Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Lilith __,
While I agree that underage sex is not necessarily exploitative, in some cases it sure is.
Absolutely. And in some cases, over-age sex is exploitative. Likewise, as Islander points out, non-sexual relationships can be just as strong as sexual ones - including as strong a bad influence. But in neither case can you have the exploiter arrested. Kaitlyn's girlfriend's parents don't appear to have objected to her as a friend for their daughter, only as a lover. That's one of the things that makes me wonder what, exactly, they thought was going to happen.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to BenWilson,
I think it's more about consent than maturity - that's an incredibly subjective idea. Furthermore, having sex is in itself a driver of maturity, a rite of passage.
I found this column interesting, about re-examining the whole idea of 'age of consent' and its underlying concepts. But one of the places I slightly disagree with it is here:
But competence isn't just cognitive. It's emotional, too. Steinberg reports that on tests of psychosocial maturity, kids are much slower to develop. From ages 10 to 21, only one of every four young people scores at an average adult level. By ages 22 to 25, one in three reaches that level. By ages 26 to 30, it's up to two in three... Lay out these numbers on a timeline, and you have the beginnings of a logical scheme for regulating teen sex.
But isn't part of that development not just age, but experience? How do you learn to handle relationships if you don't have relationships?
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I objected to their description, on the grounds that sex involving someone below an age of consent was not automatically rape, and shouldn't be described that way.
I have had exactly this argument, in a different context. I had sex at fifteen. Nobody should get to tell me that whether I consented or not is irrelevant.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to Josh Addison,
I recall an attempt to introduce a Romeo & Juliet law here, which got shouted down as "Phil Goff wants 14-year-olds to have sex!!1!" Has anything else happened since then?
Nope. The end result of that clause being removed from the legislation was that we ended up with a law that was harsher, not gentler. However...
After nine years in the job he struggled to remember cases of consensual sex between under-16s reported to the police.If they were lodged the police, under the act, were obliged to first consider other options, such as family group conferences.
So we still have this stupid law where two fifteen year olds could each face ten years in prison for having consensual sex, but even on the rare occasions when a complaint is laid, police here don't prosecute. The law in the States isn't harsher than ours, it's just that prosecutions are sometimes aggressively pursued and the consequences - felony conviction, sex offender registration - are worse.
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to nzlemming,
And the fact that they waited till Kaitlyn was over 18 to press charges, so she'd be tried as an adult.
This may not be true. The source for this is Kaitlyn's father. An early quote from Kaitlyn's mother said that while the girls had been friends for years, they hadn't started dating until Kaitlyn was 18. There must be a whole bunch of other people who know, but I can't find any independent source to support either contention. This is one of the worst aspects, that the parents apparently let this relationship go on so they could be vindictive, but it might not be true.
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Hard News: The Messenger God, in reply to Lilith __,
My experience of pre-mobile-phone public transport is people staring into space without making eye contact. Not much of a loss.
Or reading, particularly on the train. Which is what those people are doing with their phones, yes? And not everyone wants to talk to strangers on public transport, particularly women. Being able to use a phone and headphones as a tacit 'leave me alone' is occasionally very handy.
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Matthew Poole,
You mean those same people of Canterbury who elected a National Party MP into the formerly safe-Labour-seat of Christchurch East? That "affected population"?
That would be a massive surprise to the people of Christchurch East, and their MP, Lianne Dalziel. The National Candidate in Chch East was a guy you might have heard of before: Aaron Gilmore. He called himself "the National MP for Christchurch East", but that doesn't make it so.
You are thinking of the people of Christchurch Central, who don't live there any more, because it's gone.
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Could we knock off the name-calling slightly? By which I mean, completely and always, starting about now-ish? Ta.
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Hard News: Spread the Noise, in reply to ChrisW,
I'd say that's very good evidence for 'sanguine' being pretty well obsolete ...
Can we keep it for 'exsanguinated' - the sensation of feeling less optimistic because you're covered in your own blood?
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We haven't had a lot of autumn down here yet. Today is ridiculously gorgeous. My harlequin glorybower however is in full berry. These berries can be used to dye things a starting smurf blue.
