The Push Has Started to Let Adults Have Sex With Adolescents

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Commentary

​In 1977, movie director Roman Polanski was accused of drugging, raping, and anally sodomizing a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey (now Geimer). Polanski’s excuse for this abominable abuse was that the girl consented, which is—and should be—no defense to such a heinous crime.

He subsequently pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, but fearing he would be imprisoned, Polanski fled the country in 1978. He has lived in Europe as a coddled fugitive ever since.

​Despite his crime—and other accusations by women that he assaulted them as girls—Polanski’s career as a film director has continued successfully for decades.

​Why do I bring up that old and sordid story? Because efforts are underway to normalize and legitimize sexual behavior between adults and adolescents. Indeed, recent statements by Polanski’s victim downplayed the intrinsic wrongness of such relations. While originally claiming his behavior was “wrong”—talk about an understatement!—she recently met with Polanski in Paris and took a smiling photo with him, proclaiming in a French media interview that not only was her sodomizing “not a big deal” but that “it’s a terrible burden” on her that Polanski suffered legal consequences for the sexual assault.

All in all, the Polanski saga demonstrates that for many prominent people, sex with an underaged person no longer matters anymore.

The International Community Pushes the Adult/Adolescent Sex Agenda

The push toward allowing adults to have sex with adolescents isn’t limited to show business decadence. Two U.N. agencies participated in the public launch of a long report called the “8 March Principles” (pdf) published by the International Commission of Jurists—an influential nongovernmental organization that works to “develop national and international human rights standards.”

Part of their effort calls to decriminalize consensual sexual couplings as a human right—including, in some circumstances, with the underaged if the minor is deemed mature.

The report is as eye-popping as it is disturbing. It argues that “consensual sexual conduct, irrespective of the type of sexual activity ... may not be criminalized in any circumstances.” More relevantly to the subject of this essay, that apparently includes some sex between adults and minors. From the report: “With respect to the enforcement of criminal law, any prescribed minimum age of consent to sex must be applied in a non-discriminatory manner.

“Sexual conduct involving persons below the domestically prescribed minimum age of consent to sex may be consensual, in fact, if not in law. In this context, the enforcement of criminal law should reflect the rights and capacity of persons under 18 years of age to make decisions about engaging in consensual sexual conduct and their right to be heard in matters concerning them.”

In other words, if a minor is sufficiently mature, that choice should be honored, even with an adult and regardless of age of consent statutes.

This is profoundly subversive to protecting vulnerable underaged teenagers. If national laws are changed in line with this recommendation, it would essentially gut what are commonly known as statutory-rape protections that legally protect minors from sex with adults—regardless of whether they consented—based on the commonsense theory that minors are definitionally incapable of agreeing to intercourse and need protection from coercion by more sophisticated adults. These are the same reasons that minors also can’t legally consent to tattoos or enter into binding contractual obligations.

Minors Already Consent to Serious Life-Altering Decisions

Unfortunately, protecting teenagers is no longer a societal priority when it comes to issues of sexuality and lifestyle decisions. Thus, minors, sometimes as young as 12, can now consent in some jurisdictions to acts that are far more potentially life-altering than having ink indelibly injected under their skin.

For example, in California, a minor girl can unilaterally consent to receive contraception or an abortion—both without parental consent or even notification. Many mental health decisions, including medical ones, are now allowed to be made by minors. In the transgender controversy, politically progressive states have enacted laws permitting minors to consent to serious transition procedures such as puberty-blocking and mastectomies—usually known by the misnomer “gender-affirming care”—even though those decisions can profoundly impact both the child’s physiology and psychology.

Meanwhile, in Canada, “mature minors” are allowed to legally refuse life-sustaining medical treatment without parental consent, and indeed, there’s now political pressure to allow those legally younger than the age of consent to similarly request lethal injection euthanasia.

So it’s only logical. If these (and other) significant life-impacting decisions can be made by minors deemed by law and enforcement practices to be capable of making the most serious of life choices even though legally underage, why not allow them to consent to sex as well? At the very least, insinuating such adult choices into adolescence certainly is the direction toward which the establishment trend line is pointing.

Powerful cultural forces in our hyper-sexualized society want to shatter one of the last legal protections remaining that shield adolescents from undue sexual influence by adults. We can’t let that happen. Our teenagers already face a profound mental health crisis—including increases in suicides, drug abuse, addiction to pornography, and other destructive behaviors. The potential associated consequences of intense sexual affairs with adults, such as emotional turmoil, unplanned pregnancies, and pressures to abort, are burdens against which all young people should be protected.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.