I agree. So long as the child gives consent, then a voluntary contract has been formed and the government hasn't the right to step in. Sex is not something which should be hidden; it is the most natural thing one can do. If life has a purpose, it is procreation; children ought not be "protected" from life's purpose.

It has a lot to with the fact that the majority of children are not mature or responsible enough to make correct decisions; it's a simple as that. Do you think it would be okay for a 23 year old to fuck a 4 year old because the 4 year old said yes? No. The reason there is a legal age of consent is because most children are not mature enough; it doesn't get any more basic than that.

I think it has to do with many levels of maturity, not just emotional and also the degree to which we, as a society, ought to impose general rules since laws need to exist to generally regulate and it takes too much effort to properly address each and every case that comes across the table. It may very well be the case that some rare children are emotionally mature enough to reasonably choose what is right for him or her, but it is not typical - most children who engage in sexual activity with adults as children tend to have a reduced sense of their humanity - i.e. that sex becomes the basis of their existence and the role they embody as an individual in society. If you want to understand more about this dynamic do some research on it, but also look at strippers, porn stars, and prostitutes - they have typically been molested (high 90 percentile) by someone (usually an uncle, friend of their parents, or older brother) at a young age and because they were not mentally prepared, their self identity becomes overly sexually oriented - they objectify themselves because this is how their experience has been colored via their sexual abuse.

Generally most children do not become emotionally mature enough to reasonably decide what is best for them until even into their 20s. However, because of the 18 year old "age of majority" which is an old standard by which we legally permit many actions, 18 or near 18 is the age at which consensual sex is justifiably permissible.

Children will ultimately seek sexual activity because it is in our nature to be curious, our genitals are of high curiosity to us because their specific kind of sensitivity is pleasing to us, and sexual orientation is typed to us via gestational stages of fetal development. However I feel that to impose adult - post sexual discovery - into the pre-discovery and discovery phase of a child’s life is abuse because it is prior to their full maturity for sex.

Thus legally I tend to agree with laws that do not permit sex between people below the age of majority because this age ~18 is a safe place to make a cut off insofar as mutual sexual discovery is likely to have occurred between both parties.

Between curious children, sexual discovery is mutual and innocent However, between adults and children I am skeptical about nature of the engagement since adults can much more easily take advantage of the impressionability of young children and adolescents. Any deviance in adult sexuality can be corruptive to the natural exploratory process of adolescent sexuality.

An analogy could be - We dont pick fruits until they are ripe for the picking - Some fruits might ripen faster than others but generally it is better to wait until a little later in the season. Based on neurological and physiological understanding of children and adolescents they are generally not 'ripe.'

Physiologically children and adolescent girls are also not sufficiently suited for child birth. It is possible for successful pregnancy and birth but there are high incidences of complications. This is sufficient reason to believe that refraining from sexual activity until they females are older.

Personally I think that kids should be kids and do as kids do with only reasonable restrictions for safety - throw an adult in the mix sexually and it is corruptive at least to some degree but often to an extreme degree. One of the girls i went to college with was having sex with her step father at ~12 years old because he would take advantage of her naive state of mind, tell her not to say anything to her mother about it, and have sex with her secretly. This went on for a couple years and she was definitely not ready for sex at that age. She is not well adjusted even today ~30 years old, and had nightmares about that situation at least into her mid 20’s. Also my cousin was molested by her uncle, and is poorly adjusted as well. Another friend from college was not properly supervised as a young ~13 year old and was raped by three college students in their dorm. She was so traumatized by this experience that she didn’t remember that it happened until it was revealed in a therapy session many years later.

Simply put, sex too young and in the wrong way can be extremely detrimental to children and who they will become as an adult. No matter the mental maturity of my children, if I ever have them, I will be ardent in my prevention of any possible corruption to their sexual innocence to the degree that is reasonably possible within my power. I have seen the effects of sexual abuse first hand and it is probably one of the worst things I have had to find out about

Thus the legal mandate is highly reasonable.

This really comes down to how we view children as individuals.

How individual are they, exactly?

If they are able to give consent to sex, can they not be able to vote, take drugs, drink alcohol, drive?

Well, there are just many issues that come to my mind once we decide to start thinking about how to treat children.

I could write a very long post about how exactly I view children and what government should treat them as, but to focus on pedophilia, here's what I'll say:

Consent for sex with a child should come down to a few things; govermnet, parents, child.

Parent's role: It is their child. As long as the child is a dependent, who can have sex with the child would have to be approved through the parent. Now, this brings about questions of parents who sexually abuse their child or put them up for prostitution. Well, considering that child services and police currently prevent any sex with a child, it is possible that we could instead enforce the laws so that no one ABUSES a child. Rape happens to adults, yet adults are allowed to have sex. The same case should be considered for children.

Child: The child can't be having sex at any age, exactly. Instead, we should agree that they are not ready for sex until they have reached puberty. This is when they are physically ready for sex, and since some people like to say "maturity", biologically they are mature enough for sex when they have reproductive ability. If the child disagrees with the parent's restrictions, they could try to become legal independents. It is already possible for children to do so, but in this case they would also be able to have sex with adults.

Government: Government must regulate the entire process. Unless we believe that there should be no laws on pedophilia, government regulation on child sex is inevitable. The least we could do is try to make it more rational than how it is now, where consenting young teens are still barred from having sex.

Sexual desire towards young people is not a choice. There are people who truly feel aroused by children and not by anyone else. We can't just say that anyone should be allowed to fuck whoever, because there is a certain point where children are not real individuals (like 5 year olds). They are far too under-developed to be having sex. But sex with young teens is not something new. It has been around for centuries and even millenniums. it's just that now we view children as a completely separate class of people, and the moral regulations on sex has made pedophilia a crime.

Philosophically, I'm very wary of any controls that government tries to put on individuals, but I do not see it being realistic that we could completely unregulate sex. Humanity is not ready for that.

A child is simply someone waiting to become an adult. :D. Okay, kidding, but yeah. If someone is blind, never had education on sex, you asked them if they wanted pleasure, you asked them if it was okay that your hand was going to their penis, and they liked the pleasure, would that be "so wrong deserving of jail or murder" too? Ohh, they didn't know anything about the pleasure they were receiving! That's so awful!

Why, oh WHY do people always use the age of the OTHER person to justify that it's "bad"? It's the same thing they do with animals- when it's another animal it's fine, but animal on human? Ohhh god, call the cops! The animal is too retarded to realize what it's doing! It doesn't know that its penis is going into someone's vagina! (or maybe it's that it doesn't know that they're giving the other person pleasure? so what. That can be applied to ADULTS that don't know what the other party is receiving). Children aren't mature enough to make any decisions if they aren't mature enough to make decisions on sex, something that may not have any negative consequences. I could see the reason for laws regarding tattoos, etc, something marked on your skin forever, but something that people who experienced it as a child don't report any trauma with?

Does it matter if they're BOTH 4? Does it matter if one is 5? Yet people can do everything else with their child or let them choose to do other things! Holding back only makes sense to me when it has negative effects is a risk to take on the other side...

They can't "consent" to sex, but it's alright to MAKE children do whatever parents, authorities, and adults in general want them to do? I guess they don't have to be mature if they're being forced to do it!

I'm not opposing you because I'm some kind of pedophile. I'm not even old enough to be one anyway. I'm opposing you because me and everyone else who speaks of experiences when they were younger don't report having some kind of awful negative effect or trauma later warranting some kind of psychotherapy.

All of the arguments against pedophilia suck. I'm convinced that this is just a hammered belief people refuse to let go. I could never understand what was bad, and I never will. I can't convince myself either. There's the "they can't make decisions yet!" argument, flawed in that it only ever covers sex, and not everything else people let children do or FORCE children to do (I think making a kid do something they're scared to do, like taking their tooth out, for example, is worse than letting a kid do something they are supposedly not "able" to decide to do yet). I think this stems from sex being a generally negative thing to some in society- if you have too much, you are somehow immoral, you are a slut, you are a whore, you are degrading yourself, you are hurting your body. People who literally harm their bodies get less shit than people who do what they want when it comes to sex.

People would rather attempt to harm their child by saying something awful happened to them and they are filthy rather than leave them alone to not think anything bad happened to them just because they want to justify their own views, and by letting a kid go on not feeling traumatized, they have to face their views. It's disgusting. That is what I call child abuse.

Some people in with the "they aren't mature enough" argument say that they can't understand all the aspects of sex and bla bla fucking bla, like love and shit, but who are you to say that people should only have sex under love? Sex is what you make it. Sometimes it's just pure physical pleasure, and a "child" isn't retarded enough to know that it's pleasurable. No form of pleasure should be offlimits to anyone, whether it's masturbation or sex. It doesn't harm. What harms is when you want it to hurt them to justify your view.

Another argument (usually used on teenagers, although doing something with an adolescent is not pedophilia) is that it matters what the age of the person is- it's only bad if an adult does it with them. Somehow, something bad was happening to them because the person was over 18. They are all of a sudden not able to consent. The person's brain shut off from the adult waves the other person was emitting! They don't think so, and they're fine, but let's beat em up, leave em for dead, or imprison them!

When they have sex with someone their age, though, and we don't like it, we hold them ACCOUNTABLE and beat or ground them!

Yet another argument is that there is a mental difference between people under 18 and people over 18, making it... bad... somehow... it doesn't matter when they're the same age and one of them happens to be an immature diddlywick of an adult though. That's fine. But, if it's a minor, mental differences are EVIL! That somehow hurts the other person, and NOT the person dating the immature annoying idiot! Not that adults have proven that maturity comes with age anyway!

And another argument is that if someone is a certain set of years older than someone else, that they may take advantage of them. Yes, having a job, etc, when your partner does not, gives you an upperhand! They don't have the upperhand in asking for cash, and other things! Even if they did have the upperhand, the very fact they have one is EVIL! To the slammer with you!

TOTALLY, COMPLETELY, 100% LOGICAL AND JUSTIFIED. IMPRISONING PEOPLE, BEATING THEM UP, OR MURDERING THEM IS NOT AS BAD AS A MINOR HAVING SEX. SEX IS DANGEROUS SHIT, YO. EVEN THOUGH THEY DON'T KNOW IT AND SUFFER NO HARMFUL EFFECTS UNLESS YOU PUT THEM THERE!