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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

What I find particularly disturbing is the normal emotional and sexual relationships from my own teenage years (just so we're clear: dating people my own age when I was a teen) is now seen as a crime. If the clock was turned back and I was suddenly 16 years old in 2010, i'd be scared just to have a girlfriend. What if her parents charged me with a sex crime because they caught us making out? I feel pretty bad for kids today for having to grow up in a culture of fear, confusion and repression.

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Where I am. the law on the age of consent contains a strong exemption for cases where the age difference is small. The age of consent is 15, but if a 15yo and a 14yo have sex and are fine with it, their parents can scream their lungs out, the police will immediately dismiss it. Because our lawmakers remembered the purpose of the law: To stop adults from having sex with children, not to stop teenagers from having sex with each other.

This is also something I've wondered about the US legal system, how much extra information is written into law? Where I am, in Sweden, which uses a different legal system, most laws come with instructions for how to interpret it. Does this exist in the US? Or is this built up by judges?

When I was in high school I was informed (and I remember because it was relevant at the time) that our councilors were legally obligated to report sexual activity only if any participant was 15 or under or if one was a minor and another was not.

It was rather silly that a lot of students had a window of a few months during their senior year when their relationship could result in criminal charges, but before or after that it was fine.

It's even better when you consider, for example, a senior dating a junior starting from when they were both 15 <-> 18. Today, happy couple. Tomorrow, criminal sex offender. All that changed was a few hours went by.

It is highly variable. I don't know anything about child pornography law, but I can safely assume that it was written at a time that could not anticipate the production of content by teenagers themselves.

I clearly think that the cases listed are absurd. It is the Supreme Court's correct role to recast or reinterpret laws -- if necessary -- given recent applications.

>> "at a time that could not anticipate the production of content by teenagers themselves."

At what point in the history of the universe did teenagers and kids not naturally play around with each other :/

The key word there is content. It has only been in the past half-decade that tens of millions of children have had ready access to the means to produce and distribute pornography of themselves. The law enshrines certain assumptions that are no longer true due to the proliferation of technology. Undoubtedly that will be an increasingly common occurrence.

We've had cameras for centuries and home movies for a couple of generations but until recently, the act of recording something was seen as deliberate and permanent.

Now, photos and videos are a part of our day to day lives, an extension of our own thoughts and social interactions. That change is colliding with the historical concept of producing media for consumption (it's also colliding with technical reality, but that's a whole other issue).

The conflict arises not simply from the availability of technology but from the level of intimacy we have with it.

Adults have had those things, it's only recently that it's become common for children to own them as well.

If recently you mean 30+ years ago. Many teens had (cheap) cameras in the later 1970s. Some even Polaroid cameras that didn't need processing.

If by many you mean a very small minority then sure, it was hardly common for kids to have cameras; today nearly every teen has one in their phone.

Never, but they didn't commonly transmit evidence of it before the last decade.

Well, other than the occasional pregnancy. :P

It does bring up the question: did anyone ever get prosecuted for underage sex based on a pregnancy? I mean, there isn't much better evidence of said sex...

Even in cases where the law states that it's illegal for a 18yo to have sex with a 17yo, it's still up to the prosecutor to be sane about it. That doesn't always happen.

When the girl is pregnant, she still has to give up the father for them to know who to prosecute (traditionally the boy is prosecuted in these cases; sometimes they go for the girl if she is the older one, but if she is pregnant they may view her as the 'victim'). I guess she may give that information up when declaring who the father is to the hospital though, so I don't know. Maybe it just depends on how vindictive the parents are.

Here, laws are written by legislation, and interpreted by judges. As judges rule on different laws, the laws build up a case history. This is why becoming a lawyer in the US (especially if you want to be a trial lawyer) is so onerous. Not only do you need to be very familiar with the laws themselves - you have to be very familiar with how the laws have been interpreted since enactment.

Is there one single repository that links each law to cases that have referenced or interpreted it?

AFAIK, no. There are the Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis databases, but I'm not sure if even they can be called completely authoritative.

(And access to them is certainly not free.)

The implications are a bit disturbing. Paid access to those databases combined with case law means that if you are poor then you won't have full information about what can get you jailed.

Even if you are rich, case law alone is so onerously large that perusing it and studying it would take a lifetime. I spent about ten minutes trying to find out just how large the corpus of case law is, and could find no references.

Score one for the little guy, though: Google Scholar indexes (some; not sure how much of the corpus is covered) case law, as of Nov. 17, '09: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-gov...

Yep.

Most consent laws are by the states, and many are fairly rational about it. The biggest problem is the Federal "child pornography" laws.

If the clock was turned back and I was suddenly 16 years old in 2010

Maybe if someone in your family made a point of freaking you out about it, but for the most part I don't think most 16-year olds are concerning themselves with this issue, they're just not wired that way. By comparison all I do at my age (31) is worry.

I was speaking about my state of mind at the age of 16 and these new cases of teens being prosecuted for their otherwise normal relationships. I'm not saying I would stop trying to get girls (who could stop a teenage boy from chasing girls?) but it would inspire fear in me whenever I was anywhere near an adult or authority figure with my SO.

It also doesn't take a lot for media hype and rumors to appear as facts to a young person and have an effect on their state of mind. I dread a future where young adults feel these cases are uncontroversial.

Kids are used to adults meddling in their affairs. It's not like the criminal charges involved with narcotics trafficking stopped the drug trade among teens. You think laws about underage sex, something that is kept a secret from adults in the first place, is going to change anything?

Well, the consequences for a 31-year-old dating a 16-year-old are a lot worse.

That may be true, but you should understand that most of these extreme cases of teen prosecution occur in some of the most conservative of US states. That should come as no surprise to anyone.

http://www.ageofconsent.com/ageofconsent.htm

Not necessarily up to date.

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