Re: Idea- replacing Age of Consent laws with Sexual Consent Certificate Scheme
Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2025 6:03 pm
As specified, I would like to see serious proposals as to how the examples I mentioned (not particularly yours) might be attainable via some middle ground. One possibility is that the example you mentioned (reducing the age of consent to 12 with proof of initiation) is a catalyst.WavesInEternity wrote: Sat Mar 15, 2025 4:18 pmI believe that I've personally been doing the exact opposite. There's no way my "own values and objectives" are perfectly in tune with my proposal of lowering the age of consent to 12 with the caveat that the youth aged 12-16 must always clearly initiate sexual activity with an adult.Jim Burton wrote: Sat Mar 15, 2025 1:00 pm The problem common to this thread, others on this forum and what I witnessed in PCMA, is that people are putting too much faith in proposals that fully condone their own values and objectives.
I talk to an actual victim of CSA on a regular basis and integrate her perspective in my proposals. Do you?
My challenge in return, would be that directly addressing sexual relations between minors and adults instead of the rights of youth in general, would be a wrong move, since it would be seen either rightly or wrongly as self-interested.
It could also be identified that by your own exacting standards, you are introducing a voluntarist legal norm and therefore inviting the risk that others may seek to "query" the explicit will of minors by introducing "tests", or diluting the revised age with close in age exemptions to lawyer out the "ick" factor.
As for talking to those whose lived experience is that of a sex abuse survivor, I have serious reservations about whether those kind of experiences will be a limiting factor for legal reforms, as much as say, lay concerns about the potential for abuse. Either way, I kind of tune out when participants in a debate start the process of anecdotal reporting, since there is nothing particularly methodical, insightful, and therefore indicative about it, unless the insight itself is useful.