> No such thing. Children cannot legally consent to sexual activity because they cannot meaningfully consent to it in the moral sense, either. ... Therefore, all sexual activity between an adult and a child is rape.
That is very jurisdiction-specific / cultural-specific position. In my home country, there is clear legal disctinction between child rape (non-consensual sex with child) and child sex abuse (consensual sex with child).
I would be surprised if the 'age-of-consent' laws (the age limit name is also cultural specific, here it is 'age-of-legal-competence') were generally motivated by legal fiction about children unable to give consent. That seems to me more like ex-post rationalization of such laws. IMHO these laws just codify social mores without need of specific rationalization (like incest laws).
> IMHO these laws just codify social mores without need of specific rationalization (like incest laws).
What's curious is:
1) Going against social mores tends to cause psychological harm
2) Looking across history, plenty of cultures broke those mores without psychological harm
That's not just sexual mores. All sorts of things. Corporal punishment is harmful to kids in Western Culture, but not harmful to kids in many other cultures worldwide (yes, with good evidence).
The evidence for what constitutes healthy person-person relationships is mostly culturally-situated, whether that's parent-child, sibling, friends, work environment, or otherwise. The same behavior which might be considered a child abusing their parent in one country might be considered the parent abusing the child in another (and lead to actual psychological harm for the abused party).
It's helpful to look at mores across cultures and history to see which things are fundamental to humans, and which are culturally-situated. Of course, that doesn't make breaking culturally-situated norms okay -- it still causes psychological harm.
What is more problematic is that we can't talk about this in more than abstracts. I could pick dozens of concrete examples, and if I raised them in a public forum, my career would be dead.
That is very jurisdiction-specific / cultural-specific position. In my home country, there is clear legal disctinction between child rape (non-consensual sex with child) and child sex abuse (consensual sex with child).
I would be surprised if the 'age-of-consent' laws (the age limit name is also cultural specific, here it is 'age-of-legal-competence') were generally motivated by legal fiction about children unable to give consent. That seems to me more like ex-post rationalization of such laws. IMHO these laws just codify social mores without need of specific rationalization (like incest laws).