Sex Offender Madness

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

You can tie them to a chair.

My grand-daughter (14) graduated high school last June, then started college, completing her first courses over the summer. Her mother is a teacher.

My kids were raised to tolerate zero nonsense from a kid. In my practice I advocate the same policy with my parents and foster parents. Kids require life, love, and limitations...structure. Act like the warden of a Cuban prison.

 

[Guest]

So is that why you're so fucked up?

 

[rgraham666]

You can tie them to a chair.

My grand-daughter (14) graduated high school last June, then started college, completing her first courses over the summer. Her mother is a teacher.

My kids were raised to tolerate zero nonsense from a kid. In my practice I advocate the same policy with my parents and foster parents. Kids require life, love, and limitations...structure. Act like the warden of a Cuban prison.

And this from a man who loathes government and thinks they do nothing but enslave people. http://bestsmileys.com/lol/1.gif

 

[Guest]

And this from a man who loathes government and thinks they do nothing but enslave people. http://bestsmileys.com/lol/1.gif

But, Rob. Children should be considered property, shouldn't they? They have no rights.

Completely different situation.

 

[sweetness6280]

So is that why you're so fucked up?

Priceless!

 

[rgraham666]

But, Rob. Children should be considered property, shouldn't they? They have no rights.

Completely different situation.

You're right. I keep forgetting.

When the bad guys enslave people, it's bad, because they're enslaving good people.

When the good guys enslave people, it's good, because they're enslaving bad people.

Sometimes I wish I was simple enough to handle the Manichean mind set. It makes things sooooo much easier.

 

[Guest]

You're right. I keep forgetting.

When the bad guys enslave people, it's bad, because they're enslaving good people.

When the good guys enslave people, it's good, because they're enslaving bad people.

Sometimes I wish I was simple enough to handle the Manichean mind set. It makes things sooooo much easier.

Rum helps.

 

[R. Richard]

In the area where I live, the GIRLS in the area define a female virgin as 'an ugly third grader.'

There was cited the case of a 19-year-old knocking up a 14 year old. A 19-year-old can probably get booze, a 14-year-old probably can't. Booze has a magic attraction for kids who can't get it. A 19-year-old who gets a 14-year-old drunk and knocks her up should be treated so that the kid born is permanently his last.

As to the prosecution of the 13-year-old, normally what happens is that the state thunders against sin. The 13-year-old and the 12-year-old are then punished as juveniles and the record of the case is sealed, provided there are no more problems.

I can assure you that when I was 12-years-old, I would not have considered having sex with a 13-year-old. No, I was into older ladies, 16-year-olds, who had time to learn what it is all about. Hell, I would have even jumped an 18-year-old.

 

[Katyusha]

More like failure to parent.

Think about it like this:

What were you doing at 12 and 13? Me I was running around my front yard playing with barbie dolls and explaining what my big awesome house was going to be like, with my big talking tiger.

What kid do you know at this age is even thinking about a "relationship"? Do these kinds of things. We all know what "Sex" invovles, we all know how "pregnancy" comes about. But who is teaching these children at such a young age about sex? That's what I want to know. How a 13 year old girl or 12 year old boy knew how to "work it".


Charge the parents with neglect, not the little kid who has grown up entirely too fast with "sexual offender".

Their friends are talking about it at such a young age. Do you remember when you were that age, how naive you were? How everything your friends said, if they could say they heard it from a reputable source whether they had or not, was gospel? How you hadn't yet learned how to take a lot of things with a grain of salt? That's what's going on. Except that age is not very young anymore and our fear of properly teaching kids about sex too early is what has led to all of this. Sheltering them has had the opposite effect that we want it to and we can't see that at all. We CHOOSE to believe that hiding things like sex from children is what will make them stop with the experimentation and the sexual activity. And so the rumors continue to abound and kids learn a lot of wrong things about sex, because adults are afraid to educate them lest that education "lead them to do unspeakable acts."

Also, we have a lot of hormones in our food supply that weren't there years and years ago. This has led to earlier and earlier pubescence for children. How did they know how to work it at 12 and 13? Instinct. They're a lot more physically mature at that age than earlier generations were, and their hormones start raging earlier and earlier. Girls start getting their periods at 8 or 9 now, instead of 11 or 12 when I was a kid, or 14 or 15 when my mother was a kid.

 

[Katyusha]

The people who put this law in place were not trying to weed out and punish sexual predators or child abusers. They were trying to make sex illegal.

They succeeded.

And some kids have to bear the consequences of that because some people are uptight prudes.

Humans.

I wholly agree.

 

[3113]

I can assure you that when I was 12-years-old, I would not have considered having sex with a 13-year-old. No, I was into older ladies, 16-year-olds, who had time to learn what it is all about. Hell, I would have even jumped an 18-year-old.

Soooo...did ya get lucky?

 

[xssve]

Seems to me sex offences should be divided into consensual and non-consensual, wihich is to me where the ethical division lies between simple questionable judgement and predatory behavior, i.e. the difference between rape and statutory rape.

Trickier when it comes to kids, I suppose, since by law, the age of consent defines the point that a person is legally entitled to consent, which is not the same thing as saying there was no consent.

There is no real standard for assessing sexual development, children get curious about sexuality much earlier than we care to admit, the legal divisions are artificial - in most cultures historically, puberty is the age when maturity rituals are performed and children become adults, which is around 12 or so on average, even if they are not expected to fulfill adult roles just yet.

Further, the age of puberty is falling - there is no consensus just yet on why, but possible factors include increased environmental and social stressor, media and cultural influence, hormones in meat, etc.

http://www.infoforhealth.org/pr/j41/j41chap1_2.shtml

The whole culture is schizophrenic about sex if you ask me - we can't get enough cheescake, while at the same time enforcing Draconian laws against healthy, open expressions of sexuality. Legal to watch women undress in a strip bar, but illegal to perform certain acts in the privacy of your own home, looking at pornography, etc.

In rural areas, a 15 year old getting married raises few eyebrows, while somewhere else it's considered child molestation.

The latest research indicates that pubescent adolescents who engage in sex before the age of consent are at lower risk of other at risk behaviors, drug and alchohol abuse, etc., which probobly claims a lot more victims innocent or otherwise - i.e., it keeps you off the streets, leaving mainly unwanted pregnency and STD/hygiene issues.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

The whole culture is schizophrenic about sex if you ask me - we can't get enough cheescake, while at the same time enforcing Draconian laws against healthy, open expressions of sexuality. Legal to watch women undress in a strip bar, but illegal to perform certain acts in the privacy of your own home, looking at pornography, etc.

Yeah. Like people on a porn site complaining about kids having sex while a thread just ended complaining about not enough stories about kids having sex.

 

[R. Richard]

Soooo...did ya get lucky?

Luck? Luck? I can assure you what happened was the result of very careful planning and flawless execution. LUCK?

 

[Stella_Omega]

Yeah. Like people on a porn site complaining about kids having sex while a thread just ended complaining about not enough stories about kids having sex.

That's symmetry!

 

[xssve]

We consider age disparites to be the most questionable, if not heinous of sexual offences agianst propriety, while demanding women look like 12 year olds, and men look like adolescent jocks.

My biggest bugaboo right now is the whole politicization/commodification of sex in this manner: on the one hand, it moves product and on the other it's political wedge issue - neither side seems much concerned with the effect all this tug of war has on social development.

The sexual revolution started as depoliticization the Fifties and Sixties, warped into fashion the Seventies, competition in the Eighties, and seems to be drifting back into commodification, in the Marxist sense; i.e., reationshps are not about relationships, they are about status and politicking, sex is not a mode of interpersonal communication, it's a commodity to be bought, sold and traded for status, wealth, or political influence.

Sorry, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, I appear to be embroiled in a bit of a culture war skirmish at the moment.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

My biggest bugaboo right now is the whole politicization/commodification of sex in this manner: on the one hand, it moves product and on the other it's political wedge issue - neither side seems much concerned with the effect all this tug of war has on social development.

When has anyone given a damn for social development? Economic development is all that matters, and so all things are commodified. It's the American way.

 

[xssve]

Exactly.

 

[WRJames]

We think that we are protecting children by making it illegal for them to engage in various "adult" activities -- smoking, drinking, driving, and sex.

Now, no one is seriously arguing that we need to reduce the driving and drinking age to twelve. Smoking probably should be banned at any age.

What is it about sex that makes the argument so different? I'm not expressing a personal opinion here -- just asking for discussion.

 

[3113]

What is it about sex that makes the argument so different? I'm not expressing a personal opinion here -- just asking for discussion.

Well, it is a natural, biological imperative. Neither drinking nor smoking is that. If all liquor and all cigarettes vanished from the planet tomorrow, the human race would continue--maybe not as happily, but it would. But if our sexual desires ended, that'd be the end of us.

A 12 year old is capable of having sex and having children--this isn't to say that they should, that they're mental or emotionally ready to do so, but their biology is ready. It's not just another bad habit. Sexual feelings, attractions, needs and the rest are a part of being not just human, but a living, breathing animal. That makes it an apple compared to the liquor/cigarettes oranges.

 

[Elianna]

I also think that we are doing our kids disservice. The only sex ed in schools (at least where I'm from) is abstinence training. Do you know that we have the highest teen pregnancy rate for any developed country? Our society still has Puritan ideals, and because of it, we're not facing the facts. Our kids are getting pregnant because we're NOT teaching them about sex. Maybe we figure if we stick our heads in the sand the problem would go away.

What I wonder is why other developed countries have a lower teen pregnancy rate and what they are doing with their kids? How do they address sex so that their kids are NOT teen moms as much as ours?

 

[Selena_Kitt]

A friend of my daughter's spent two years in jail for having consensual sex with his 16 year old girlfriend.
Her parents discovered it and pressed charges.
He too is listed on the Sex Offenders List.

That is just... ALL kinds of wrong!!

 

[xssve]

Well, it is a natural, biological imperative. Neither drinking nor smoking is that. If all liquor and all cigarettes vanished from the planet tomorrow, the human race would continue--maybe not as happily, but it would. But if our sexual desires ended, that'd be the end of us.

A 12 year old is capable of having sex and having children--this isn't to say that they should, that they're mental or emotionally ready to do so, but their biology is ready. It's not just another bad habit. Sexual feelings, attractions, needs and the rest are a part of being not just human, but a living, breathing animal. That makes it an apple compared to the liquor/cigarettes oranges.

In researching this it strikes me that females reach sexual maturity well before they become fertile - from wikipedia:

Menstruation and fertility

The first menstrual bleeding is referred to as menarche, and typically occurs about 2 years after thelarche.[9] The average age of menarche in American girls is about 12.75 years.[9] Menses (menstrual periods) are not always regular and monthly in the first 2 years after menarche.[14] Ovulation is necessary for fertility, but may or may not accompany the earliest menses.[15] In postmenarchal girls, about 80% of the cycles were anovulatory in the first year after menarche, 50% in the third and 10% in the sixth year.[14] However, initiation of ovulation after menarche is not inevitable, and a high proportion of girls with continued irregularity several years from menarche will continue to have prolonged irregularity and anovulation, and are at higher risk for reduced fertility.[16] The word nubility is used commonly in the social sciences to designate achievement of fertility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty

Menarche doesn't occur for up to two years after thelarche, and actual ovulation begins at rather low levels and only gradually works up.

In evolutionary terms, this would seem to indicate a "learning phase", extended by neoteny, as in most of human growth patterns. there are a lot of ways to explain it, but given a preliterate culture who base their conceptions of adulthood on eternal physiological cues, changes in color, size and tone, swelling of breast tissue, etc., it argues that females in whom ovulation began as thelarche did not enjoy the same reproductive success as females in whom ovulation was delayed and were selected out, if we assume hominids experiencing a much more condensed pubescent phase similar to apes.

The truth is, I don't know much about puberty in apes, be interesting to find out, but from an evolutionary point oof view it makes perfect sense when you factor in things like maturity of the immune system, and overall physical strength and muscle tone, against the rigors of childbirth, not to mention social factors like the social skills or political pull to hold a mate which facilitates reproductive success.

Overall, the benefits of delayed puberty involve other neotenic factors, i.e., a prolonged period of accelerated cognitive development, curiosity, memorization, etc., and it's generally accepted that children benefit cognitively from delayed sexual activity, when they start thinking mainly about that one thing only.

I was listening to a show on NPR the other day about how girls seem to lose all interest in learning anything after they hit puberty - as this is hardly universal, even if ubiquitous, one suspects cultural factors involved, i.e., guys don't want to go out with girls smarter than they are or something so the girls will start playing dumb.

In other words, I don't know that there is any direct physiological correlation between sexual activity and a slowdown in cognitive development, or to what extent, while I can speculate as to the nature of cultural factors that might have the same effect.

 

[Boota]

I used to work in a juvenile detention center years ago and we had a bad situation made worse by legal interference. A 16 year-old boy got his 19 year-old girlfriend pregnant. At first nothing was said about it, but then the girl's ultra-religious mother kicked her daughter out of the house, with no job and nowhere to go. The boy's mother, not wanting her grandchild born on the streets, allowed the girl to move in with them. The boy was a straight A student with a part-time after school. He was committed to the idea that he had a baby on the way and he was ready to do what had to be done for his coming child. They had decided to get married after he graduated, when he would be seventeen and could legally marry with his mother's permission. Sounds like a responsible kid handling a rough situation in a very adult manner.

Then the state learned of the arrangement.

They arrested the boy's mother for contributing to the delinquency of a minor and they arrested his girlfriend for child molestation. Since the mother was in jail the boy couldn't be left on his own and he was taken in by the state to the detention center where I worked. He lost his job, which would have become full-time upon his graduation from high school. He was removed from school and lost an opportunity at a scholarship he was up for. At the time I was there the baby hadn't been born yet, but the idea was that the girl's mother would be given the baby to take care of while her daughter was in prison, if convicted.

Sometimes maybe we shouldn't protect kids so much.

 

[3113]

In other words, I don't know that there is any direct physiological correlation between sexual activity and a slowdown in cognitive development, or to what extent, while I can speculate as to the nature of cultural factors that might have the same effect.

I'd agree that it's likely cultural, as in many countries, including (sadly) much of the U.S. there is a feeling that once a girl hits puberty she's on her way to marriage and kids and why bother with the learning? And so the girl is less encouraged to use her brain not only by the boys she might be competing with in class, but also parents and society. She's likely to hold this view herself.

However, I'd also postulate two other things. First, it's possible that the comparison to boys makes the girls look slower. Boys kick in at about that time (which is why we have to change the way kids are taught). So it's rather like watching a race. The girls race ahead, the boys trail. Half-way, the boys get speed and match the girls--but you could judge that as the girls slowing down . Maybe true, maybe not. The girls might be keeping pace, they just look slower because the boys got faster.

Second, I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that female hormones, kicking in, slow down a girl's ability to learn in jr. high. The girls have no trouble concentrating, then suddenly they're having mood swings (which affects their relationship, obviously, with parents and siblings and friends). Their bodies change and they get fixated on that (I'm ugly! I've got pimples!), and social concerns (Does he like me? Do you think he likes me?). Wanting a boyfriend, having a boyfriend (spending hours on the texting and talking to him), doing a boyfriend's homework breaking up with a boyfriend--none of this requires sex to make a girl study less and do worse in school. Everything is a distraction and a worry. Including sexuality activity and fear. A pregnancy scare will shoot all a girl's concentration right to hell.

But, I'd really have to hear more about how this study was conducted. For example, did it compare girls to boys and did it consider that the boys speeding up might make girls look slower? Did the study include schools which were girls only and boys only? How long did this slow-down last (i.e., how far did the study go? all the say to college age?). Did it include other countries and methodology of teaching? Did it take into account the schools themselves? Teachers paying more attention to aggressive teen boys as compared to less aggressive teen girls? Without all these, I'd worry about connecting JUST puberty to girls' cognitive skills.

Personally, my cognitive skills and scholarship improved significantly after puberty. But then, I also moved to a significantly better school system where I wasn't being bullied by other students, nor ignored by the teachers. Hello?