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The law makes a very clear distinction between the two such that self-defense is not assault.
In many jurisdictions, it absolutely is.
A "15-year-old girl who loves her 20-year-old boyfriend" is not the same as "a 15-year-old victim of statutory rape".
A 15-year-old who has sex with her 20-year-old boyfriend is, however, in most US jurisdictions ("Romeo and Juliet" laws tend to allow 4 years or less)
Yes, but the operative fact in that distinction is sexual contact. It's not a crime in and of itself for a fifteen-year-old girl to love a twenty-year-old boy, or vice versa. (Indeed, how could the law ever criminalise emotional states? That's right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
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It would be even better if the law made a distinction where a loving relationship involving a 15 year old between could never be statutory rape. Only people who actually victimize should be prosecutable.
I guess in mine it's not, because human nature is violent and we don't want to make every man who gets in a fight a felon.
It is if they have sex, even if she wanted it and is not victimized by it.
Does the law ever pass judgement on which relationships are "loving" and which aren't? How would it even go about doing this? I know that in custody disputes between divorcing parents the judge may well take the respective parents' apparent affection for their children (and concern for their welfare) into account, but my understanding is that this is only one factor of many taken into consideration: if forced to choose between granting custody to one parent who really loves his children but is a heroin addict, and another parent who doesn't seem that invested in them but isn't addicted to heroin and always feeds and clothes them, I imagine most judges would choose the latter parent. Offhand I can't think of any instance in which the legal system adjudicates on which relationships are "loving" and which are not. Still less can I think of any crime which is not considered a crime provided the perpetrator and victim love each other. We used to recognise such categories (domestic abuse, marital rape), and it was considered a major feminist victory when we no longer did so. I, for one, would not like to go back to the world in which it is legally impossible for a man to rape his wife.
Which jurisdiction would that be?
No, it's not. If a fifteen-year-old girl loves her twenty-year-old boyfriend, but they have a celibate relationship, no crime has been committed. If a fifteen-year-old girl has sex with her twenty-year-old boyfriend, in some jurisdictions he will be considered a statutory rapist. The extent to which she loves him simply doesn't enter into it. We're not criminalising loving relationships, we're criminalising the sexual exploitation of minors, and as with literally every law in the history of the human race there are bound to be weird edge cases where it could plausibly be argued no real harm has been done.
You're not criminalising sexual exploitation of minors. Exploitation means to use someone unfairly for benefit. There is no clause in the law that the girl must be used unfairly, even though this would be easy to demonstrate. For example, if a man makes promises to her over text, has sex with her, cheats on her, and then dumps her, that would qualify as sexual exploitation. Indeed, at the very least, if criminalising exploitation were the goal, there would be no close-in-age exemptions for teenage boys, and testimony from the girl that she loves the man would ruin the case. And it's not a weird edge case. In every case I've studied, either no harm is done, harm does not rise to the level of a felony considering the values of society (heartbreak doesn't cut it for me, I demand my heart to be protected too and otherwise I'm not willing to put the mere feelings of teenage girls over the mating interests of young men), or the case is an easy way out after a rape or abuse allegation, which is a de facto violation of the 5th amendment of the bill of rights, which states:
If the case is known to really be about a rape, and the sentence and punishment is proportional to that effect, but a lesser crime is prosecuted, yet the worse crime is in fact the motivation for it, then the right to not be "eld to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury" as well as the right to "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" has been violated. In other words, the state must prove the real crime, not pass unjustifiable laws and then use excessive punishment for the crime as written described, because "everybody knows it's really about rape or exploitation."
As written, statutory rape punished as a felony with prison time also violates 8th amendment rights.
If a man is convicted of statutory rape, then he had consensual sex with a teenage girl. If "everybody knows" he's a rapist, too bad, he committed an unserious crime per the letter of the law. That crime being a felony or requiring "sex offender" status seems excessive and cruel and unusual to me. Considering that as written, the crime has no victims, jail time also seems cruel and unusual. The state has the hard job of proving the real crime, not bypassing the Bill of Rights with a funny trick.
Okay, now tell me why you can't (or wouldn't) make all these same arguments about a 10-year-old who has hit puberty?
10 year olds have a serious intelligence deficit compared to adults. 10 year old pregnancy is extremely harmful. The cohort of men attracted to 10 year olds is a small percent of the population, and they tend to have other mental illnesses. Even as a smart person, I personally don't think I could have consented to sex at only 10 years old. I didn't understand it enough. I don't believe any of these are true at 15.
I don't find this argument convincing. Your entire premise is that 15 is arbitrary and most 15-year-olds (according to you) are physically and mentally mature enough while most 10-year-olds are not. This might be true. But it's clearly a sliding scale: some (very tiny) number of 10-year-olds probably are physically and mentally mature enough, while there are a not-insignificant number of 15-year-olds who definitely are not.
Every age-of-consent argument boils down to this: yes, the number we choose is somewhat arbitrary. You're saying 18 is too old but 14 is too young. You may or may not be correct, but there will always be someone saying "Aktually most 14-year-olds nowadays..."
While I wouldn't lose sleep over lowering the AOC to 15, nor am I losing sleep over it being 18. And I would pretty seriously side-eye a grown man with a 15-year-old girlfriend, however full of hip and round of breast she might be.
(Also, I think you probably are our previous ebophile poster.)
Elsewhere in the thread I said I supported a "common law age of consent," where the aptitude for consent is judged by a jury in a trial that charges rape or sexual assault, where the prosecutor brings evidence that the victim lacks mental capacity. My priors are that in 99% of cases involving 15 year olds that are successful now, the state will be unable to meet this standard. But in 99% of cases involving 10 year olds, they will be able to meet this standard. It's fine with me to have 1% outliers, after all, people differ a lot in intrinsic qualities other than age.
The problem here is that most cases over 15 result in serious harm to a man, and little to no harm to the girl. If the age is lowered, you will introduce slightly more mild harm to girls and decrease serious harm (prison, felony status, sex offender registration) to young men while also causing positive externalities like the expansion of young male dating pools, increases in young marriage and increases in the TFR. The issue is therefore asymmetrical; an age of consent of 18 is plausibly far less optimal than an age of consent of 15, when it comes to the amount of harm and negative externalities either causes.
So could a 22-year-old claim she was statutorily raped and force a trial to establish she was competent to consent?
Ah. There it is.
I don't think adding 15-year-olds to the dating pool will actually solve the dating woes of young people. Do you think suddenly young men will be locking down teen virgins before they start looking for older chads too?
This assumes you don't believe 15-year-olds impregnated by older men are "negative externalities."
Your mathematical approach assumes a spherical and symmetrical world, which sexual relations surely is not.
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