Discussion forums for Minor-Attracted People and allies
http://forum.map-union.org/
Well, I've no work tomorrow, so I'll try and commit something to digital storage.BLueRibbon wrote: ↑Sat Sep 07, 2024 7:52 am Perhaps Red Rodent, who seems to be soft anti-c, could write an article about his experience in 'safeguarding'.
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.
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.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'm aware that coercive encounters are included in the numbers I cited, but as you also note, it's impossible to pull them out.Pharmakon wrote: ↑Mon Sep 09, 2024 5:39 pm 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 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.
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.Fragment wrote: ↑Mon Sep 09, 2024 7:00 am 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...
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....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....
This is where Rind's 1998 analysis, or Daly's 2021 dissertation come more into play.Jim Burton wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2024 4:25 pm 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.
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.Pharmakon wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2024 4:16 pm First, and most important, negative reactions, especially among girls, are likely to be a product of prevailing erotophobic norms.
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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.