The law says you cannot consent if you are under 16. You can, however, be guilty of murder or most other crimes. Sometimes I wonder about our criminal justice system.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4204306...x-schoolboys-16.html

Yes, we have one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility - from 10 - in Europe and one of the lower in the world. China and Russia from 14, e.g. A basic tenet of the law is mens rea (mental intent, basically).

Kill someone you meant to and ",life"... do something and kill someone but not intend to, and 8 years manslaughter out in 4. Huge difference, across the board of offences...

So, how is a 15 year old able on the one hand to intend to commit murder, but not intend sexual consent? Their minds are and at the same time are not their own. On the one hand to be held to account, on the other to be protected.....

I draw no moral conclusions about the punishment of minors or the laws of UK sexual consent; but the legal and moral confusion is manifest....

And these boys will be traumatised for the rest of their lives because of their experiences? Mein Gott! Although the boys ages are not disclosed (thereby fueling readers disgust levels), given there were seven of them, it is difficult to imagine that they were unwilling participants. When I was a testosterone-addled pubescent and post-pubescent schoolkid, I would love to have had the opportunity they have had, not least the intoxicating fillip and confidence it would have given me.

All the while our wonderful sex-obsessed media focuses on such stories, and all the while our lovely police force and judiciary focuses on prosecuting consensual 'sex-abuse' that equate to victimless crimes, but everyone it seems, remains willfully blind to the far more widespread and greater crimes of child physical abuse, child mental abuse, and child neglect within the family home which causes massive psychological damage to countless child victims.

What a sick, perverted, oppressive, cowardly, ignorant and uncaring society we are forced to live in.

Forgive me for returning to this story. I know it’s a few days old now. But the more I thought about it, the more needlessly vengeful it seemed to become. Needless to say, I largely share Peter's sentiments

Labyrinth asks a critical question:

So, how is a 15 year old able on the one hand to intend to commit murder, but not intend sexual consent? Their minds are and at the same time are not their own. On the one hand to be held to account, on the other to be protected.....

I couldn’t help feeling that implicit in this story, with its constant references to the ‘sexual assault’ of ‘underage boys’ (as though they were toddlers rather than teenagers), is the almost desperate ideological need for an icon of absolute evil, a representative of pure wickedness, which this unfortunate (but almost unbelievably foolhardy) woman has been pitilessly used for. That immediately raises questions of who has a need for this, why do they have it and to what end?

Might it conceivably be that moral sadism of the witchfinding variety is the only source of erotic satisfaction available to those who embrace its joyless puritanism? I’ve come to believe that, prevented by their morality from taking any delight in simple earthly pleasures (like mutually desired, noncoercive sex), they’re driven instead to extract hidden erotic satisfaction from pointing accusing fingers at perceived heretics and then gloating over their public immolation.

This woman must have sensed that she was courting ruin when she began her libidinal pastimes with these boys.

It’s obvious to anyone who refuses to join the deranged paedofinding panic of our times that it’s her life that has now been irretrievably ruined, not the boys’ she had sex with, or “assaulted” as the prosecution would have it.

Are ‘abuse’ and ‘assault’ really the best terms for mutually desired, noncoercive erotic activity, even if an arbitrarily designated age barrier has been crossed? Things that would have been entirely legal (and entirely pleasurable) within the space of a year or two for these boys are preemptively (and compulsorily) depicted as life-blighting crimes through terminology like this, even if her 'victims' actually found them pleasurable and non-harmful. I recall the late Richard Rorty once noting that anything could be made to look good or bad depending on the language used to describe it.

The obligatory representation of this woman as an evil abuser who ‘assaulted’ ‘children’ (as if there were no distinctions to be made between teenagers and toddlers) will result in her symbolic execution and consignment to a lifetime of social abjection. This strikes me as barbarically excessive.

Evil is easily associated with the word ‘perversion’, which the OED defines not simply as a straying, a wandering away (which could lead to productive new discoveries), but an inherently destructive deviation from the good, the straight and narrow, and a wicked subversion of it.

Yet Freud outraged the moralists of his day by equating perversion not with wickedness but with innocence. The natural state of the human infant, he argued, was ‘polymorphous perversity’ – the ability to extract all manner of sensual pleasures from bodily sensations that were ‘meant’ to be purely functional but could also be pleasurable. The list is endless, and includes defecating, non-nutritional sucking of the mother’s nipple, and the sensations associated with parental care (bathing, diapering, caressing, etc)..

There was nothing destructive in these pleasures; for Freud, they’re simply the seeds of future happiness because they’re the foundation of the creative ability to derive joyous pleasure from the world without harm to self or other.

But much hinges on how these innocent sensual beginnings are subsequently described by the moral codes the child encounters as he or she grows up. In insisting on impossible ideals of childhood “innocence” and “purity” (typically subsumed under the slippery word "vulnerability") – which I think are inherently abusive because real children can never live up to them (and face terrible punishments when they fail) – a morally sadistic governing order actually guarantees the very ‘perversion’ it seeks to eradicate.

Perversion doesn’t originate ‘over there’, in the proverbial dirty raincoat brigade (a largely imaginary threat hallucinated by the sex-obsessed puritan/PC mind, I believe). From a psychoanalytic point of view, it’s evoked by the very insistence on an impossible purity itself. It’s intimately proximate, not distant; it’s in here, not out there; in us – those of us who embrace the morality of purity-and-innocence - not in ‘them.’

We might think of perversion in the sense that I’m using it as the spontaneous resistance of the human body to pleasure-killing codes of conduct, a refusal to be subjugated, a resistance that could result in self-destruction when it defies a murderous morality.

What this woman is being socially destroyed for is her failure to conform to such a murderous morality, a morality incapable of appreciating or valuing anything jubilant or generous in the sharing of mutually desired erotic activities. In seeking to persuade randy adolescent lads that they’ve been damaged for life for a few harmless ‘rolls in the hay’, it seems to me to be irredeemably wicked.

If there was any damage perpetrated by these events, it seems to me that it was confined to a moral code whose superficial piety is laced with murderous cruelty, a morality that would brutally redescribe the touching story of a love affair between a 15-year-old boy and a beautiful woman in Robert Mulligan’s 1971 movie “Summer of ‘42” as an unmitigated horror, a crime scene, a depiction of a ‘child’ abused.

It seems to me that sexual inquisitions, once they begin, can never end until everyone is endangered by them because their adherents refuse to see that the ‘sexual evil’ they’re pursuing is a direct product of their own evil efforts to purge the erotic from human subjectivity. Which, of course, is impossible and can only end in tyranny.

Pascal presciently summed up the inherent iniquity of PC righteousness in the seventeenth century:

Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.

Evil, it seems, resides in the evil eye that sees evil all around.

The 'Age' laws in this country are totally screwy (a legal term for 'f**ked up'). Youngest Son of the Dwarf , when he was 17, drove his car to the garage, filled his tank with petrol but was refused a pack of smokes because he wasn't old enough? More annoyingly for him , he had been able to legally buy his own smokes up to the day before-instead of nicking MINE- right up to that point but they didn't 'granfather' current 17 year olds in when they changed the law.

I'd die for my Kid(s) in a heartbeat of course but hand on heart, Youngest Dwarf isn't the smoothest smoke in the pack and he had real trouble getting his head around the concept that he could drive a car legally-which has to be the single most dangerous thing he could do at anytime in his life besides join Crown Forces- that he could legally buy 50 litres of a highly explosive fuel and then drive home to his lawful wedded 16 year old wife and child if he had had such. But he suddenly was too young to buy a packet of fags...when he hadn't been yesterday.

Teenage boys being how they are, especially in groups, I dont see how they could not have been pressured into taking part.

The law is how it is to protect teenagers from themselves as much as from others.
The situation described is very different to consenting young people of similar age, and is, in my view, abuse.

I'm curious to see what sentence she will get. If this were a man fucking and "sexually assaulting" seven underage boys or girls multiple times, we'd expect a hefty penalty.

According to the sentencing guidelines, starting point would be 5 years. There's a discount for guilty plea and previous good character, but significant age gap and "grooming behaviour" would probably be cited as aggravating factors. My guess is that a man would get a 4 year sentence. I predict this woman will get half that.

I don't see why there shouldn't be a difference between the age of consent and the age of criminal responsiblity. Ten-year-olds can ride bikes or murder their baby brothers but not drive HGVs or give consent. Someone has clearly decided that ten-year-olds are mature enough to know when they're committing murder but not to know that they're consenting to sexual activity, e.g. with a manipulative adult.

Are you arguing that the age of consent should be lowered, JK, and if so, to what age, or that the age of criminal responsibility should be raised to beyond the age of ten?

Interesting!!! Just read the news story.

I guess this is the crime of seduction or something. It's not just the men who have power, women do as well and I glad in this instance it is recognised as such. Perhaps the boys should be considered to take some responsibility for their actions as well. Maybe society could be included in the taking responsibility as maybe there are no frank discussions parents/schools etc.

Age 16 for consent seems reasonable. Various ages for different things maybe. To protect younger people from themselves and give them breathing space to pause and consider how they want to live is responsible. Perhaps a lot more in honest, frank and open education would assist parents. I know when I served my time the kids would not listen to me but sometimes there was the slim chance they would listen to the teacher.

Unfortunate thing with the UK and some other countries is when they finally do the right thing they seem to go over the top like with parking meters and fines. The entorcers are similar to extremists. So they do the right thing in the wrong way.

I consider it also responsible to encourage people of consenting age to be extra careful when alcohol is involved.

General comments here, and more interested to learn from other views and experiences.

The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10 years old. The age of consent is 16 years old. Until this massive gulf in age difference is equalised, society will continue to reap what it has sown. By that I mean to say: so long as children and adolescents continue to be denied the opportunity to take risks in the world by both the nanny state and helicopter parenting, their level of maturity, and consequently their readiness to join the human race, on leaving school will be significantly diminished.

The longer I live the more I become convinced the AoC should be raised to at least 21, and maybe even higher for males. Also a licence should be required to possess, carry or use a vagina or penis. Or as Aged Mother says "there'd be a lot less trouble in the world if we all just kept our knickers on". Society gets rather exercised about 'The Cheeldren' indulging in supposedly dangerous, life ruining behaviour such as coma-drinking or smoking yet seems happy enough for 'young adults' (what an awful phrase) to indulge in the one past time that is almost guaranteed to screw them up- in more ways than one- for life. A 16 year having a baby hasn't necessarily 'ruined her life'-although they often do- however she has changed her life far more than a few packs of Silk Cut, a few joints or beers could ever manage. Not necessarily underage, unwanted pregnancy but just from the sheer emotional tsunami of sexual encounters. How did sleeping with your first partner change your life and future development? Probably some good and some bad...if you were lucky.

Your answer JO; I'm not sure - I think the problem with Age of Consent is that it should be different for individuals. Look at the guy doing well in snooker at the moment; he's 15 but looks 25; has a beard; is clearly able to decide with whom, if anyone, he should have sex - as long as they agree. It would be absurd to say he should not be allowed to play snooker until he is 16 or 18 or any general age; he is physically and mentally capable at 15. Likewise, when a child murders another child, he or she should be assessed individually as to whether they knew what they were doing, intended the death or it was an accident, had they been taught morality adequately - and so on.

Trouble is, with our generally stupid police and increasingly superficial species, that's all far too complicated to understand. Simplicity rules. Kill someone? Whether in defence, accidentally, serial killer, whatever - 10 years old or 101 years old? Hang them. Bring back capital punishment. Nice and simple. And for God's sake abandon expensive and complicated trials. If one person's word against another's is enough to jail people for decades, adapt it for all crimes, true or false, and kill the perpetrator. 32 MPH? Took drugs in 1963? Hang 'em. Nice'n'easy.

I hesitated before posting again on this thread because I fear pissing people off with my extended bloviations (and somewhat heretical perspectives).

But I find it keeps coming back to mind. So, alas, I feel the need to bloviate again.

I fully agree JK. Rather than seeing all ‘children’ below an arbitrary age as a uniformly ‘vulnerable’ block, it seems to me that it would be far saner to acknowledge that children of the same age can differ markedly from one another – in their capacity for kindness, for empathy, in their ability to manage their aggressive tendencies, in their propensity for envy and malice, in their cognitive aptitudes, in their sexual awareness, in their ability to learn from experience and reform themselves (i.e., grow up well).

To pick up on a point raised earlier about the presumed harms of pressure, it strikes me that the issue of struggling with whether to resist or yield to ‘pressure’ is an inherent and generally rather valuable aspect of all childhood and adolescent experience, whether sexual or not.

Presuming harm (or criminal intent) simply on the basis of age is, I fear, dangerously reckless. It seems rational and necessary to me that harm should be proven to have actually occurred, beyond reasonable doubt, not merely presumed because of a number. Yet in the context of a law court, as opposed to, say, a psychoanalyst’s consulting room, this is fraught with irreducible ambiguity. Regretting a pleasure you once participated in but now have second thoughts about should, not, I believe, be designated as harm. It is regret. And the good news is you can learn from regret, reform your ways and move on.

The well-intentioned endeavour to shield children from these experiences will always, I fear, inevitably end in a controlling petty tyranny, because ‘pressure’ (or ‘power’ as Foucault might have put it) comes from everywhere, whether there are laws against it or not.

Tutelary power is far more despotic than repressive or prohibitory power, because it wears a deceptively smiley face and says “it’s for your own good” – words that I’ve personally despised since I was a child because they license endless interference and control. A State-regulated childhood, to be blunt. And when the State gets involved in human intimacies, as Orwell knew well, discipline, punishment and even torture are never far away.

Power/pressure simply doesn’t flow in one direction only, from the older to the younger generation. It traverses all relationships, including peer relationships. And, as many falsely accused teachers can testify, it can also flow upwards from the malicious allegations of some youngsters to the shattering consequences visited upon the adults they’ve besmirched with such explosive lies.

And, of course, the pressures the young place on one another are often considerably nastier than that placed on them by the vast majority of adults, and it seems to me vitally important that, barring ABH or murder, they’re permitted to learn from these experiences as far as possible.

As I look back on my childhood and adolescence, I’ve increasingly come to value the experiences that I regretted participating in, because they ultimately helped me to become a better, kinder, wiser person.

Is it not essential to allow the young, perhaps especially the trainee adults we call adolescents, to struggle with adversity and challenge, with unfortunate choices and their aftermath, rather than try to insulate them in an aseptic nursery? It’s what they must learn to deal with if they’re to grow up into balanced human beings, including acquiring the invaluable desire to make sincere reparation for past wrongdoing.

I rather disagree with the principle that the law should protect teenagers from themselves, because it seems to me to be inherently infantilising, keeping them in a state of imposed vulnerability and victimhood (something I know my teenage self would have violently resisted. It strikes me as yet another benevolent intention that ends up paving the road to hell, because it culminates in controlling and censuring the young rather than allowing them the freedom, within broad limits, to learn from their life experiences.

What would have been the better outcome for these boys (and the woman who had sex with them)? Leaving this chapter with them as a private experience to be personally reflected on as they matured and entered adulthood, or subjecting them to the traumatic horror of having their deeply private escapades broadcast from a court of law to all and sundry by local or national media, knowing that they would be watching the destruction of a human being they were once very intimate with?

Leaving an experience with someone doesn’t imply covering it up: it can subsequently be shared with trusted others at some point for further debate so that personally meaningful ‘lessons in living’ might be drawn from it. So, this seems to be the choice: allowing time and space for personal enlightenment and growth, or prosecuting a 'wrong’un' in a court of law and inevitably generating publicly humiliating misery porn stories like this in the mass media?

The latter seems infinitely more harmful than the former, even if we should expect far greater restraint from a responsible adult. If indeed that’s what she was; she may have been an 'adult' in chronological sense only. Not all adults are responsible and many are mentally immature or ‘stunted’. Moorside’s Karen Matthews comes to mind. Age is not a good guide to criminal responsibility.

The official pressure on these boys to assume victim status will have been immense, and immensely abusive, because grooming/seducing young people into embracing such an ungenerous and spiteful identity is in and of itself thoroughly pernicious. Who wants to grow up to be a vengeful, petulant snowflake with a sense of entitlement, who ruins all subsequent intimacies by demanding endless indulgence?

Very few of us have the lives we believe we should have had; we only have the lives we actually did (and do) have. But it’s what we make of those lives that matters, how we grow from them, how we strengthen our capacity for kindness and fellow-feeling. The “abuse” lobby wants to petrify everyone who had unconventional youthful experiences in a perpetual state of bitter and vengeful victimhood, which strikes me as appallingly abusive and cruel.

This seems to me to be indisputable: whether there are ruinous laws prohibiting it or not, many juveniles will spontaneously experiment with sex, some of it maladroit or downright dishonourable, some of it mutually joyous. Unless they’ve been coercively mistreated and forced to engage in acts against their will, wouldn’t it be wiser and kinder simply to allow them to learn from their experience, rather than carting them off to a courtroom and imposing life-blighting identities on them like ‘victim’ or ‘sex offender?’

Good post as usual Pete; why bother with brevity when eleven hundred words will suffice? ;o)

“And, as many falsely accused teachers can testify, it can also flow upwards from the malicious allegations of some youngsters to the shattering consequences visited upon the adults they’ve besmirched with such explosive lies.

And, of course, the pressures the young place on one another are often considerably nastier than that placed on them by the vast majority of adults …”

The snake-pit that is in each and every one of us is at times super-evident among school-age peers; at least it was at my school where the normalcy of corporal punishment created a harsh environment for kids. I believe one of the side-effects of creating generation snowflake has been to stunt the basic human instinct to fear the consequences of one’s own actions, a fear that would otherwise be learnt from being allowed to take risks during childhood, in other words, the self-taught skill of orientating oneself along the line between order and chaos. So we have bred a generation that has the freedom to take offence in the classroom, to take offence at what people say, to take offence online, and to take offence in courts of law, with minimal negative consequences for doing the accusing, and even maybe the positive of financial remuneration.

“What would have been the better outcome for these boys (and the woman who had sex with them)? Leaving this chapter with them as a private experience to be personally reflected on as they matured and entered adulthood, or subjecting them to the traumatic horror of having their deeply private escapades broadcast from a court of law to all and sundry by local or national media, knowing that they would be watching the destruction of a human being they were once very intimate with?”

I take that to be a rhetorical question. The creation of more chaos is the inevitable outcome from the ruination of the lives of all involved in being forced through the barbaric mincer that is the medieval inquisitorial process.

Which brings us back to the good old days of Dixon of Dock Green where the decent desk officer, using common sense, sometimes wrong but nearly always right, decided which claims were to be pursued and which, the majority, were to be dealt with via sympathy and that magnificent remedy, beating chicken soup to Number 2, a cup of tea.

Remedy Nr.1 would have been, in DoDG's day, a cup of tea and a cigarette. One without the other has only a fraction of the efficacy of the two combined....at least for those of us lucky , blessed even, to be smokers. I haven't checked but the chances are tea and cigarettes were even blended at the time in such a way as to increase their natural complimenting.

Another masterpiece from Pete, and a good follow up from Peter too.

Jo wrote:
I don't see why there shouldn't be a difference between the age of consent and the age of criminal responsiblity.


Here's why. An under 16 year old can be prosecuted and held criminally responsible for sexual deeds that the law says he cannot give consent to. If, as the age of consent dictates, the defendant isn't doing sexual doings of his own free will and consent, there can be no mens rea and therefore no crime.

I think along similar lines to JK. Sexual consent should be a test of competency: whether one can effectively express informed consent about proposed sexual actions. I don't think there should be an age-based boundary at all. It might be useful to link this to something in the educational curriculum, making a more flexibl age of consent based on the actual consent rather than a legal ability one somehow gains on a particular birthday.

Another point is that you can still enlist in the British Army from the age of 16, although I don't think you can be sent into battle until 18.

Yes, Britain has child soldiers - worth bearing in mind next time you see some politician preaching to other countries from a great height.