Was it a crime? It might. be tempting to say no, but laws do exist as a deterrent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To demand that a horny 13 year old girl not fuck for half a decade to satisfy some arb moral code, is stupid.
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.
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-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.
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.
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.
You cannot victimize yourself by taking a picture of yourself.
You cannot victimize yourself by sharing pics of your own self.
I think each situation need individual judgement, not a universal law.
No adult and no coercion — no case.
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.
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.