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Notes -
So, the Guardian has decided to be offended by a volleyball player, gleefully (and from what I can see, technically correctly (the best kind of correct!)) calling him a child rapist in the headlines.
Apparently he had sex with a twelve-year-old when he was 19 (with no additional elements of coercion) and served a year for it in 2016.
That is one icky age difference, and I think that the prison sentence he served might be an appropriate general deterrent. (Personally, I would prefer having (legally void) consensual sex with an adult (to whom I am attracted, see consent) at age 12 to spending a year in the prison at 19, but ymmv.)
However, I also believe in rehabilitation. I see no reason to report on this any more than if he had served a year for insurance fraud in 2016.
Both of the Guardian articles feel less of a hit piece than some other stuff I have read in the past, apart from the headline. (I wish we had some better phrase to refer to the offense than 'child rape', which includes this but also abducting and violently raping kindergardeners.) Of course, that the elected to report on it at all is the most problematic part of it apart from the headlines -- it was eight years ago, which is longer than most doping bans last, and he did a substantial amount of time for it.
Isn't the distinction already made in rape vs aggravated rape? We can be certain that a 12 year is a child and that the crime committed was rape, I see no issue with the term 'child rape'.
Usually, the distinction is to call it "statutory rape", distinguishing two concepts, factual consent and legal consent. That is, "rape" is often used to describe cases where the victim did not factually consent to the sex act, and "statutory rape" captures a range of scenarios where the victim may or may not have factually consented, but in either case, the statute would not have accepted that factual consent as providing legal consent (and thus, it is not actually necessary to even ask/answer the question about factual consent). My sense is that, usually, cases involving children are pretty trivially easy to prosecute as "statutory rape", and it's only when there are significant other factors (usually clear evidence of force/violence) that can be shown, where it is 'promoted' to your category of "aggravated rape". There's often little point, from the standpoint of what is actually prosecuted, to pursuing a 'partially-promoted' case, where they try to show that there was no factual consent, but without sufficient evidence to bump it all the way up to "aggravated". Like, sure, it can help you with the jury to have the victim say that it felt bad and icky and they said they didn't like it and didn't want it, but I don't think it 'bumps the charge up' in a lot of cases.
Thus, I would generally find an unqualified use of "rape" to be rather ambiguous, as well as the slightly-qualified "child rape". It's still not entirely clear which bucket it would fall into.
...of course, if you start asking more pointed questions about whether children can factually consent, why/why not, and why/why not a statutory regime should accept that factual consent, you open a whole box of absolute conceptual mess, which is a historical sore spot for the more Foucauldian-inspired left.
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