by cmsellers » Mon Nov 20, 2017 3:10 am
So I read that article and basically the argument is "the legal category of 'minor' shouldn't exist, my life was ruined because of it." I can empathize since I have a similar attitude towards public schools, for similar reasons. However my experience doesn't mean I think we shouldn't offer free education. On a similar note, the category of 'minor' exists to protect minors. The fact that it can fail horribly and even backfire is a problem, but I'm not sure "abolish the category of 'minor'" is the solution.
The big issue is that he had abusive parents which society did nothing about, because society defers too heavily to parental authority. That's something I've commented on before. He was also sent to an institution which shouldn't have been legal, and when he ran away from home he was unable to get a roof over his head because minors can't sign contracts.
There I think that there actually is a point. If we can charge minors younger than teens as adults for serious crimes (though I'm a bit skeptical of that practice for people younger than 16), I feel like it should be easier to become an emancipated minor. If I had my way it would be possible for minors to do most things adults can do as young as twelve, in certain circumstances. Or possibly no age limit, just a maturity test. If I had my way the voting age would be lowered to twelve. (Yes I know, it's a terrible idea and you had no idea about politics when you were twelve, I've heard this since I started advocating it at thirteen.)
However I still wouldn't say a twelve-year-old, even an incredibly precocious one, should be legally allowed consent to sex with an adult. Now maybe it's conceivable that somewhere there's a pre-teen who is capable of making informed, adult decisions about sex. Maybe. Yet seems to me like there's little benefit to designing the law around those hypothetical extreme edge cases, and I can see a whole lot of downside, given how often underage rape victims are blamed even now when it's bright-line illegal.