Category: Politics (Historical)

While looking around online for something else, I came across this tidbit:

Statutory rape laws are based on the premise that until a person reaches a certain age, that individual is legally incapable of consenting to sexual intercourse. Statutory rape was codified into English law more than 700 years ago, when it became illegal “to ravish,” with or without her consent, a “maiden” under the age of 12. In 1576, the age of consent was lowered to 10.⁷
Statutory rape laws became part of the American legal system through English common law. As in England, early lawmakers in this country adopted 10 as the age of consent. However, during the 19th century, states gradually raised the age of consent, in some cases to 21.⁸ Today, the age of consent ranges from 14 to 18 years of age; in more than half of the states, the age of consent is 16 (see Table 1).

10???? With or without her consent???

Meanwhile, we’re told that young girls are hitting puberty at earlier ages than in the past… which sent me looking for historical input. Here’s a chart (hot-linked to the source page):

Polimom sees some incongruity here. If girls are maturing earlier now than they have historically, and at one time the age of consent was 10 (that boggles my mind), then what does all this say about society’s historical antecedants regarding children, adolescents, and pedophilia?
One can only go so far with the argument that there was more responsibility on the young, or that because of the higher infant mortality, families started sooner. It’s pretty obvious from the data that “consent” was totally disconnected from such explanations, but was more likely a disguise for what Polimom would consider to be overt sexual abuse.
And that brings me back around to what I was going to write about in the first place.
The debates surrounding the Foley scandal indicate (to me) that our society seems to have drawn some arbitrary age-lines in the sand. Perhaps we’d benefit from a bit of historical perspective, and a discussion of childhood itself: where it begins… and ends.