| =Julia Set= 2006-11-19, 4:45 pm |
| On 16 Nov 2006 14:09:39 -0800, jakethespake@yahoo.com wrote:
>
>
While I agree with you Mike, pædophilia is so much a part of the
fabric of our world, I don't see any significant changes to the
current laws (at least here) any time soon. For example, in almost
all cases of sexual abuse of minors, the abuser gets name suppression.
The excuses for this vary from, protection of the victim to protection
of the abusers family. In the case of the former, it implies the
victim should feel shame. In the case of the latter, I say 'tough
shit'. They wouldn't show that sort of consideration of a drug
offenders family, yet most drug related crime are victimless.
[vbcol=seagreen]
>That's not so easy as that because not every man who had sex with a
>minor knew they were a minor. Some of those men are victims of an
>optical illusion or lies.
>When I was 30 I had a romance with a beautiful girl I never dreamed
>was 16 becasue she was tall which was visibly misleading. When I asked
>her age she always said 19 (she was afraid of me leaving her for
>another woman--a legit fear cause that's exactly what would have
>happened).
>I'm in my 60s now and she and I have long been married and have
>grandchildren but the idea I can be considered a predator and a
>pedophile for having relations with a female I didn't even know was a
>minor is kind of scary.
Just out of interest, do you think you would've said "go away little
girl" if she had identified herself as being sixteen? I'm wondering
because from what little you've told us, you were meant to be
together. I know it's difficult to answer the question because our
opinions and feelings about previous events change over time.
Actually, I'm wondering now how you'd have felt if one of your
grandchildren was in the same situation.
>I'm all for "getting the pedos" but I think society has to be very
>careful how we define pedo. It seems to be a wild label we toss at
>everyone and everything.
Where in the world are you because I had always assumed that sixteen
was the age of consent when it came to sex? It is here in New
Zealand, anyway. Some people have even married younger than that in
the US. Loretta Lynn, for example, was married at the age of thirteen
or fourteen.
I agree with you with regard to the pædophile tag. It's a word that
one would ocassionally hear in conversation but in the last year in
usenet, I read that word every other day, tossed about and used as an
insult so flippantly that it takes away just how XXXXing serious the
issue is.
While it's normal for a society to change and develop over the
generations, I'm in two minds over how I feel about older men 'dating'
a very much younger person, such as in your situation. Part of me
believes that a consenting adult is a consenting adult yet another
part, probably the mother part of me finds it disturbing when a
significantly older male has a relationship with a person who has just
reached age of consent. It wasn't so long ago that your situation
was a reasonabley common one. Certainly amongst the very wealthy, in
the British Isles and colonies, young daughters were promised to
wealthy landowners, or whoever it was socially and fiscally useful to
the family to make such promises too, and love or the daughters wishes
be damned. Not that I'm suggesting you're a wealthy landowner. <g>
=JS
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