Posts Tagged age of consent

Date: June 5th, 2008
Cate: society + culture

age of consent?

I might sound like a broken record here (playing the same thing over and over again, for those of you in the audience who have only heard of what a record is) but stupid shit like this wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have such stupid arbitrary laws concerning how old you have to be before you can consent to sexual activity:

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, a 17-year-old boy recently was charged with child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child and defamation for allegedly posting nude photos of his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend on his MySpace page. The girl had taken the pictures with her cell phone at her mother’s home and e-mailed them to the boyfriend, authorities said.

“They were pretty graphic,” said sheriff’s Sgt. Mark Yehle. “I think they just do it to impress their boyfriends. When he breaks up, he ..vents,’ in his words, by posting them. He apparently didn’t think there was anything wrong with it. He didn’t know it was illegal.”

Normally, getting back at your girlfriend by posting naked pictures of her on the internet is one of those mastercard ‘priceless’ moments – but if your girlfriend is 16, just two years younger then the age-of-consent, you are in deep shit, because you’ve ceased to be a jerk ex-boyfriend, and instead you’re a child pornographer who has sexually exploited a kid. What the fuck.

The images are complicating the work of investigators whose job is to find exploited children. Authorities trying to identify youngsters in naked photos are increasingly discovering that the teens themselves took the shots, said John Shehan, a director at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

See? The assumption that all photos or videos of nude underage people is a problem, isn’t it? How can they be exploited when they took the photo themselves? I mean, have you seen Chris Crocker naked? He’s got a picture of himself when he was 17 – if you poke around a little in google image search you’ll find it. He took it himself, and chose to distribute it over the internet – but legally, he didn’t have the ability to take the photo, or distribute it. How fucked up is that?

It’s insulting the level of irresponsibility our government assigns to people younger then 18. It’s total bullshit. My imaginary punk rock band ‘bullshit policy’ probably has a song called ‘your body is not your own’ or something. Seriously.

Date: June 4th, 2008
Cate: society + culture

Supreme Court consider death penalty for child rape

The nation’s highest court has set arguments on Wednesday on whether the death penalty for the crime of raping a child represents unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.

Well, you know how I feel about capital punishment – I’m convinced that killing people is absolutely wrong, and should only be considered in the context of weighing one life against another.

Of course it sounds like a good idea – nobody likes those child-rapists, right? Of course they deserve to die! Rather then arguing that no one deserves death, I’m going to point something else out – not everyone defines ‘child’ and ‘rape’ the same way.

How young is a child? Below 18? Maybe 16? 14? 8? 4? Right off you’re going to have to pick an arbitrary number – what if you pick 15 as the magic number, and then some kid who’s 15-and-four-days gets raped? Is that somehow less worthy of death then the kid who’s 14-and-363-days?

And what’s rape? That should be obvious, but it isn’t – you know why ‘statutory rape’ is considered rape? Not because there’s neccesarily any coercion involved – but because the ‘victim’ is unable to give legal consent to having sex. So does this mean that we can kill a 19-year-old who has safe. consentual sex with his 17-year-old boyfriend? At 17 he’s still a child, and that’s rape – punishable by death?

Extreme examples? Of course they are – but you know that they’re going to happen, and innocent kids are going to get killed. Our justice system is good, but it’s not perfect – and would you trust an imperfect system to sentance criminals to death? Because I sure wouldn’t. I would feel guilty as hell about it. I do actually feel pretty guilty that we still have the death penalty here in the US, and that people would actually try to expand the territory covered by that act of cold-blooded murder.

Mmmm. Well, that’s all the politics i’ve got energy for tonight.