> Part of the problem was that many of the girls groomed were 16-18 so it was very hard to prove rape and coercion.
Rape is usually hard to prove. Even if the victim is under the age of
consent, the "it wasn't rape" defense is easily changed to an "it
never happened at all" defense... and it's really hard to counter
that long after the fact.
There's also such a thing as being a giant cad and hurting people
without it actually being rape. You can't outlaw every callous
obnoxious thing somebody might do.
Nor can you outlaw one thing to get at another.
I don't see how you can avoid picking an age, but you have to have to
respect the limitations of what you can achieve. Age is at best a weak
proxy for abuse, and it gets weaker fast as you go higher. And the "we
can't prove what went on" thing is very dangerous indeed as an
excuse for criminalizing people.
Your argument for going from 16 to 18 could as easily be used to go
from 18 to 25, or maybe 25 to 30.
As for prevalence, generalizing from a couple of girls you know is
really beyond the pale. I don't deny that stories like yours happen,
but you're not in a position to treat them as the paradigm.
Even if you have a bunch of headlines and police reports and gossip as
well, they're still anecdotes. They stay anecdotes even if you count
them; the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Even a small rate of
anything in a large population will generate tens or hundreds of
thousands of cases, and you're much more likely to actually count a
case where there's a problem than a case where there's none.
Anecdotes are all that anybody, including self-proclaimed "experts",
really has.
If we're trading anecdotes, I never knew anybody who related the
experience you describe, but I knew lots of people who had positive,
obviously consensual sexual experiences at 16 or 17. Along with a
certain amount of hurting each other by being young and dumb, but even
that was generally not, you know, rape.
A few I know well, including me at 16, had positive, obviously
consensual sexual experiences with people in their thirties or
forties. Mine and at least a couple of other cases I know of
absolutely cannot be made to fit your template, just based on the
sequence of actual events, even if you falsely assume we weren't
able to notice if we were being manipulated.
I've seen a little pressure to retcon that experience as "abuse". Not
nearly as much pressure as some people get, but a bit. I'm not that
easily manipulated, thanks. I wasn't that easily manipulated at 16,
either.
If you're picking an age, 16 is probably after the knee of the curve
in terms of being easily bamboozled... and it's also after the knee of
the curve in terms of actually wanting and deserving sexual
experiences. Yes, that is a valuable thing, and you can't just
sacrifice it for (mostly illusory) ease of punishing people.
Nor does the threat of punishment necessarily help. When and where I
grew up, the age of consent was 18. There was no close-in-age
exception, either. Yet I still have those stories and experiences, and
even according to what they would actually admit on surveys, most
people weren't, and still aren't, virgins on their 18th birthdays.
That's pretty much the definition of an ineffective law. Making ineffective
laws is always a bad idea.
> Not going to lie I probably would have punched you in the face had you said this to me IRL though.
... and of course I can't forget
> "migrants"
You're still not painting a picture of yourself as the kind of person
who should be listened to about laws. Hurting people you don't like
isn't a good basis for public policy.
> You just justified the attacks on her, which was the entire point of the article, saying that no attacks are justified, regardless of the situation.
No, he didn't. I have a daughter who I instruct to dress in a way that covers most of her body. This does not mean that I am justifying rapes that happen because some lustful men are aroused by scantily-clad women, it simply means I observed and recognized the reality of the situation, and realized that dressing in a certain way reduces the chance of an incident. The fact that there are men out there who are unable to control their urges is a separate thing (that we of course should be talking about as a society). Likewise, michaelochurch made an observation on what is a good strategy to reduce the chances of being hurt. He explicitly went on to mention that he wishes the reality of things weren't this way.
> What you seem to mean is that you don't like their boyfriends and are upset you can't jail them.
I truly hope this isn't a genuine comment, but I'll reply assuming your comment was in good faith. Not going to lie I probably would have punched you in the face had you said this to me IRL though.
Part of the problem was that many of the girls groomed were 16-18 so it was very hard to prove rape and coercion.
Like most people from working class backgrounds I know a couple of girls who were groomed...
At the start these girls are made to feel special because there's a guy in his 30s spending money on them and buying them gifts. These guys take these girls out for food and to the cinema and eventually the girls will develop feelings for their abusers. At this point they coerce the girls into sexual acts and isolate them from friends and family.
One of the girls I know who was abused genuinely thought her abuser loved her, and it wasn't until a couple of years later when she was in her late teens that she started to understand the extent of abuse she was subjected to.
While you're right that rape is illegal, it's not always clear to someone in the moment that they were raped – this is even more true of children. If a 16 year old child does something sexual because a much older person asks them to do it, is that because they're truly consenting or because they don't understand the situation they're in?
I'm a guy, but when I was a teenager I was dating a girl that was quite abusive looking back on it, but I loved her so I allowed her to do it and honestly in the moment I didn't even really understand what was happening. In my case it was "just" emotional abuse, but the same can obviously be true of physical abuse too.
Were it illegal for older men to have sex with children in the UK then it would have been far easier to have put an end to the abuse.
But either way, you're just wrong on this. At this point it's uncontroversial that these young girls were sexually abused. The comment you made, however is a common defence made by the abusers. Anyone with any first hand experience of would know they were not boyfriends. In fact, these men were often married and lying to the girls about their relationship status.
> This is a rhetorical trick being misinterpreted as some baseless claim.
That part of the story is comparatively easy to check - the audio is available if you follow the link in the article. The relevant section is at about 1:10 minutes. The quote is “I’m sorry you’re ok with children being raped.”
That’s not a rhetorical trick.
It’s an attempt to smear a person or organization by slinging dirt that has no grounding in reality. Dealing with this kinds of baseless lines of reasoning is part of the problem.
> There is an unsavory political/propaganda purpose to putting catcalling and rape in the same category
Unless one views combatting unwanted sexual conduct to which people are subjected without consent as an unsavory purposes, no, there isn't.
> The eliding of crimes of vastly differing degrees of severity is another warping of law enforcement and the judiciary which totalitarian states have used to oppress individuals.
True, but irrelevant, for several reasons: first, this isn't a law enforcement issue; second, while the category of discussion overlaps with criminal conduct, it is not a discussion of crime as such, but of a category united by shared features not incliding criminality; third, no one is suggesting equivalency or arguing for ignoring the distinctions between acts within the category while discussing the broad category.
>can we stop equating rape which is a shockingly violent violation/assult of a real a human being with anything less
sure, we can but in fact using rape as a metaphor for really bad things that one person does to another person is not used to downgrade rape but really to point a finger at why the thing being done is bad. Because rape has power as a bad thing.
Sure, but I mean we must not use rape as an analogy for anything that is not rape, holocaust for anything that is not holocaust, fraud must only be used for things that are legally prosecutable as fraud and so forth. The language must be cleaned and simplified, metaphor and analogy while a seemingly necessary component of the human mind must be excised.
> The part that amazes me, though, is that they don't seem to believe that the person being called "whore" or "salope" or whatever can have consented to such "violence."
This is consistent with French law, where one can not legally consent to this kind of abuse.
> Pretty Orwellian if you feel this is an acceptable approach to apply to innocent people en masse in response to a crime.
I don't, but there's a nuanced area between "this is fine" and "this is rape".
Is inserting a needle to take blood rape? What about people being seen at a nudist beach? Obviously they consent to "inspection", so I guess it's just sex then?
I suspect you're using an incorrect but emotive word to get your point across - and I definitely sit in the same camp in terms of it being right/wrong - but inaccurate all the same. If you misuse strongly emotive words, their meaning and impact fade.
> Maybe take a lock of hair for a DNA test against the newborn if you’re really that concerned yah?
I don't disagree, but time is a factor in one of the busiest airports in the world with 10+ planes grounded while they wait. In addition, the line for what's ethical, peoples bodily rights etc are different in Qatar - something anyone entering the country has a responsibility to know. You're projecting western values over them and demanding their culture bends to your view.
> This is the absolute most obtuse reading of the situation you could have mustered. And this is the problem with this entire debate: those who are arguing against these "seduction" techniques must resort to strawmen and imagined scenarios to show how awful this is.
I didn't even attempt to portray that as his argument. I said that if you don't then there must, of necessity, be some communication going on. -le sigh-
> Unfortunately, this is the stuff that social interaction is made of. You're not going to change it by suddenly defining normal interaction as assault.
Care to provide example of "that images are fine"?
> Words like "willing" and "voluntary"
Maybe look at the other words around those words for context.
> This is a normalisation of...
This is the infantilisation of language. Certain word "normalize" something, therefore adults are no longer allowed to be subjected to them. Language policing at its finest.
> using this misinterpretation of the word
Says who? Many people would assume the same. Should that be ignored because the legal definition, only fully understood by lawyers, differs? In terms of Minsky's reputation, it matters more what regular people think it means, than what definitions exist in law.
The common misconception wrt what "sexual assault" implies is often utilised by malicious publications and prosecutions - maybe it's time to clean up the language.
What on Earth gives you this ridiculous idea? "Grooming" certainly isn't a euphemism. It is an entirely accurate and descriptive term.
reply