AMSC I probably still wouldn't want to advocate for it in 16/12. The norms against incest are just too strong.

For better or worse, it's a very assimilationist approach. But I feel that the radical approaches have been tried and failed. That isn't to say I want to abandon radical thought entirely, nor throw sub-groups of MAPs under the bus in order to achieve reform. Incrementalism need not be the enemy of revolution.

Even if the policy is more targeted towards hebephilic and ephebophilic individuals, I think it's very important that the narrative and rhetoric stays inclusive of pedophilic and nepiophilic people. That's fundamentally where the LGBT movement let BLs down- they didn't just abandon us in terms of policy, but they abandoned us in terms of inclusive attitudes.