Despite ostensibly being a gender-neutral concern, the age of consent is primarily discussed in terms of young women’s sexuality and vulnerability. Who do our age of consent laws really protect? LuxAlptraum writes
Photo: United Artists When The New Yorker published a profile of the lawyer and academic Alan Dershowitz, it likely did not intend to spark a spirited debate about the age of consent. But when a stray comment about an op-ed Dershowitz penned in the nineties advocating for a reduced age of consent led to that op-ed surfacing on Twitter, Dershowitz felt compelled to speak up in his defense — a decision which, unsurprisingly, led to some heavy backlash.
When American purity reformers began advocating for an increased age of consent in the late 1800s, their argument hinged on the idea of women as sexless, innocent creatures seduced into vice by immoral men. One petition circulated by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union put this worldview in stark terms, framing their battle as one to ensure that “the age at which a girl can legally consent to her own ruin be raised to at least eighteen years.
Troublingly, this refusal to see young women as complex individuals with sexual agency continues once they’ve reached the age of consent. If younger teens are seen as off-limits, once someone has reached the age of 18 it’s presumed that anything goes, as though a switch is magically flipped in our brains the second we reach that milestone.
And for young people who act on sexual urges prior to the age at which they’re legally presumed able, these laws can have severely negative impacts. In addition to criminalizing teens who have sex with other teens, or labeling a 16-year-old who takes a naked selfie as a child pornographer, age of consent laws can cause harm to young people who find themselves in sexual relationships with adults.
None of this is to say, however, that the world that Alan Dershowitz envisions, in which a 50-year-old man can pursue a 16-year-old without fear of consequence or reprisal, is one we should be striving to attain. But instead of assuming that the age of consent is the only, and best, way of achieving our goal of enabling young people to mature into sexually healthy adults, perhaps we could envision some alternatives.
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