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

[Strato]

Thank you for highlighting in the proposal the-younger-age-at-which-children-commence-puberty phenomenon. The piece is stronger for it.

I note the following from virped.org/mission statements: "Virtuous Pedophiles is fundamentally opposed to any form of sexual activity between adults and children." Clearly the AMSC proposal takes a diametrically opposite view to this statement. I understand this forum is to give a collective voice to all MAPS, virtuous or otherwise. How does one avoid alienating a presumably not insubstantial number of fellow MAPS in this instance?

I'd say there's three things:

First, and most importantly, Pro-Reform is NOT a position held by MAP Union. It is a personal position held by Brian, and to a lesser degree, myself. As an organization we actually hope for the participation of more VirPed type people. We want to amplify THEIR voices, too. We have a guest blogs section where we would happily publish anti-c essays and we hope that as our committee expands in the future that we will be able to welcome anti-c people and be able to work alongside them. None of Mu's principles are opposed to VirPed's principles. We do support legal reform, but age of consent reform is not explicitly outlined as part of that.

Meanwhile we also support discussion about contact stances between pro-c and anti-c people. Some communities try to unite either side of the fence by banning discussion on the topic. We don't think that's productive. We want people who agree on most things, but disagree on one important issue, to be able to work together on the things that do unite us.

Second, and this may be splitting hairs, but pro-reform is not a position that supports sexuality activity between adults and children. Children are explicitly excluded from the reform. It is a proposal focused on adolescent sexual agency and autonomy. Formerly having strong anti-c views himself, Brian proposed 12+ partly because he felt it would be a position that moderate anti-c people could support, while still being seen as "progress enough" for pro-c people. Key to the position is that adolescents are not children- they are between childhood and adulthood and should be treated as such.

Third, even Ethan Edwards, one of the founders of VirPed has expressed a view very similar to 12+ in this blog.

The compromise I propose is that for girls of (say) age 13 and above, there should be no prosecution unless the girl herself wants it -- without heavy pressure from parents or law enforcement. This system leaves in place the most important protection -- if she was raped, there is no need to prove lack of consent. If it can be proven that sex happened, then if she says she did not consent she is automatically right. She could also admit she agreed to the sex but it was under false pretenses -- this should also result in a conviction, though a lighter sentence. But she also has the option to forgive the man and chalk it up to a learning experience. Of course, if she is enthusiastic about the relationship, she would not support prosecution.

Her judgment that she wants the man prosecuted should not be required immediately -- she should have a few years at least to re-evaluate the experience.

This is almost exactly the 16/12 position (except that the age is 13 instead of 12). Even including the ability of the younger person to prosecute without having to prove a lack of consent. I know this isn't an official VirPed position and just Ethan's personal view, but if such an influential member of the anti-c community can accept this as a reasonable position, then we believe it should be possible for 16/12 to unite a substantial part of the community. There will, of course, be abolitionists that think it doesn't go far enough and other people who think that it goes too far. But we hope it can lead to discussion, not alienation.

Thank you for your detailed response.

<Devil’s advocate mode: ON>

I am having difficulty reconciling on the one hand: proposal content penned by MAP Union founders, officers, whatever, and on the other: MAP Union has no position regarding the self-same proposal content. I get what you are attempting to do, but it just seems a tad dysfunctional.

“We want people who agree on most things, but disagree on one important issue, to be able to work together on the things that do unite us.”

How is MAP Union ever to improve the lot of MAPS, if our detractors can turn round and rightfully claim that the so-called union fails to agree on the important issues?

“None of Mu's principles are opposed to VirPed's principles.”

Well no ... as I read them, Mu’s principles are generic and fail to consider the elephants in the room. A problem might arise when contradictory proposals appear.

“Second, and this may be splitting hairs, but pro-reform is not a position that supports sexuality activity between adults and children.”

We need to be careful when splitting hairs; certain agencies consider a child to be between 5 and 14 years of age.

"I know this isn't an official VirPed position and just Ethan's personal view ..."

I would also caution placing excessive weight on a single person's viewpoint. There are many MAPS out there who also have personal views but no agency or resources to make them dominant.

<Devil’s advocate mode: OFF>

[Red Rodent]

Personally I want pro-c and anti-c people to stop seeing themselves as so diametrically opposed.

Oh, God, you and me both, Fragment! I've felt frustrated about this false dichotomy for years, possibly since I joined the Virped forum a decade ago.

I'm sure I'm not alone in my take on this: I identify as a non-contact boylover but that, to me, is a personal decision, based on my personal experience and consequent values and beliefs. I don't seek to judge the views and behaviour of others in this respect. I have never subscribed to the core VP dictum that "sex between adults and minors is always wrong," because the issues are too complex and nuanced to make such a bold declaration.

Things also change as time moves on. I've been in a civil partnership for over ten years. When we first made a commitment to each other I was in my mid-20s and he was 18. That was never an issue for me (aside from good-natured teasing from friends about me being a "toffee tortoise"*) But, even if I weren't in a monogamous relationship, I couldn't conceive of having sexual relations with a teenager these days.

I must also say that I would and could never be affiliated with a group that campaigns for the rights of adults to have sex with children, or even the rights of children to have sex with adults. It would be professional suicide for me, if nothing else.

I'm open about my support for VP and B4U-ACT; I've even defended Free Spirits as a legitimate support organisation rather than the sinister paedophile ring that it's sometimes been cast as. Discussion of the issues is great. Sexual liberation for teenagers, yes. Compassionate justice for those who make mistakes and overstep the mark. Freedom for one to love whomsoever they choose. But this is a line that I neither want nor am able to cross.
--
*Toffee tortoise: Brit. school slang from "toffee man", one who hangs around offering toffees to kids. A toffee tortoise is one who gets in before the hare.

[Strato]

"I ended up kind of rambling a bit, but I hope I made things a bit more clear?"

Playing devil's advocate sometimes brings things to the surface that might otherwise not be discussed, so thank you very much for digging deep by way of a response to two of the points I raised.

[BLueRibbon]

That is a long discussion to come back to.

Fragment explained everything remarkably well, but I think I should also reply as the primary author of the Pro-Reform framework.

1. The Pro-Reform framework that is becoming quite popular is a BLueRibbon position, not an official Mu position. It's posted in Mu Perspectives, to which anyone can submit an essay for consideration. The board is concerned about the lack of anti-c articles; we would like to see contributions from people with a variety of different perspectives. Perhaps Red Rodent, who seems to be soft anti-c, could write an article about his experience in 'safeguarding'. He might (hopefully would!) have some criticisms about the 'safeguarding' community from within.

2. The 16/12 proposal is designed to offer legal headroom for adults and young people to interact sexually, offering protections against both abuse and unnecessary prosecution. It avoids an over-reliance on chronological age by creating a zone in which an adult who takes advantage of a teen can be prosecuted, but a genuinely mutual relationship should not go to court. This recognizes the differential rates of development among young people, while placing a hard cut-off at a point necessary for the proposal to ever have any hope of gaining traction. It is supported by data on the harm of AMSC, and also by my observations of the emotional development of the many children and teens I have known through work and as a (platonic) AF to many boys.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Lennon72]

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.

@Fragment So, all right then. The child can press charges "if they want to". This seems to imply that if the experience was positive for them, that they can simply refuse to press charges or even refuse to report it. Is that what you are saying?