CMV: Children Should Be Allowed To Consent To Sex.

I think that children are capable of consenting to sexual contact with adults, and it's actually incredibly harmful to take that right away from them, and a violation of human rights. The normal arguments you hear against it are that the adult is always going to have more power in the relationship so it's inherently abusive, the child isn't ready for sex, developed enough, etc., and that there's too much risk for harm and anyone who isn't traumatized is an exception.

The idea that power dynamics makes a relationship inherently abusive is just outright wrong. Power dynamics only matter if the party with the power exercises it, and laws are an equalizer because they make there be reasons not to exploit power dynamics if empathy and compassion wasn't enough of a reason already. We only extend this idea of power dynamics to sexual situations with children, in all other areas it's actually expected and socially acceptable to exercise power against children (using hierarchy to get them to do what you want, physical punishment as deterrence, lack of consideration for their will, etc.).

Any sort of argument about development and puberty ignores the reason people have sex, people don't have sex just because hormones compelled them to do it, they have it because it's a pleasant and meaningful experience to achieve sexual release and increasingly so if someone you want to be involved is involved to. The idea that children aren't sexual creatures is to say they can't receive pleasure and have positive sexual experiences.

This is probably going to be the meatiest counter-argument that I have. I'll say it bluntly, no scientific evidence that uses unbiased samples (samples that represent the population as a whole) comes to the conclusion that willing sexual participation, or EVEN unwilling, is incredibly traumatic by itself. A study into the most impactful combinations of abuse on a child's happiness, finds that sexual abuse (defined as unwilling) isn't even in the top ten combinations of the most harmful abuse (Ney, Fung, & Wickett, 1994). Countless other studies find that early sexual experiences with adults are incredibly unlikely to cause lasting harm (Rind & Tromovitch, 1997; Rind et Al, 1998; Clancy, 2009) and other studies show that children who are willing participants in sex are statistically identical to the control group when it comes to issues of mental health (Arreola et Al, 2008; Arreola et Al, 2009). There's research that shows that minors who have first time experiences with adults have nearly indistinguishable experiences as minors with peers and adults with adults (Rind & Welter, 2014; Rind & Welter, 2016; Rind, 2017) and a study done of Finnish children that found that children are far more likely to report forced sexual contact than willing because they don't consider the willing sexual contact abuse (Lahtinen, 2018).

I personally see no reason to disallow child from having sexual freedom given all the research (there's more even) and find it immoral to deny them sexual freedom. I hope that having a conversation on a sub about reasonable discussions will bring me some actual solid and impactful evidence/arguments against rather than the usual moralistic squabble and argument avoidance of other places. I want an actual discussion about this and reasons why, in the presence of immense evidence that I believe is contrary, that children shouldn't be allowed to consent to sex, reasons the research is flawed, skewed, biased, or in anyway "junk science", or research that uses non-biased samples (i.e. not samples with a disproportionate amount of clinical patients) and come to the conclusion that sexual contact the child is willingly involved in is going to cause them some kind of lasting harm or problems. Thank you.