Day: October 19, 2009

Girl 13, charged as sex offender and victim at the same time

Due to age of consent laws, children need legal counsel before engaging in sexual behavior or photographing themselves. And of course, they have to check their partner’s ID to make sure they don’t lie about her age, and verify the local law while vacationing in other countries.

Here is another absurd example:

Chief Justice Christine Durham wondered if the state Legislature had intended the “peculiar consequence” that a child would have the simultaneous status of a protected person and an alleged perpetrator under the law.

The comments came in oral arguments on a motion asking the high court to overturn the finding of delinquency – the legal term in juvenile court for a conviction – against Z.C., who became pregnant after she and her boyfriend engaged in sex in October 2003.

State authorities filed delinquency petitions in July 2004, alleging that each had committed sexual abuse of a child, a second-degree felony if committed by an adult.

The girl appealed the petition, saying her constitutional right to be treated equally under the law had been violated.

Her motion noted that for juveniles who are 16 and 17, having sex with others in their own age group does not qualify as a crime.

Juveniles who are 14 or 15 and have sex with peers can be charged with unlawful conduct with a minor, but the law provides for mitigation when the age difference is less than four years, making the offense a misdemeanor.

For adolescents under 14, though, there are no exceptions or mitigation and they are never considered capable of consenting to sex.

Source: http://www.denverpost.com/ci_4783650

Surprisingly, the Utah Supreme Court showed some signs of sanity. In this narrowly defined case, the girl escaped serious punishment. Still, legal cost and years of court wrangling are pretty strong punishment already. And underage sex still remains a mine field that even a seasoned lawyer has a hard time to traverse. For example, I remember the case of a boy in Brazil that was arrested on his 18th birthday, for having sex with his long term 17 year old girlfriend. While he was underage, it was legal.

No amount of judicial lenity to compensate for the absurd application of the law changes the fact that the application of the law was absurd to begin with. Moreover, labeling Z.C. with the moniker of “child abuser,” even within the juvenile court system, can have serious consequences that were not intended by the legislature.

A delinquency adjudication for sexual abuse of a child can lead to sentencing enhancements for any offenses Z.C. might commit while she is a juvenile or even as an adult if her juvenile record is not expunged. Such an adjudication also has the potential to affect any civil proceedings related to the custody of her child or any future attempts to seek child support from the father.

We therefore vacate Z.C.’s adjudication. We stress, however, that our holding is narrowly confined to the application of [State] Code section 76-5-404.1 in situations where no true victim or perpetrator can be identified.

Source: http://www.ipce.info/library_3/files/utah_sc.htm

In my opinion these laws should be abolished completely, as science indicates there is no need to protect adolescents from consenual sex even with adults, much less protect them of sex with their peers.

Unless, of course, one is worried about Teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, etc. But there are no mandatory 5-10 year prison sentences for teenage pregnancy, so this does not seem to be the main concern of these laws.

History of child pornography production and laws, told by an insider

Found a ong, very interesting article by an insider in child porn. He makes a lot of interesting points

  1. from antiquity until a few decades ago, children’s nudity was object of arts, of photographers, painters, sculptures. Today’s witch hunt that jails children for photographing themselves in the nude and passing their own photograph to their boyfriends (sexting) is new.
  2. mainstream movies and magazines showed nude adolescents in scenes whose production or even viewing nowadays would be punished by decades of jail terms.
  3. actual child abuse was fairly rare, lots of models actually enjoyed the shootings (we are talking about posing and not acts that are totally unnatural for their age)
  4. Internet censorship and blocking programs don’t work because the child porn industry nowadays is so tech savvy that these measures only catch the amateurs.

Source of the long article: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/My_life_in_child_porn Original german version of the source

In the past, child and adolescent sex was considered normal.  Even exaggerated examples from religious books did not shock people

Mohammed married Aisha at age 6 or 9 (http://www.missionislam.com/knowledge/aishamarriage.pdf http://www.muslim.org/islam/aisha-age.htm )

Many biblical commentators believe that Rebekah was still a child when she married Isaac, while Isaac was forty years of age ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham )

Brooke Shields 15 years in PeopleMagazine
Brooke Shields 15 years in People Magazine

Since antique times, artists could show children and adolescents nude. Mainstream movies and magazines printed nude photos of 14 year old girls up to the 1980ies or later, which nowadays would be a crime punishable by many years in jail not only for the producers but also for the spectators and buyers. Actually, artists nowadays frequently get prosecuted for depicting children.( http://users.rcn.com/kyp/witchprc.html )

Shields’ first major film role was her 1978 appearance in Louis Malle’s Pretty Baby, a movie in which she played a child who lived in a brothel (and in which there were numerous nude scenes).[1] Because she was only 12 when the film was released, and possibly 11 when it was filmed, questions were raised about child pornography.[7][8][9] This was followed by a slightly less controversial and less notable film, Wanda Nevada (1979).

After two decades of movies, her best known films are still arguably The Blue Lagoon (1980), which included a number of nude scenes between teenage lovers on a tropical island (Shields later testified before a U.S. Congressional inquiry that older body doubles were used in some of them) and Endless Love (1981). She won the People’s Choice Award in the category of Favorite Young Performer in four consecutive years from 1981 to 1984.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooke_Shields

Nowadays, parents get prosecuted for taking nude photos of their babies in the bath tub, and teenagers arrested for taking nude photos of themselves.

History of child sex and child porn

Very interesting article by an insider from the child porn scene.

Source: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/My_life_in_child_porn Original german version of the source

In the Middle Ages, when the life expectancy was still significantly lower, the puberty began later than today and adolescents in the age range 12-18 years were set up for marriage. This changed increasingly. Naked, erotically depicted boys and girls have always been in the center of the art. As photography became popular at the end of the 18th Century, also erotic act descriptions with children and young people were made. At the end of the 60s there was a magazine called Lolita, produced by the Danish company “Color Climax”, that had sex between children and between children and adults as the subject. </ p>

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