5 ms·

No victim means no crime. (Morally, I'm using the word "crime" here to refer to a moral crime.) But it also means that the prosecution of such non-crimes is i

No victim means no crime. (Morally, I'm using the word "crime" here to refer to a moral crime.) But it also means that the prosecution of such non-crimes is itself a crime, meaning the "guilty" party here is the victim and everyone involved in their prosecution, up to and including the supreme court, is criminal.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
This is hard to do in practice. I've heard someone vehemently defend a relationship they had at 14 with an older fellow. They categorized it as a positive experience that helped them discover themselves. It may have even been 13; I forget. Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.
- Iv 9y ago
  The idea that informed consent is a characteristic that magically appears in full at 18 or 20 is ridiculous. Obviously some people acquire it earlier. Some much later. Problem is, judges and police have yet to design an objective maturity test, so instead they use an age threshold, easy to test, objective but arbitrary. Like the map is not the territory, the law is not a perfect match to our moral landscape. It works with constraints of fairness, neutrality and enforceability. It is clear that there are couples for which some illegal relationships are actually harmless or even positive and done with mutual consent. It is also clear that some relationships are abusive and extremely dangerous. The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority. If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
  - BigJono 9y ago
    > The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority. You can't just assume teenagers will wait because they're told to. I don't think that's even remotely realistic. The law (any law) has to be written in a way that protects those who break it with no ill intent. There's nothing "easy" about child sex laws.
  - ageofwant 9y ago
    Pandora and her friends routinely open their boxes at around 15. Age of puberty has been decreasing rapidly since the advent of industrialization and the increase in nutrition and general health and hyper-abundance of synthetic estrogen in consumables, in western societies at least. In america it is between 9 and 13, for girls. A bit more for boys. To demand that a horny 13 year old girl not fuck for half a decade to satisfy some arb moral code, is stupid.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    It's fine to assume that people under 18 lack the necessary power and sophistication to meaningfully decide whether or not to have sex. But then we must also assume that they lack the necessary power and sophistication to meaningfully decide to commit rape. Deciding that someone is both a rape victim and a rapist at the same time, for the same act, isn't an unfortunate sacrifice around the edge cases of heuristic reasoning. It's categorically insane. States have typically balanced this against the desire to prohibit "relationships" with vast power differentials (i.e. between a child and a middle-aged adult) by carving out exceptions to statutory rape for consenting couples who are close in age. Others have just relied on police and prosecutors not to bring cases against teenage couples, and been mostly successful outside of a some newsworthy examples met with public outcry.
    - Digit-Al 9y ago
      I couldn't agree more. I've long said that it's insane that the law can say that someone is not mature enough to consent to sex, but is mature enough to commit statutory rape. The idea that two teenagers of say 14 and 15 who consensually go with their natural urges can then be both put on a sex offenders register that will affect them negatively for the rest of their lives is absolutely insane and proof of a fundamentally broken system.
      - henrikschroder 9y ago
        (I agree, just piling on with more perspectives) Where I'm from the age of consent is 15, but the law also explicitly states that there is no crime if the age difference is small. So in your example, if the two kids are fine with it, nothing would happen, not even if any of their parents were screaming bloody murder. Were not exactly lacking blueprints of sane legislation in this area, or lacking datapoints on how different ages of consent affect different societies. Why some places persist in prosecuting kids who have consensual sex with each other is just baffling to me.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    As others have noted, the age of consent is far less than 18 in much of the world. Indeed, in parts of the US. Or at least, it was no more than a couple decades ago.
  - AnthonyMouse 9y ago
    > Problem is, judges and police have yet to design an objective maturity test, so instead they use an age threshold, easy to test, objective but arbitrary. There are traditionally two ways to do that and still make sure people who go to prison actually deserve it. The first is to draw the line high and rely on prosecutors to sensibly exercise their discretion, the second is to draw the line low enough that you don't find innocent people on the wrong side of it. But prosecutors have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to exercise sensible discretion, leaving the second option as the only viable alternative.
  - pakitan 9y ago
    > If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully. In my country age of consent is 14. There is no pandora's box, there is no widespread abuse of teen girls and children being raped. Only ones who routinely have sex and get pregnant at that age are gypsy girls and that's because their "traditions" require them to marry young.
  - bryanrasmussen 9y ago
    The American system is probably the world's most enthusiastic supporter of trying juveniles and children as adults.
  - henrikschroder 9y ago
    > The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority. No, no, no. That's not how age of consent laws work, not even in parts of the US. The main purpose of the age of consent is to define the difference between rape and child molestation. Both are illegal acts involving non-consensual sex, but the latter has a much stronger punishment, because society wants a larger deterrent for it. We think it's the worse crime. The secondary effect is that it's easier for the person below the age of consent to be believed by the courts if that person claims the sex was non-consensual. Many regular rape cases unfortunately end in a he said/she said without much technical evidence, in which case there's no conviction. If an underage person is involved, society spends more resources on figuring out if a crime actually happened. This is good, because it adds to the deterrent. In case of consensual sex between two people where both are below the age of consent or on different sides of it, it's obvious to me that society shouldn't pursue a criminal conviction. In the US, this is usually codified into age of consent laws as a "Romeo & Juliet clause", and other places usually have something similar. There are of course parts of the US and the world where age of consent is high and there are no exemptions, because those places are neurotic about sex and want to impose some sort of morality on their teenagers. That's unfortunate, and I hope people oppose those laws. > If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully. What box? It's under 18 for large parts of the US. It's 14/15 in many places in Europe, and it has been that way for decades. There's plenty of facts if you want to measure the effects of different ages of consent. Also, I believe that the average age of sexual debut is 17 in many parts of the US. To criminalize over half the teenage population is, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. The laws of a society should reflect the morality of its citizens.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > open the pandora box of consent under 18 I see everyone's forgotten Jerry Lee Lewis and his (AFAIK perfectly legal at the time in that state) 13 year old wife. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-Balls-Scandal-How-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-marriage-13-year-old-wrecked-career.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-B... Now, we are rightly wiser in the 21st century and have almost entirely done away with child marriage. But I would say one key principle is believe the victim. Which cuts both ways. It makes no sense to pursue a life-ruining prosecution of a minor if the alleged victim claims (un-coerced) not to be a victim. There are plenty of nastier cases out there to spend scarce effort on. Not to give people a blank cheque if they happen to be under 18, either: the treatment of unsolicited underage genital pics should be a lot more serious. Conversely the long-unravelling scandal of UK entertainers abusing children comes from not believing the victims at the time, or constructing an environment in which they were met with extreme hostility for coming forward. This led to a "missing stair" environment, where lots of people suspected that Jimmy Savile was an abuser but he was able to get unsupervised access to children to abuse.
- Zak 9y ago
  Those laws generally punish the older person, not the younger person they're supposedly there to protect. Prosecuting underage sexting as child pornography under laws supposedly meant to protect children from exploitation further harms the supposed victim. Laws where the victim is the offender are problematic in a way that enforcing the law when the victim doesn't always want the offender punished is not.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Your comment is on a completely different topic than mine. In child molestation there is a victim- the kid. I'm talking about situations where there is no victim. You cannot victimize yourself by taking a picture of yourself.
  - chii 9y ago
    So you're saying that if an adult managed to coerce a child to take pictures of themselves, then send it, they are going to get a get out of jail free card?! I think each situation need individual judgement, not a universal law.
    - nine_k 9y ago
      Find that adult, prove coercion, and you have a case. No adult and no coercion — no case.
    - function_seven 9y ago
      Yes, the child will have a get out of jail free card. The adult wouldn’t. They coerced the minor to send the images.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    To clarify, I completely agree. Maybe it was a dopey observation, but I was describing a situation where there is supposedly no victim.
  - mirimir 9y ago
    True. But someone else can victimize you by sharing it. Those people, it's fine to go after.
    - pritambaral 9y ago
      Correction: someone else. You cannot victimize yourself by sharing pics of your own self.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- darawk 9y ago
  Ya, there are definitely cases where there was no crime (in the moral, not technical sense) even when there is a significant age gap. However, the law has to do its best at splitting the difference, and capturing 'most' of the true crimes here. However, I don't think anyone seriously considers a 15 year old sexting another 15 year old to be engaging in child abuse. We all agree there is no crime there. There is no difference to split, it's just kids playing out their natural urges.
abpavel 9y ago
> No victim means no crime This isn't true in the least. Jaywalking and speeding can be done in a world with "population: 1", yet caught on camera would constitute a crime.
- visarga 9y ago
  Well, that example is pretty bad. There is no jaywalking crime when you're the last man on earth.
  - mythrwy 9y ago
    Technical still a crime, but just demand a jury trial in that case.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Nope, neither of them are crimes and in fact, prosecuting someone for either of them is actually a crime. You're misusing the word crime here, despite me being very explicit about what I'm talking about. The law does not determine crime-- morality determines that the law is criminal itself, as I've shown.
djsumdog 9y ago
Except that child pornography is a Strict Liability crime (same as drunk driving). In Strict Liability, intent doesn't matter. mens rea is irrelevant.
- rothbardrand 9y ago
  Except that I'm pointing out (and explicitly said) that the law here is creating a moral crime and thus is itself corrupt, so citing the nature of the law is merely whitewashing criminal behavior.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  "Drunk driving" is also a horrible category of crime, popularized by odious moral crusaders in order to raise money from parents they terrorized. Its primary role is to act as another input for the "justice" system treadmill to which we chain the working poor.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

This is hard to do in practice. I've heard someone vehemently defend a relationship they had at 14 with an older fellow. They categorized it as a positive experience that helped them discover themselves. It may have even been 13; I forget. Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.

Iv 9y ago
The idea that informed consent is a characteristic that magically appears in full at 18 or 20 is ridiculous. Obviously some people acquire it earlier. Some much later. Problem is, judges and police have yet to design an objective maturity test, so instead they use an age threshold, easy to test, objective but arbitrary. Like the map is not the territory, the law is not a perfect match to our moral landscape. It works with constraints of fairness, neutrality and enforceability. It is clear that there are couples for which some illegal relationships are actually harmless or even positive and done with mutual consent. It is also clear that some relationships are abusive and extremely dangerous. The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority. If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully.
- BigJono 9y ago
  > The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority. You can't just assume teenagers will wait because they're told to. I don't think that's even remotely realistic. The law (any law) has to be written in a way that protects those who break it with no ill intent. There's nothing "easy" about child sex laws.
- ageofwant 9y ago
  Pandora and her friends routinely open their boxes at around 15. Age of puberty has been decreasing rapidly since the advent of industrialization and the increase in nutrition and general health and hyper-abundance of synthetic estrogen in consumables, in western societies at least. In america it is between 9 and 13, for girls. A bit more for boys. To demand that a horny 13 year old girl not fuck for half a decade to satisfy some arb moral code, is stupid.
- closeparen 9y ago
  It's fine to assume that people under 18 lack the necessary power and sophistication to meaningfully decide whether or not to have sex. But then we must also assume that they lack the necessary power and sophistication to meaningfully decide to commit rape. Deciding that someone is both a rape victim and a rapist at the same time, for the same act, isn't an unfortunate sacrifice around the edge cases of heuristic reasoning. It's categorically insane. States have typically balanced this against the desire to prohibit "relationships" with vast power differentials (i.e. between a child and a middle-aged adult) by carving out exceptions to statutory rape for consenting couples who are close in age. Others have just relied on police and prosecutors not to bring cases against teenage couples, and been mostly successful outside of a some newsworthy examples met with public outcry.
  - Digit-Al 9y ago
    I couldn't agree more. I've long said that it's insane that the law can say that someone is not mature enough to consent to sex, but is mature enough to commit statutory rape. The idea that two teenagers of say 14 and 15 who consensually go with their natural urges can then be both put on a sex offenders register that will affect them negatively for the rest of their lives is absolutely insane and proof of a fundamentally broken system.
    - henrikschroder 9y ago
      (I agree, just piling on with more perspectives) Where I'm from the age of consent is 15, but the law also explicitly states that there is no crime if the age difference is small. So in your example, if the two kids are fine with it, nothing would happen, not even if any of their parents were screaming bloody murder. Were not exactly lacking blueprints of sane legislation in this area, or lacking datapoints on how different ages of consent affect different societies. Why some places persist in prosecuting kids who have consensual sex with each other is just baffling to me.
- mirimir 9y ago
  As others have noted, the age of consent is far less than 18 in much of the world. Indeed, in parts of the US. Or at least, it was no more than a couple decades ago.
- AnthonyMouse 9y ago
  > Problem is, judges and police have yet to design an objective maturity test, so instead they use an age threshold, easy to test, objective but arbitrary. There are traditionally two ways to do that and still make sure people who go to prison actually deserve it. The first is to draw the line high and rely on prosecutors to sensibly exercise their discretion, the second is to draw the line low enough that you don't find innocent people on the wrong side of it. But prosecutors have repeatedly demonstrated a failure to exercise sensible discretion, leaving the second option as the only viable alternative.
- pakitan 9y ago
  > If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully. In my country age of consent is 14. There is no pandora's box, there is no widespread abuse of teen girls and children being raped. Only ones who routinely have sex and get pregnant at that age are gypsy girls and that's because their "traditions" require them to marry young.
- bryanrasmussen 9y ago
  The American system is probably the world's most enthusiastic supporter of trying juveniles and children as adults.
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  > The balancing between protection of the abused and individual freedom is easy to make: on one hand, you have children being raped, on the other hand, you have young lovers that may have to wait a few years before fucking. I would say the first goal has priority. No, no, no. That's not how age of consent laws work, not even in parts of the US. The main purpose of the age of consent is to define the difference between rape and child molestation. Both are illegal acts involving non-consensual sex, but the latter has a much stronger punishment, because society wants a larger deterrent for it. We think it's the worse crime. The secondary effect is that it's easier for the person below the age of consent to be believed by the courts if that person claims the sex was non-consensual. Many regular rape cases unfortunately end in a he said/she said without much technical evidence, in which case there's no conviction. If an underage person is involved, society spends more resources on figuring out if a crime actually happened. This is good, because it adds to the deterrent. In case of consensual sex between two people where both are below the age of consent or on different sides of it, it's obvious to me that society shouldn't pursue a criminal conviction. In the US, this is usually codified into age of consent laws as a "Romeo & Juliet clause", and other places usually have something similar. There are of course parts of the US and the world where age of consent is high and there are no exemptions, because those places are neurotic about sex and want to impose some sort of morality on their teenagers. That's unfortunate, and I hope people oppose those laws. > If we open the pandora box of consent under 18, we will have to tread very carefully. What box? It's under 18 for large parts of the US. It's 14/15 in many places in Europe, and it has been that way for decades. There's plenty of facts if you want to measure the effects of different ages of consent. Also, I believe that the average age of sexual debut is 17 in many parts of the US. To criminalize over half the teenage population is, to put it bluntly, fucking stupid. The laws of a society should reflect the morality of its citizens.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > open the pandora box of consent under 18 I see everyone's forgotten Jerry Lee Lewis and his (AFAIK perfectly legal at the time in that state) 13 year old wife. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-Balls-Scandal-How-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-marriage-13-year-old-wrecked-career.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1021569/Great-B... Now, we are rightly wiser in the 21st century and have almost entirely done away with child marriage. But I would say one key principle is believe the victim. Which cuts both ways. It makes no sense to pursue a life-ruining prosecution of a minor if the alleged victim claims (un-coerced) not to be a victim. There are plenty of nastier cases out there to spend scarce effort on. Not to give people a blank cheque if they happen to be under 18, either: the treatment of unsolicited underage genital pics should be a lot more serious. Conversely the long-unravelling scandal of UK entertainers abusing children comes from not believing the victims at the time, or constructing an environment in which they were met with extreme hostility for coming forward. This led to a "missing stair" environment, where lots of people suspected that Jimmy Savile was an abuser but he was able to get unsupervised access to children to abuse.
Zak 9y ago
Those laws generally punish the older person, not the younger person they're supposedly there to protect. Prosecuting underage sexting as child pornography under laws supposedly meant to protect children from exploitation further harms the supposed victim. Laws where the victim is the offender are problematic in a way that enforcing the law when the victim doesn't always want the offender punished is not.
rothbardrand 9y ago
Your comment is on a completely different topic than mine. In child molestation there is a victim- the kid. I'm talking about situations where there is no victim. You cannot victimize yourself by taking a picture of yourself.
- chii 9y ago
  So you're saying that if an adult managed to coerce a child to take pictures of themselves, then send it, they are going to get a get out of jail free card?! I think each situation need individual judgement, not a universal law.
  - nine_k 9y ago
    Find that adult, prove coercion, and you have a case. No adult and no coercion — no case.
  - function_seven 9y ago
    Yes, the child will have a get out of jail free card. The adult wouldn’t. They coerced the minor to send the images.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  To clarify, I completely agree. Maybe it was a dopey observation, but I was describing a situation where there is supposedly no victim.
- mirimir 9y ago
  True. But someone else can victimize you by sharing it. Those people, it's fine to go after.
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    Correction: someone else. You cannot victimize yourself by sharing pics of your own self.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
darawk 9y ago
Ya, there are definitely cases where there was no crime (in the moral, not technical sense) even when there is a significant age gap. However, the law has to do its best at splitting the difference, and capturing 'most' of the true crimes here. However, I don't think anyone seriously considers a 15 year old sexting another 15 year old to be engaging in child abuse. We all agree there is no crime there. There is no difference to split, it's just kids playing out their natural urges.

abpavel 9y ago

> No victim means no crime This isn't true in the least. Jaywalking and speeding can be done in a world with "population: 1", yet caught on camera would constitute a crime.

visarga 9y ago
Well, that example is pretty bad. There is no jaywalking crime when you're the last man on earth.
- mythrwy 9y ago
  Technical still a crime, but just demand a jury trial in that case.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rothbardrand 9y ago
Nope, neither of them are crimes and in fact, prosecuting someone for either of them is actually a crime. You're misusing the word crime here, despite me being very explicit about what I'm talking about. The law does not determine crime-- morality determines that the law is criminal itself, as I've shown.

djsumdog 9y ago

Except that child pornography is a Strict Liability crime (same as drunk driving). In Strict Liability, intent doesn't matter. mens rea is irrelevant.

rothbardrand 9y ago
Except that I'm pointing out (and explicitly said) that the law here is creating a moral crime and thus is itself corrupt, so citing the nature of the law is merely whitewashing criminal behavior.
jessaustin 9y ago
"Drunk driving" is also a horrible category of crime, popularized by odious moral crusaders in order to raise money from parents they terrorized. Its primary role is to act as another input for the "justice" system treadmill to which we chain the working poor.