Pedos Gaining Traction – Age of Consent: Reframing the Issue
Recent revelations in the world of so-called “influencers” is bringing the age of consent into question. This is a real problem. The age of consent is not an arbitrary law made to shame creepy urges. It is a law that is in place to protect the safe and healthy development of our young people.
Part of the Problem:
The way this conversation has been framed recently is giving people who see nothing wrong with this behavior, wind behind their terrible words. It is being framed as a sort of ethereal question of what is absolutely moral or immoral about a person’s natural or unnatural desires. Now, obviously in my OPINION, any sort of relationship with a minor and even the desire to have one is immoral. However, as a matter of law, this is not how we should frame the issue.
If these people have these urges, there is no way that shaming them will lead to a very good solution. I can’t speak for everyone, but personally, i never take advice from people who hate me. All shaming does is cause people to be more discrete and shadier about the way they live their lives. Unless we can show that these people have already committed a criminal offense, we have to change the way we present our moral framework to try to prevent them from acting on their dark urges in the first place, rather than simply ridiculing them before they have done anything wrong.
Moral Framework:
The moral framework must be formed in a way that assumes these people do have some moral and redeeming value. Before you blow up my inbox, please listen. I am not saying that these people are very often morally redeemable, but their ways of living are beginning to gain traction in the eyes of the public because of the way the issue has been framed in the past and i find it quite concerning. This is conjecture, but according to my girlfriend Emma, they are even trying to work their way into being represented under the same social justice category as LGBTQ+ issues. These are entirely unrelated issues and we cannot allow another bifurcation of our society to give pedophiles any sort of political credibility under the same flag as LGBTQ+ individuals.
Is It Already Too Late?
It may already be to some degree to late for us to prevent public sympathy from growing towards the people in question. The California Legislature recently voted to change the crime of sexual relationships with a minor to a misdemeanor and removed the automatic sex offender registration requirement under some pretty broad scoping conditions. As long as the individuals involved are within 10 YEARS of the same age as each other, this kind of relationship with any minor above the age of 14 is now a misdemeanor. This means a 24-year-old could have sex with a 14-year-old and get off with a little more than a fix-it ticket. Unacceptable.
Influencers:
As another example of how these people are gaining some traction in the eyes of the public, i present to you the case of Youtube make-up guru, James Charles. James was recently discovered to have engaged with several 16-year-old boys online and in-person in an inappropriate way. I won’t go into details. Charles is not an old man. He is 22 years old as i am writing this blog post. Many people seem to have some sympathy for the guy either because they already liked him or because the age gap between him and his victims was seen by them to be relatively insignificant.
What James Charles did was wrong though and we should not forget that. We don’t have to hate the guy but his actions were WRONG and in need of correction going forward at the very least. With that said, I don’t think i am going to convince his fans of that by calling him disgusting. I worry that his fans will have a hip-fired defense response to those most harshly ridiculing James’ actions, which will lead them to sympathize with those actions even if they didn’t before. They do look up to him after all. He is called an influencer for a reason. It is important that his influencees can hear us out from a place where are not outright attacking James for everything he represents to them but rather because of the danger his actions pose to children’s psychological health and society at large.
Best-Case Plausible Solution:
The only solution i can come up with is to present to James and his fans the following point: Children under the age of 18 are psychologically underdeveloped and engaging with them as an adult threatens the right to the natural and healthy development of otherwise healthy and productive members of our society. To expose children to an adult who views them in an inappropriate way threatens their developmental progress. It seems clear to me that children need to be sheltered from some of life’s realities until they are mentally prepared to deal with these problems. When children are exposed to things too early on they can be deeply traumatized by otherwise normal adult activities and trauma is bad for society.
If i understand the phenomena of victims becoming victimizers correctly, people who go through adult-minor-related trauma often end up committing the same crimes against psychology that were done to them. This to me indicates that there is some real trauma there that can last with people for a lifetime.
It is my understanding, and correct me if i am wrong here, but it appears to me that some of these people with strange urges do have some level of compassion for their victims. If this is the case, this further emphasizes the need to reframe this issue. If these people have redeemable human qualities, we need to start dealing with them the way we would with any other redeemable person. We all have moments of poor judgment and it is the guidance of the people around us that corrects our course and causes us to grow as individuals.
Clarity on Criminals:
To be clear, if these people have already committed crimes against a child, just put them in jail or kill them for all i care. To me the damage they have done psychologically to that child warrants cruel and unusual punishment because what they did to the child is cruel and unusual. However, if they have yet to commit a crime, the best thing we can do is try to get them to change their way of thinking. If they have any shred of compassion for these children, they will not act on their creepy urges. If they do act, burn em for all i care. However time keeps moving on and just as all of these people were themselves once children, some children of today will likely end up in a similar state of mind in the future.
Concluding Remarks:
The problem won’t just go away because we don’t like it. we have to be reasonable and rational about how to achieve the best outcomes for the sake of our children’s health. If the public begins to sympathize with these people, the practice will only become more commonplace. We can sympathize with the person’s struggles, but not with morally bankrupt actions that directly intervene in the healthy development of a child.
The only way i can see as potentially fruitful in curbing this issue at all is to help abusers realize that their submission to their darkest urges is wrong MOST IMPORTANTLY (not exclusively) because of how it affects children’s long-term psychological health. We need to stop judging them the way i felt it necessary to do in this post to make clear my position on the issue, and instead try to appeal to their humanity to make the case that we are not their enemies and are only looking out for the sake of the most innocent amongst us.
The final point just to make sure i state this clearly: Criminals need to be punished. Citizens who happen to have dangerous ideologies which will cause them to become criminals in the future need to be inspired to change so that they never commit a crime in the first place.
Dissenting Counterfactuals:
California Bill Doesn’t Make Pedophilia ‘Legal’
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