Here's a tough one: probable child sex

Economics Political Theory
1

heres one I’m curious to see how you guys respond…

How do you defend a system of libertarian law when confronted with this stuff:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFZc2CuCor4

These men have not violated anyones rights. But we can be pretty sure they would have ended up having sex with these young teens (and maybe forcibly raping them if they refused).

I don’t know anyone who has an objection to this bait and switch tactic and arresting these people on charges that wouldn’t be crimes in a libertarian society.

No one questions the idea that these guys deserve to be in jail, and that its better they’re off the street. Everyone applauds this effort of fishing these guys out before they actually do end up in some young kid’s house. How do you respond to this kind of case? How do you defend the idea of making what these men are doing perfectly legal and what these cops are doing illegal?

2

Your whole post reads like an especially pathetic episode of ‘cops’. It’s not tough. Nobody can show damage, no crime was committed.

3

I doubt that the perpetrator doesn’t question the idea.

I doubt that the perpetrator applauds it.

Btw, how do statists defend the current system where stuff like this occurs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb6wo_XTuw0&feature=player_detailpage#t=244s?

4

what would age of consent laws be?

when is someone a child, when are they an adult?

5

every human being becomes an adult at the age of 18. That’s just no brainer, dude.

6

{{But we can be pretty sure they would have ended up having sex with these young teens (and maybe forcibly raping them if they refused).}}

You mean like in the U.S. District of Columbia, where the age of consent is 14? Or in Spain, where it is 13?

{{Btw, how do statists defend the current system where stuff like this occurs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fb6wo_XTuw0&feature=player_detailpage#t=244s?}}

Cherry-picking, but I have to lol at that poor innocent child being humiliated on national television for speaking out as a victim of over 300 rapes.

{{what would age of consent laws be?}}

What would be the smacking-naughty-kids-buttocks age?

What would be the inappropriate-wrestling-moves age?

What would be the changing-room-nudity age?

What would be the risking-public-toilet-stds age?

I can’t believe no one has pondered these life-threatening scenarios before! Why don’t people care about protecting the vulnerable, dependent elderly from those who prey on them for inheritance money? They are just as emotionally and intellectually crippled.

As with everything, privatize the risks and people will be better off.

7

These men have not violated anyones rights.
Case closed. But you continue, for some unknown reason…

How do you respond to this kind of case?
It’s absolutely outrageous hipocrasy. And I use the term “absolutely” literally. It is the height of madness, requiring utter abandonment of any principled consistency. The idea of abandoning morals to impose slavery, while claiming to support principled morality, is perfect lunacy.

When a being is capable of acting (purposeful behavior), then controlling him without his will is slavery. There’s no justifying human action one way or the other, but attempting to justify slavery in attempt to uphold morality is severely intellectually bankrupt.

These men have not violated anyones rights.
Precisely. We should be paying more attention to the thugs who prevent voluntary interaction.

8

We can? IIRC, there weren’t any young teens actually involved in To Catch a Predator, nor in other such sting operations that the government has conducted.

That’s because they believe the ends justify the means in this case.

Well, if the ends justify the means, and the ends in question here are keeping “pedophiles” away from children, why not keep all adults under constant house arrest? After all, they could be “pedophiles”. How do you know that they aren’t?

I have no moral problem with the bait-and-switch itself. What I do have a moral problem with is the person on the receiving end of the bait-and-switch then being arrested, imprisoned, and so forth. As I see it, his actions violated no one else’s rights, so why should he be deprived of any of his?

Keep in mind that, with these kinds of sting operations, the decoys apparently act very willing and certainly aware of different kinds of sexual activity. We’re not talking about children who have no idea what sex is and are being groomed to “play games” with older people. The latter, to me, involves actual pedophilia (i.e. sexual attraction to sexually immature humans). We’re also not talking about a person forcing himself on someone who has no interest in sex with him. That’s just straightforward rape.

The funny thing to me is, if a 50-year-old man is lured to a house thinking he’s going to meet and have sex with an 18-year-old girl, but has actually been set up to be exposed for his alleged “perversion”, he doesn’t deserve to be deprived of any of his rights (in the eyes of the law). But if he’s lured there thinking he’s going to meet and have sex with a 17-year-old girl, now he does deserve that. What’s the magical difference between being 17 years old and being 18 years old that leads to this difference? Nothing but the law itself.

9

Heh, yeah, those sting operations are so successful at keeping “pedophiles” away from “children”. Stuff like this leads to me to conclude that the real purpose of those sting operations is to make cops, prosecutors, etc. look better (because more arrests and convictions).

Also, check out the highest rated comment on that video for some lulz.

10

QFT.

11

I think the natural legal distinction is puberty. And the agents which have been traditionally responsible for policing this - far more effectively, by the way, than the State - were family members. Mom, dad, grandparents, and so on. They are at once the people most likely to have the children’s best interests at heart and the people closest to the children and, thus, most likely to detect and prevent abuse of any kind.

A general suspicion of parents is a hallmark of the statist mentality. And child “protection” agencies should send shivers down the spine of any decent human being. These bureaucracies are merciless grist mills that chew up families (mostly poor families) and spit them out. Many of the children that end up in the foster care system are systematically abused and neglected by the foster parents who have either signed up for the money or for the opportunity to exploit children with absolutely no remaining safety net.

Some pedophiles try to apply libertarian arguments to child sex. “As long as the child is consenting, what’s the problem?” There are several cases here:

a) The parents don’t agree to the child engaging in sex. In this case, it doesn’t matter what the child wants, the parents’ legal right to exclude others from interacting with the child on whatever basis they please is sufficient to stop this. Whether it’s a tort is a different matter (and I think the law in an unhampered market in law would treat it as a tort).

b) The parents agree to the sex but are not themselves doing it. In this case, the extended family should be able to intervene on the basis that abuse is occurring and be able to seek to transfer the parenting rights to themselves.

c) No one is protecting the child (parents or extended family). In this case, I think that even strangers would then have a right to intervene and something along the lines of an “abandoned property” argument could be applied here - the people who naturally have title to the parenting rights simply are not exercising them. Thus, those rights have been abandoned and can be homestead by anyone, such as a charity for orphans or whatever. Once the rights have been transferred, the child will again be protected.

Here is a slightly similar thread.

Clayton -

12

I think the natural legal distinction is puberty.
And yet you haven’t justified human action one way or the other. In this case, a) the use of violence to enforce rules (manmade “laws”) which people may choose not to follow, or b) choosing not to follow rules you oppose. An arbitrary factor like bodily development seems irrelevant to which actions a capable being should willingly perform if the entire system is baseless…

13

The point is that puberty is not a particular age, it’s a stage of human development where the body goes from being sexually immature to sexually mature. When I preface a sentence with “I think”, that means it’s a speculation about what I think people will come to recognize as the natural dividing line for legal purposes.

Clayton -

14

My apologies. The age of consent in the District of Columbia was changed not long ago, and is now 16. However, the age of consent in Germany is 14, and in many Mexican states it is puberty, i.e. 12. (sex with someone 12-18 is not illegal per se, but can still be open to prosecution under certain circumstances).

{Well, if the ends justify the means, and the ends in question here are keeping “pedophiles” away from children, why not keep all adults under constant house arrest? After all, they could be “pedophiles”. How do you know that they aren’t?}

What a way to sweep consequentialism under the carpet. In that case, the ends would not justify the means, because no one can be trusted with the power of keeping everyone else under house arrest. Also, most people wouldn’t want those kinds of arbitrary intrusions into privacy, i.e. it’s not in their self-interest.

{And the agents which have been traditionally responsible for policing this - far more effectively, by the way, than the State - were family members. Mom, dad, grandparents, and so on. They are at once the people most likely to have the children’s best interests at heart and the people closest to the children and, thus, most likely to detect and prevent abuse of any kind.}

Incest between a child or adolescent and a related adult has been identified as the most widespread form of child sexual abuse with a huge capacity for damage to a child.[10] One researcher stated that more than 70% of abusers are immediate family members or someone very close to the family.[75]Another researcher stated that about 30% of all perpetrators of sexual abuse are related to their victim, 60% of the perpetrators are family acquaintances, like a neighbor, babysitter or friend and 10% of the perpetrators in child sexual abuse cases are strangers.[12]

{a) The parents don’t agree to the child engaging in sex. In this case, it doesn’t matter what the child wants, the parents’ legal right to exclude others from interacting with the child on whatever basis they please is sufficient to stop this.}

I can envision similar legal rights for children when their parents grow old and become emotionally/intellectually ‘immature’. After all, the children are the ones closest to the parents, and must have their best interests at heart. It doesn’t matter what the parent wants, the child’s legal right to exclude others from interacting with the parent on whatever basis they please is sufficient to stop them being abused by gold diggers - except of course, by the children themselves.

{I think the natural legal distinction is puberty.}

I’m curious as to what your position is on kids regarding parental “spanking”, unsupervised “wrestling”, dangerous masturbation fantasies, changing rooms and using public toilets.

15

If you want to learn more about this issue, be sure to check out Newgon.com. From the main page:

{Our resource aims to document facts, opinions, arguments, research and testimonies relating to physical attractions and relationships between minors and adults.}

16

Oh boy, here come the hysterics.

Which is it? From their popular book Why Beatiful People Have More Daughters, Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa say this on the related subject of child murder:

At first sight, it appears that killing children makes no sense from the evolutionary psychological perspective, which emphasizes reproductive success. Why would parents kill their own children? Daly and Wilson have two answers to this question. The first answer is that they don’t. Daly and Wilson discovered that what often passes as parents killing their children in police statistics is actually stepfathers killing their stepchildren, who do not carry their genes. It looks as though biological parents are killing their genetic children in the statistics because the police, uninformed by Darwinian logic, make no distinction between biological parents and stepparents in their record keeping. Biological parents very seldom kill their genetic children.

Chapter 6 - Guys Gone Wild

Police statistics for “incest” suffer from precisely the same problem - a stepdaughter is not a daughter. And nearly as bad, a “minor” is anyone who has not yet reached their 18th birthday, an obviously absurd definition when asking a question like “What is wrong with men these days? Are they just all perverts?”

I already explained how I envision this as a “ranking” system of right-of-first-refusal in providing care to the children; clearly, the children are not the property of the parents. But neither do any non-parents have a right to provide care to the children over the objections of the parents so long as they are not themselves abusing or neglecting the children. The purpose of this system is to permit parents to protect their children from genetic strangers who are much more likely to kill or sexually exploit them. The Darwinian logic and the empirical facts are irrefutable on this point.

How about the involuntary drugging of children with mind-altering substances derived from methamphetamine? I wonder where that fits on your scale of parental disposition to abuse their children?

Clayton -

17

Could you please explain what you mean by this? I’m not quite sure how to take it.

Technically, keeping all adults under constant house arrest is impossible, because the bureaucratic apparatus required to enforce that would need to be staffed by adults who aren’t under constant house arrest. But who says no one can be trusted with that power? (Just so you know, I’m playing Devil’s Advocate here.)

In other words, most people are hypocrites?

18

I don’t care about child sex as long as its not with my kids or my fam. or friend’s kids.

There is an article about issues like these here, go down to the child sex section.

19

That’s fine, but do you take this approach with other issues? Do you not care about restrictions on liberty as long as it’s not on you or your kids or your friends? You clearly care about child sex, but only so far as you think it personally affects you. I know quotes are not worth much but:

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” -Thomas Paine

20

{Police statistics for “incest” suffer from precisely the same problem - a stepdaughter is not a daughter.}

Parents may have an in-built biological instinct to protect their children, but an unsafe home is an unsafe home - parents have a coercive monopoly on the provision of caregiver services. Competition amongst caregivers can only improve the quality of childhood at a cheaper price to the child. Evolution is a discovery process that is always finding better ways of doing things. It doesn’t mean going along with the statist quo.

A problem is that children usually don’t speak out about incest (and other sexual abuse resulting from an unsafe external environment). Whereas speaking out requires courage, running away from home requires only a pair of legs. If running away from home became more culturally acceptable (and legal), caregiver-rating agencies would spring up like credit-rating agencies, and match homeless kids with relatively reliable caregivers. I think this would dramatically reduce the occurrence of sexual abuse, because caregivers would go out of their way to ensure a safe environment for their adopted children. Kids would also become more self-reliant from assuming more personal autonomy and responsibility. This would give some the courage needed to speak out about against their abusers.