Andrew Tate has been indicted by Romanian prosecutors for various crimes, including trafficking minors, money laundering, and sex with a minor, according to reports.
Andrew Tate has been indicted by Romanian prosecutors for various crimes, including trafficking minors, money laundering, and sex with a minor, according to reports.
I mean, I lost my virginity at 17 to a 19-year-old, and it definitely wasn’t rape.
Obviously there’s not a lot of nuance when you’re talking about a full grown man taking advantage of a minor, but I also think it’s kind of ridiculous to suggest two 16-year-olds having sex, or two teenagers barely on either side of 18, can’t be consensual.
Yes, but what the law says and what is going on in practice are often (or usually) two different things.
In your own example, a forensic psychiatrist might have interrogated you when you were 17 and concluded that you were of sound mind and had the requisite emotional and logical faculty to “consent” in every reasonable definition of the term.
However, the law says that your consent in this case has no legal baring. This is not to undermine your own agency as a 17 year old, but to protect those 17 year olds who were not as well developed as you, or who might be manipulated some how, and so on.
The trade-off is that there usually has to be a complainant. In your own example you or your parents would (in most jurisdictions), need to ask the police to press charges.
Of course, the age of consent varies between jurisdictions. Here I think it’s 16. I went to school with someone who got married when she was 16 because she had become pregnant when she was 15. I didn’t realise at the time how messed up that was.
I’m reminded of the fascinating and macabre history of Pitcairn Island. The abridged version is that in the 1700’s (?) a sailing ship named the Bounty visited Tahiti for several months where many of the crew became involved with Tahitian ladies. Rather than return to their lives they mutinied, and absconded to an uninhabited island with their brides. Much violence and depravity, and later fanatical religious stuff ensued, but ultimately a tiny community of several dozen people survived to the 1990’s. At that time it emerged that underage sex / rape was a common and even celebrated practice. It’s a truly incredible story for a variety of reasons.
Many places have a sliding scale, usually a window of a few years. 19 and 17 was legal under that scale.
That would be crazy otherwise.
John (17 years and 11 months) and Mary (17 years and 5 months) are in an intimate relationship since 6 months and are sexually active.
John hits his birthday and now they can’t have sex for 6 months (otherwise it would be rape).
Exactly
I got my relatively prude vanilla ass handed to me for attempting to draw a distinction between rock stars given social consent and then proceeding to break a law and 70 year old power brokers making false promises to get young women in positions where they cannot say no. I believe that conflating even those two by not acknowledging that they have different terms, is disingenuous to the victims who gave all of zero consent and were not interested in the action, but we’re subject to violence.
To say that few us us here are interested in actually protecting women, just being seen as white knights.
White knights may now proceed to shower me with downvotes.
it’s strange how some of y’all are getting upvoted while i got 18 downvotes and someone calling me a pedophile when i said the same thing
the dogpiling on this website is crazy, it’s just like reddit in that sense
Tone and framing change how people react to an idea.
yeah, true. it’s also i guess this issue being sensitive and people in these very online spaces not realizing they have an extremist view on this which is completely detached from the real world
I think doubling down on “everyone on this site is unreasonable” will not help on the tone front.
i’m aware, i have 30 downvotes on my first comment atp, definitely way past the point where people can assess my comments with a sound mind, so there’s no point in pulling out the silk gloves
It is very hard, without writing a mini essay, to convey all the relavent context, tone and meaning via a text based comment.
Often what people write will end up being interpreted differently by people reading it and different to your intentions.
Also the, for lack of a better term, “dog pile” effect really matters. If the first few people down vote you, that changes how successive people will interpret your message. “Maybe it seems harmless but it’s -3, so I might have missed some context and it’s more nefarious than I realised” etc.