Youth and Human Rights Discussion
Host Mike Males

Participant
Good morning, Mary! How delightful to see you on line again!

Your conservative "Economist" magazine of July 19th caught my attention with an item on page 12 entitled "Steamy, heated and wrong". It began: "Weapons of mass destruction were blown off Britain's front pages this week by 12 year old Shevaun Pennington who decamped for a few days with Toby Studabaker, a 31 year old American ex-Marine whom she met in an online chatroom. The story hits some of modern Britain's hottest buttons sex, children and the internet. For reasons which sociologists struggle to understand, and despite a fall in sexual offences involving children, pedophilia has become a regular, reliable source of newspaper hysteria in recent years. In response to this outburst of public concern, a new law is now passing through Parliament making seduction of children over the internet (known as "grooming") a crime punishable with five years in jail- more if it actually leads to sex…More worrying still is the criminalization of all sexual contact involving children however consensual with anyone under 16...The government is now considering amendments before the bill goes before a parliamentary committee in October. There will be no perfect answer--indeed during the last debate on the bill the home secretary offered champagne to anyone who could come up with a satisfactory law on all this." How about stepping up and claiming that champagne, Mary! Warm regards.

Mike Males
Doug and Mary, and Richard and Alex have written on this subject as well--The ideal framework to deal with adult-teen sex is sexual harassment law, which interests itself in the power relationship between the partners, not arbitrary characteristics. In ideal form, harassment law states that one may not exploit a position of authority to obtain sex from a subordinate that would not occur if power was not used to coerce it. In practice, that principle gets muddled, but its guiding principle is apt.

I was credited with and reviled for bringing up the fact that adult men, not teenage males, cause the large majority of what we so absurdly call "teen" pregnancy, motherhood, prostitution, HIV, and sexually transmitted infection. My purpose was not to stigmatize adult-teen relationships or get men tossed in prison, nor to brand girls as witless victims, so much as to discredit the moronic lie called "teenage pregnancy."

Teenage sex and pregnancy do not exist. They are simply versions of adult sex and pregnancy, mainly because they so routinely occur with adults. In the cowardly, disgraceful, self-serving lies that have sustained a worthless century-long "debate," BOTH advocates of sex education and advocates of abstinence preaching never mentioned the little detail that adult, post-high-school men are the main partners of the "teen" pregnancy and other sexual ills they had been wailing ignorantly about for close to 80 years.

Now both sides in this abysmal squabble, with the help of political agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, major institutions like the Kaiser Family Foundation, media shills like Oprah, USA Today, Newsweek, John Stossel, and other ignoramus liars, are shrieking their fool heads off that seventh-grade girls are sexing up seventh grade boys in unheard-of numbers, absent a shred of evidence anything of the sort is occurring. When junior high girls get knocked up or diseased, the perpetrator is nearly always an older teen or adult male--but our craven pundits and sex-squabblers are too squeamish to deal with the realities 13 year-old girls have to.

Adults, including considerably older adults, have a lot of sex with teens, and not just men. Last year, 35,000 babies were born to California teen mothers and adult fathers over age 20, and 4,000 babies were born to teen fathers and adult women ages 20 and older. Seven in ten births involving one teen parent also involve an adult parent averaging over 21 years old. That is what we call "TEEN PREGNANCY"!!

What further enrages me (among many things) is that the same folks who insist "teen sex" is out of control and "teen pregnancy" is a social epidemic are the very ones who are silent or horrified at the notion that innocent adult men should ever be held accountable for their role in these supposed scourges--particularly in the failure to provide child support. The experts who angrily condemned "teen sex" when they thought teen boys were getting lucky suddenly lapsed into silence or defensiveness when it turned out adult men were the perps.

It's damned suspicious that "teen pregnancy" only became "an epidemic social problem" beginning around 1975, when vital statistics reports showed teenage boys were encroaching on the sacred teen-girl territory of adult men. In 1920, 90% of babies born to teenage mothers were fathered by men over age 20 (one-third of the dads were over 25); in the 1950s, 85%; in the 1970s, down to 65%. I often wonder if this whole modern crusade against teen sex amounts to the tribal elders reasserting their territorial rights to teen-girl bodies and are deploying government and institutions to muscle teen boys back in their place.

That's not such a weird speculation when you consider that six First Ladies were pregnant teens (from Elizabeth Monroe to Rosalynn Carter), Jefferson and JFK both nailed teens during their presidencies, and Clinton (and god knows how many West Wingmen) certainly would have. If that's not convincing enough, consider that the most frantic scions of alarm over "teen pregnancy" were chaste types like Ted Kennedy, Newt Gingrich, and Clinton. I rest my case.

Or, consider the widely-celebrated 1997 report by the Urban Institute (the most established of liberal Washington research sycophants) on the "adult male" problem. It concluded (I am not making this up) that adult men who have sex with and impregnate teenage girls are acting "squarely within societal norms"--BUT, teenage girls who have sex and/or get pregnant are deviant because they "prematurely engage in childbearing and other adult behaviors." This travesty makes 1950s double standards look tame--so, naturally, it was wildly celebrated in New York Times and other forums as having buried that troublesome adult-male problem so all interests could get back to doing what they really wanted--blaming teens. (Read this idiotic study yourself: Family Planning Perspectives, May/June 1997).

American adults can't screw our teens and blame them, too. So, dammit, I propose single standard: if it's hunky-dory for grownups to bang high schoolers, then it's fine for teens to have sex with teens. There are men (including older teenagers) who abuse their power and authority to force and coerce sex with 12- and 13-year-olds and kids they have power over, and that is rape--the men who do that deserve draconian punishment. However, unless we're going to berate Jimmy Carter, Jefferson, Ginsburg, and millions of other men and women for doing adolescents, then adult-teen sex is normative. Therefore, it's time for America's jealous tribal elders to adopt a more European and Latin attitude that teen-teen sex is normative as well. Or, we can take the Puritan route and decree that everyone must be chaste until marriage or be stoned to death in the village square. What we can't do is keep up the tiresome pretend-debate over "teenage sex" as an excuse to have it both ways. Pretty weird country that says: have sex with a 16 year-old, but give her a cigarette afterward, it's jail time.

Participant
Further examples of exploitation based upon entitlement that comes from status? The lies and manipulation of appearances by those who benefit (older men) are typical competition tactics employed in our society.

Participant
I was once told by a group of social workers in Minneapolis about what they called "the Stearns County Syndrome". Stearns County is a farming community in central Minnesota, populated mainly, I think, by German Catholics. The social workers claimed that in that county 75% of the families are involved in incest, usually father-daughter, and usually with the consent of the mother. The rationale, apparently, is that since divorce is so taboo, it was way of keeping the family together when the father tired of having sex with the mother. They said that it led to a stream of young, blond girls from Stearns County entering into prostitution, first in Minneapolis, and from there to New York.

As I understand it, the consequences of incest and other forms of adult/child sex are less in the victims' withdrawing from further sexuality, but its opposite, the instrumental use of sex in adult life.

So like other forms of child abuse, adult/child sex has a heavy family component. One book I read estimated that twenty million Americans had been involved in incestual relations.

Participant
I think Ray's questions are on the right track. I recognize my shallow understanding of the message that Dick and Mike are trying to portray will make true believers label me as Neanderthal. But I truly believe that equating childhood problems, whatever they really are, have little resemblance to the plight of women. In my perhaps flawed opinion whatever differences there are between adults and children on the one hand and women and men on the other are truly totally different. I suspect these same differences may also be applied to girl and boy children.

Children are undeveloped "persons" that are going through rapid changes from birth to adulthood. To lump their problems, whatever they are, together from birth to maturity simply hides the major definitions of what these problems really are.

I also feel very uncomfortable with many of the suggested "fixes" that are being advanced. For example, giving children the "vote". Of course I agree that parents or guardians should take seriously their wishes of one kind or another, but these are not votes in the true meaning of the word. In fact, to emphasize my Neanderthal credentials, I would favor reversing the recent lowering of the voting age to 18 and put it back to 21.

Perhaps many of other people's children have the wisdom to vote on issues of importance to our society, but neither my clearly superior [ :) ] children or grandchildren under the age of 21 are either ready or desiring the right to vote. They are bright, they have many good ideas -- most of which change at short intervals -- and they will, I fully believe, become good citizens. But the ages at which they achieve this status is different for each of them and these differences can be observed during the years from about 15 and 21.

This discussion is an important and useful one. But to be successful in making changes, I believe it needs to examine more in depth the differences between the problems of a human in the developmental stages and those who have reached maturity.

And again, Mike, I do not mean to be rude or to denigrate the depth of your knowledge and the privilege of being allowed to follow your leadership in this discussion. Your # 66 begins to recognize how some of us have misread your earlier impassioned list of solutions that were developed out of your long studies of the "problem", studies that resulted in solutions that were not being absorbed by minds (like mine) not yet educated enough to understand them. May you have more success in the next few weeks in educating me--and I suspect others as well!

Mike Males
Sorry if I’m beating this topic into the turf--if so, let’s use this as a transition to some more productive issue to wrap up this forum. But the more I think about the irrelevance of what leading authorities think are the most urgent threats to young people, versus what the real threats are, the virtual reality gap is so vast that the problem of grownup maladaptation to changing reality is a major social problem.

Example (of many): Congress has now passed the Communications Decency Act, what? three times? This act has been treated as a dire emergency, pressing business set aside, expedited hearings, frantic warnings from experts that violent cyber porn forced on them by murderous perverts menaces the young like the 1918 flu. Lushly funded academics arrived at hearings with videos of the worst they could dredge, implying it was one mouse-click away from sweeping away your kid to perdition, and then shrieked for more funding. The Supreme Court struck the CDA down twice but finally gave in, since Congress and the administration evidently are prepared to slight all other business to get this legislation through.

I’m around teenage net users, including young gamesters and cyber types far more sophisticated than I am. All, to my knowledge, have seen at one time or another just about the worst porn the Net (or other media) can dish. They get the same kinds of spam and ads that infest our computers. They may patronize a steamy site now and then. But, for the vast majority of youth, Net raunch is of very little importance. It’s there, good for a thrill or a laugh on occasion, but about as important as Dad’s Penthouse down in the third dresser drawer behind the never-worn sweater was to us. Congress, the administration, the courts, and the erudite scientific porn-counters were just about completely irrelevant to what young people care about, let alone need to protect them.

Why are Congressional and allied elder nannies, average age 55-plus, so terrified? The Net is a dark, evil jungle to them. They hallucinate Nazi porn pandemics, just as they hallucinated shadowy dope dealers in schoolyards and lurid peer-pressurers in dim teen-sex denizens and other imaginary bogeys that kids, when honestly polled, rate as around 101 on their top 100 problems. Meanwhile, the new child-savers just can’t get interested in the real killers and warpers of young people--child abuse, poverty, unaffordable education, violent and addicted parents, the disappearance of career-ladder jobs, outrageously priced housing, a punitive criminal justice system that has lost all interest in rehabilitation--the tough stuff mature adult leaders ought to be able to face when it comes to ensuring the well-being of the next generation.

Only, America’s grownup leaders can’t face these issues. I think they exploit phony horror over imaginary threats as an excuse to dodge the complex, difficult questions that may not yield immediate monetary or political gratification. That is what I call immaturity--what we would all call immaturity if an 8th grader acted this way on matters in their lives. Those who argue 14 year-olds can’t responsibly vote or exercise adult rights may have good theoretical points, but please suggest an alternative way today’s adults can be snapped out of their fascination with lurid, immediate thrills and quick bucks and political points at the expense of our future--exactly the kinds of immaturities we accuse adolescents of indulging. Today’s American adults are too out of touch, perhaps willfully so, to govern responsibly, especially in matters involving young people, and I can think of no alternative than to give younger people more power to make their own case.

Participant
Mike: I would accept the first half of the following sentence as a good final wind-up, but not the last half.

"Today’s American adults are too out of touch, perhaps willfully so, to govern responsibly, especially in matters involving young people, and I can think of no alternative than to give younger people more power to make their own case."

I would agree that we need to "invent" some new strategies for the evils that you so well have introduced, but you insist on discussing one "fix" --child votes--and no others. For example, there are a large number of new configurations for discussing new strategies for today's ills. Just for one example, it is in these configurations that we could include "children", and in doing so might come up with a great many other solutions that would be both better and easier to introduce than lowering the voting age.

But again thanks for your inputs and your management of this problem.

Participant
Saving children from pornography is such a crowd pleaser, but so useless and hypocritical. We have the idea that the way to protect children from sexual predators is to keep them ignorant about sex. What they really need is the power to say no to an adult, but that we are not prepared to give them.

Let's take a look at the real needs.

First of all, freedom from poverty. The US is not among the nations that take care of children so that they do not grow up hungry. We would rather denigrate young mothers, and spend millions on sexual abstinence programs.

The US justice system is so badly managed that it is an international scandal. For at least seventy years there have been only three responses by politicians from both parties to crime--harsher sentences, bigger prisons and more police--all counterproductive. Criminologists have known better ways for decades. And the juvenile justice system is the most unfair. It was conceived as an opportunity for a kindly judge to put his arm around the shoulder of a wayward youth and counsel him or her to a better life. In fact, those children who go through the system are given only a few minutes of court time, have little contact with lawyers, and are sentenced for longer incarceration than they would be if they were adults having committed the same crime. Indeed, with crimes such as truancy and curfew violation, which are not crimes for adults, the basic crime is being a child.

Child labor laws, which originated not as a way to prevent abuses but mainly as a way of keeping both women and children out of the labor market, prevent youth from many areas of endeavor, making economic progress almost impossible for them.

They are incarcerated against their will in compulsory education for thirteen years. Virtually no alternative pathways to maturity exist--even though the failures of the educational system to educate are well documented. Indeed, the fact that it is compulsory has transformed teaching into disciplinary control, leading to more than half of all teachers who planned on a career in teaching to leave the profession before they have been in the system five years.

Not all parents are good for their children. Five children are murdered every day in the US, most by their parents. Child abuse is a national calamity, with estimates running as high as four million cases a year. Children should have access to alternative home environments, but almost none are available.

Corporal punishment has been abandoned in most developed countries, but not in the US. It is still approved by parents and educators, and supported by the Supreme Court. It is a humiliating, and sometimes physically and emotionally damaging, travesty against children. Hitting children should be outlawed.

A child's ignorance is a strong political ally of adult society, and adults have come to rely on it. Even the institutions designed to educate and inform children also serve double duty by keeping them ignorant and dependent. Mainly, children are separated from the adult world, so can't find out about it. Censorship is inevitable, even in libraries where there is a fear that access to certain documents will produce public outrage. Knowledge is power, and adults know it.

Childhood is nothing short of a disability. We conspire as a society to keep children weak, innocent, helpless, and dependent. We indoctrinate, patronize, ignore, dominate, prohibit, compel, incarcerate, and abuse them. We deny them the right to self-determination, economic independence, political power, sexual experience, self-education, and equal justice. We discriminate against them in every conceivable way and then have the gall to exhibit concern over their developing a healthy identity, a positive self-concept. Until society's views as to what a child might be undergo radical change, the child is trapped, a prisoner of childhood.

Participant
Gang behavior of adolescents is inherently frightening to adults, but Shulamith Firestone, in her book, The Dialectic of Sex, argues that gangs are formed out of the forced impotence of youth. She believes that liberation of the sort we have been discussing would reduce the threat, not increase it.

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