JWeinCom said:
Nem said:
I'm talking about puberty from the time it starts. I even gave you an estimate of not sooner than 12, but i admit that crazy exceptions may occur. Why am i repeating all this?
You want to put a hard age like say 12 and up, but that goes against the exception cases i'm bringing up. It's because they are exceptions that it is difficult to categorise them with hard lines of age and why i used the term puberty. As in sexually developed and with a developed body size.
You just can't fathom these exception for some reason. Everything must go on group 1 or group 2.No deviations allowed. I am NOT sugesting Children. I have never brought up children. You diluted the conversation in your head by deciding that a consenting 12 or 14 year old presumibly developed is a Child. He isn't a child, he is a teenager. Puberty is what makes one not be a child anymore. It's not an age.
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Most of that is just wrong.
Children are defined as persons under 18 by the UN, and that resolution was ratified by 192 different countries. In almost all cases it is used as a binary distinction between children and adult.
Teenager has nothing to do with puberty. It is a term that is explicitly linked to age. An 11 year old who has undergone puberty is not a teenager. A 13 year old who has not undergone puberty is a teenager. Teen-ager. As in, the age ends with teen. ThirTEEN, FourTEEN etc. 13-19 year olds are teenagers. No exceptions. That's just a definition. Teenager and children are not mutually exclusive terms. A 13 year old is a child and a teenager. A twelve year old is only a child. Maybe adolescent is the word you are looking for.
You're also wrong on the age of the onset of puberty. Not sooner than 12 is completely wrong. For girls it is actually more common for puberty to occur before 12. 11 is about average. 9 or 10 is fairly common, and 7 or 8 is common enough to consider. Boys generally start at 12, but starting at 9 isn't a freakish thing. It's fairly typical. In a given fifth grade class of 30 kids, you could expect 3 or 4 girls and 1 or 2 boys to show clear signs of puberty. And I can tell you from personal experience, that they do not tend to be any more or less emotionally or intellectually developed than their peers.
Puberty has no very limited correlation with intellectual development or decision making abilities. They tend to coincide simply because they both typically occur with age. Puberty means you can physically have reproductive sex, not that you can intellectual consent. And, puberty occuring at age 12 is a mostly modern phenomena. Our diets have changed the onset of puberty from about 15 to 12 over the past century, so kids being sexually developed at this stage of brain development is a new and problematic phenomena.
Defining puberty as the age of consent is no less arbitrary than an age. Age is actually a far better predictor of brain development and intellectual capabilities than puberty is, so puberty is more arbitrary in determining consent than age.
I can absolutely fathom exceptions, but at a certain point there are none. That's why I bring up five. Because it's an age where I hoped we'd both agree that there is no exception because it is so far out of the normal range that it is easy to see that it is impossible to give consent.
If we have hopefully finally agreed that there are certain ages where there is no gray area, I again come back to how you've determined that 12 is not a part of that zone. I've already given you plenty of evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and sociology as to why it is generally agreed on that 12 is not an appropriate age of consent ESPECIALLY when the age difference is more than 10 years, and ESPECIALLY ESPECIALLY when the adult in the situation is an authority figure.
What research have you done? What special knowledge have you done that has led you to defy the concensus of neuroscience and psychology? Why have you determined that there is a reasonable possibility that this relationship was healthy and consentual, when you don't seem to know much about these topics?
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