elric le tueur d'amis wrote:Well,then your grandfather was +- 18 when he married;
for me,yes this is a kind of pedophilia in normal times (cause a 14 year old girl can't know what having sex really means) but you choose a ww period where people doesn't act normally : they don't have time to know if they are really in love cause the man can go to war soon and die;
if they married at age 18 for the girl,the case would be obviously not a phedophilia one;
So if it's the 1930's it's pedophilia but if it's the 1940's it's not?
That doesn't even remotely resemble logic.
You see, the problem is that you're at once trying to set a concrete age for consensual sex AND trying to adjust that, necessarily arbitrary, age in terms of context.
What makes an 18-year-old girl differnt from a 17-and-11-month-old girl? What a 14-year-old woman having sex with an 18-year-old man different from two 14-year-olds having sex?
A pedophile is a person who is sexually attracted to children BECAUSE they are children. A man who marries a young woman is not necessarily a pedophile, particularly demonstrated when he then spends 65 years of his life married to her.
We should distinguish between pedophilia as an exploitative act and sex between consenting individuals, even if one of those individuals, in -=your=- estimation, is too young to "know what having sex really means." The state has a compelling interest to protect children from exploitation. It does not, however, have the moral authority to draw absolute lines determining what is and is not love between individuals, their families, and their communities.
We've gotten off topic here but the point is important: the age of consent is a socially constructed and legally established arbitrary line. The political party in the Netherlands is, to my understanding, trying to establish two basic chages. First, they wish to lower the age of consent. Second, they wish to establish that a person at or above the age of consent is not a child for purposes of child pornography laws.
We can argue about the age (and personally I think they're trying to set it too low and I have concerns about that) but that's the point of political discourse. They are trying to move a politically determined arbitrary line. As citizens they have the right to pursue that political goal. Rival parties, of course, have the right AND the responsibility to fight against them.