You can only be young once. But you can always be immature. – Dave Barry
I’ve said it many times before; the most common request escort service operators get is “as young as possible,” and because of it most whores tend to lie about their ages. And since in many countries prostitution is either illegal or legalized (i.e. technically legal but strangled and crippled by arbitrary laws), there is no way for a man to be sure whether the prostitute he hires is of legal age even if she looks as though she is, or underage even if she looks as though she isn’t. Are there some men who would hire a girl even knowing full well she was underage? Of course there are, just like there are some men who are willing to receive stolen goods, take bribes, use illegal drugs or otherwise step outside the bounds of legality even though they are otherwise not disposed toward criminality. But if prostitution were treated as a normal trade only those men who really wanted to break the law would pursue underage whores, and the law could be reasonably sure that anyone caught with an illegally young hooker had done it on purpose.
Two wealthy and prominent men, one in Italy (where prostitution is legalized and restricted) and one in Arizona (where prostitution is criminalized) have recently been accused of consorting with underage prostitutes. You would probably have to have been lost in the Amazon Basin for the past year not to have heard about Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s girl troubles, but they’ve recently grown worse: He’s been indicted on “child” prostitution charges for allegedly hiring a Moroccan dancer for sex when she was still 17. Working in his favor: Both he and the girl deny having had sex at all. Working against him: All three members of the tribunal are female. The following is paraphrased from a February 15th article on Huffington Post :
The 74-year-old Italian premier, Silvio Berlusconi, was ordered Tuesday to stand trial on charges he paid a 17-year-old Moroccan girl for sex, and then used his influence to cover it up. Berlusconi has called the allegations “groundless” and dismissed the case as a “farce,” accusing prosecutors of seeking to oust him from power. The trial is set to begin April 6 before a panel of three female judges. The indictment alleges Berlusconi paid for sex with the girl, who goes by the name Ruby, then used his influence to get her out of police custody when she was detained in connection with an unrelated theft of €3000. Prosecutors claim Berlusconi called police the night of May 27-28, 2010 because he feared his relationship with the girl would be revealed, while the defense claims that Berlusconi intervened because he believed Ruby was Hosni Mubarak’s niece and was trying to prevent a diplomatic incident. Both Berlusconi and the now 18-year-old nightclub dancer deny having had sex together. In an interview on one of Berlusconi’s television stations Ruby said that she told the premier she was a 24-year-old Egyptian and that he gave her €7,000 the evening they met, and later jewelry.
Judge Cristina Di Censo handed down the indictment for immediate trial as prosecutors requested; this is only done in cases of overwhelming evidence and skips a preliminary hearing that alone can take nearly a year. The child prostitution charge carries a possible prison term of six months to three years, but the abuse of influence charge carries a sentence of four to 12 years and if Berlusconi is sentenced to more than five, he would be barred from ever again holding public office. The trial will follow the resumption of three other criminal cases involving Berlusconi’s business dealings, creating a legal mess as various parties try to schedule hearings amid Berlusconi’s commitments as head of government. At the same time, a weakened Berlusconi will face the challenge of keeping coalition partners happy and attempting to repair his international reputation.
Most Italians have been tolerant of Berlusconi’s scandals, but last weekend more than a million women attended a protest against what they called his “denigrating treatment of women.” And when his estranged wife Veronica Lario announced she was divorcing him in 2009, she cited his involvement with young women and promotion of starlets to lawmakers. She also issued a plea to his friends to help him, saying “My husband is sick.” However, Berlusconi has proven adept at riding out other legal charges in the past and may do so again.
Though there might be some kind of hard evidence for the “abuse of influence” charge, I’m not quite sure how the prosecutors intend to prove a prostitution charge when both parties claim not to have even had sex. Here in the United States, however, grocery magnate Michael C. Gilliland may have a more difficult time of it considering the present climate of hysteria about “sex predators” and “child sex trafficking”; this story is paraphrased from one which appeared in the Arizona Republic on February 13th:
Sunflower Farmers Market founder and CEO Michael C. Gilliland has resigned from the company after being arrested Thursday (February 10th) in Phoenix on suspicion of felony child prostitution. Phoenix Police Sergeant Steve Martos said Gilliland, 52, went to the hotel expecting to pay for sex with a person who had identified herself as an underage girl he had met online; the arrest was part of a weeklong operation that netted seven other arrests. According to a company news release Gilliland told Sunflower he is not guilty and that he expects to be exonerated, and the company’s new acting CEO, Chris S. Sherrell, said “Sunflower appreciates the respect that Mr. Gilliland has shown for the company by his [resignation], so that his personal affairs will not affect the company.”
Note that there was no actual underage girl involved here, only an imaginary one, but I’m sure the trafficking fanatics will still claim it as evidence of 300,000 “trafficked children”. If the charges turn out to be true, Gilliland acted not only criminally but carelessly; after all, it’s not like he couldn’t afford to hire a well-reviewed professional escort. If prostitution were legal, would he have risked everything to push the age barrier by a few years? Possibly, but we’ll never know.
1) Don’t forget about Lawrence Taylor.
2 The age of consent is different in different states and countries, as I’m sure you’re well aware of. It’s a man made construct, so what determines if men are ‘monsters’ and ‘predators’ in your eyes, or the eyes of other professionals?
3) Are women(I know you can’t speak for all women) confused or resentful as to why this(“as young as possible”) is a common theme for guys?
4) Why don’t underage males that have sex with underage girls have to go to jail? They stick their dicks inside of children, why aren’t they punished?
2) I assume you mean professional whores; professional psychologists and sexologists know better than to classify normal male sexual response as “monstrous”. As for whores, some of them buy into the hype but I would like to think most understand men a little better than that.
3) I would say they’re exactly as confused or resentful as men are about why money and fame are a common theme for women.
4) Because they’re innocent little “children” as well and can’t be punished, unless it involves pictures in which case they magically become adults. Just to keep it clear, now: The action which could potentially create a human life and ruin both the boy’s and girl’s lives for good = not criminal, but the action which has no major direct consequences whatsoever = criminal and results in branding as “sex offender” for life.
Ah, if only. But the truth is, in some states two teenagers having consensual sex can be charged with statutory rape. Yeah, they were raping each other, and enjoying every minute of it. c.c
And yes, seventeen year old girls who send nudie pics of themselves to their boyfriends can be charged with manufacturing and distributing child pornography. Apparently, at the exact moment the picture was snapped, she became both an innocent child and thus a victim, and an adult monster pedophile kiddy-porning beast… at the same time! This goes beyond the capabilities even of comic book characters; even Billy Batson/Captain Marvel has to be either a child OR an adult.
How far do we to take this notion that you can be both perpetrator and victim? Should a fourteen-year-old who masturbates be arrested? It is, after all, against the law to play with the genitals of a fourteen-year-old. Why should some child-fondler be excused just because he’s the one being fondled?
{more rolling eyes emoticons than can be typed}
I was wondering when you would get to the Berlusconi flap, Maggie.
Judging from the picture of Ruby that you’ve shown us, there is absolutely no way you can mistake this person for a child, no matter what her age. That is the most developed 17 year old I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately the law only cares about chronological age, not physiological age. But physiological age should be taken into consideration when judging such cases.
As for Berlusconi, the Italians should make a law forbidding media-owners like him from holding public office. It’s like Rupert Murdoch becoming president. An obvious conflict of interest, and it just invites corruption.
I honestly had no intention of writing about it (and even said so in my January 18th column), but when they actually hit him with criminal charges I was forced to reconsider. IMHO “politician consorts with whores, tarts, hussies or assorted bits of tail” = not news, but “acting head of state brought up on criminal charges” = news.
And yeah, anybody who claims he wouldn’t have believed this chick when she said she was 24 is a damned liar.
Well, Maggie, maybe we should take every “age of consent” law on the entire Earth, and insert a clause in each one that no girl can get her first period until she’s legally old enough to consent to sex.
I mean, really, we can’t have 14-17 year old girls flouting the law by developing tits so big they can barely keep them in their shirts, forgodsake.
They’re CHILDREN, dammit! Don’t they know they can’t CONSENT????????
(sarcasm off)
You know, I wouldn’t put it past some silly bastard somewhere to actually propose that. 🙁
Tell me about it! It’s like we’ve lost all good sense, what with 17 year old boys becoming “sex offenders” when having 15 year old girlfriends. Pu-leeze.
Something is seriously wrong in the intersection of the Western concepts of sex, children, and crime. Or maybe the Dark Ages aren’t over; take your pick.
Actually, I suspect we are entering a new dark age. 🙁
The fact that you may actually be right about that is very worrisome. I’m an optimist, though; there may be sufficiently many sane people (many writing blogs like yours) for us to — just barely? — avert this possibility.
GOOD1
The female breast is the destroyer of all human life. It’s been scientifically proven.
In case you were wondering about who our most dangerous sex offenders are, this is a good article about it. Also has a nice concise graph to show who the most convicted sexual offending age group is. It’s kind of heartbreaking really.
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2009/09/there-is-fury-and-and-sadness-inside.html
That’s a fantastic article, Americanus; thanks for linking it. Readers, it’s well worth your time. One passage in particular that I found particularly resonant: “These kids are criminals, not necessarily because they violated the life, liberty or property of another person. They are criminals because the politicians defined them as criminals.” And of course, this is also true of many, many others in our society, including prostitutes and weed-smokers. 🙁
Lest people think that I’m joking about teenagers who masturbate being arrested for child molestation: I’m not. It is the logical next step. If you can violate yourself with a digital photograph, you can violate yourself with your fingers. If we don’t get this society back on the road of reasonableness, then fourteen year old “child molesters” whose only sexual contact with a “child” was solitary masturbation is inevitable. It WILL happen.
Americanus, I’m glad you sent this article. And I’m glad I don’t have a teenage son or daughter who could end up on a sex offender registry for the rest of his or her life just because he or she was in the wrong place and the wrong time.
What I would recommend to parents whose children end up on these lists would be to repatriate them to a foreign country, even if it’s a Third World country, when they turn 18. Because then at least they might be able to have a normal life within those countries.
One reason Italians have tolerated the continuning sexual accusations aginst the PM is that they know there are always ulterior motives for such “scandals.” Except for a few neo-feminists in La-La Land who really think they are “protecting children,” Berlusconi’s critics are transparently unscrupulous.
I attended one of the demonstrations to promote “Respect for Women,” and most of the speakers complained about such things as their lack of stable employment – a contemporary problem for both men and women that has nothing to do with Berlusconi’s sex life. Most people in the crowd didn’t even pay attention to the speakers but engaged in trivial conversation with each other. The demonstration was a shameful excuse to attack one’s political opponents.
Prostitution isn’t legal here in Italy but it’s tolerated: streetwalkers are out in broad daylight in predictable locations, and nobody bothers them. They are mostly African immigrants who are desperate and probably have children to feed. That’s what I (and probably many other residents) assume.
I don’t know if there are escort services here, but older men can easily find a young woman to accommodate them in exchange for a gift. What could be more natural than that? The really troubling thought about the unscrupulous PM’s situation is if he defeated by the opposition, who is going to replace him – the unscrupulous opposition?
Alas, that’s always the case, isn’t it? One maxim which holds true virtually without exception in every land and time where politics exist is that attacks on politicians are always politically motivated. 🙁
There is a measure of truth to treating teenagers differently. The last spurt of brain growth and structural change occurs around 14-16+ enabling the proper infrastructure for abstract reasoning. However, neuron fibers need to be properly insulated to function at highest efficiency, and this process (myelination) continues until early 20s – particularly in the prefrontal cortex, which is mostly responsible for planning and decision making.
In other words, teenagers are neurologically different from adults and less capable of making sound decisions. And even when like a 16-17-year old looks like an adult woman, her biological infrastructure for decision making is not yet at the same level.
Unfortunately, it also means that the publicly accepted age benchmarks are not useful. You can see the reason behind identifying age 16 as an important step (age of consent in many places, I believe) – but 18 is kind of arbitrary. It does not correlate with any biological benchmark. Recognizing 16 and 20 would have made more sense.
I totally agree that teenagers are not adults, but neither are they children, and the research I’ve read shows the brain continues to change until the late twenties! So if I were dictatrix I would establish a four-tiered system rather than our current two-tiered one: Children (persons below 14), adolescents (persons 14-20), young adults (persons 21-29) and adults (persons 30 or older). Young adults should have most adult abilities except for marriage and running for public office; I could probably be convinced they shouldn’t vote, either, because that group has a distressing tendency to vote itself goodies at the expense of others and the descendants they don’t yet have.
I am in agreement on the practical system you are suggesting 🙂 I also wonder about the wisdom of involving people younger than 20s on the battlefield…
Re: brain development, the intro to biological basis of behaviour/neuroscience class I am currently taking suggest that the only regular developmental process that really continues into 20s is myelination of prefrontal cortex. I don’t remember whether it goes until early or late 20s though so you are likely right. Actual increases in brain weight however are generally done around 16.
Yet overall, it’s also true that brain never stops changing – any new learning has to be represented at the tissue level. And some areas of the brain retain the ability to generate new neurons for lifetime. The question is the extent of change and how it translates into behaviour.
Because brain changes continue throughout life (the research I’ve seen talks about Darwinian models for brain structuring and synapses building — cf. T. Deacon), any “biological” argument is going to stumble on the need to decide on a date at which “most important changes” have happened as more or less arbitrary (plus or minus a couple of years). Exceptions would abound, even for a better conceived system like Maggie’s. Basically, it’s one of those questions better answered pragmatically: which cut-off age would cause the most (or the least) amount of harm in practical terms?
Good God Almighty in Heaven Above! The brain stuff again? Really?
What has been shown by the brain studies: there are small differences in the brain structures of teenagers and adults.
What has not been shown: what that means in terms of behavior. There are no, NO solid studies showing links between this small structural difference and differences in behavior.
http://www.youthfacts.org/brain.html
The United States does not have a good history when it comes to laws based on biological differences (real or imagined) between groups of people. I’m not aware of any nation with a good history on such things. We need to leave that BS in the dust-bin of history where it belongs and have NO laws abrogating the basic rights of entire groups of people based on biology. We already have age-restrictions based on experience, and that has been and will remain sufficient (if anything, we use it as an excuse to keep young people much more under the thumb than is reasonable).
Finally, myelination in the prefrontal cortex is (probably) associated with the making of finely nuanced decisions, not basic decisions. Not decisions like “should I should I take birth control”* or “am I sober enough to drive”** or even “should I take that much dope,”*** but decisions where no answer is really good, and even which answer is least wrong has subjective elements. Decisions like “should the US continue to support Middle East leader X, who is slow to respect his people’s rights but who is easily persuaded to follow policies generally regarded as in the best interests of the US, but perhaps only in the short and medium terms, the long term being unclear, especially as regards…”
So an argument could be made (barely) that lack of myelination in the prefrontal cortex justifies barring teenagers and young people from being legislators, governors, presidents, judges, and jurors. But then we already have laws about such things, based on experience; laws made before anybody had ever heard of myelin.
* Pregnancy among teenagers and among adults over 21 track with scary precision.
** More teenagers are killed by drunk drivers over 21 than by drunk teenagers.
*** Drug abuse deaths among teenagers are down, drug abuse deaths among the middle-aged is up.
I am happy for you that you are so knowledgeable and participated in so many such discussions that you can use the word “again”. However, your expression of disbelief makes it sound like the same applies to the rest of us.
It doesn’t. This topic is completely new to me and for this reason, I am grateful for the information and food for thought you supplied.
Whoa, Sailor, I’m on your side! I haven’t changed my belief about a four-tiered system in well over a decade, long before I heard of that study. I know you agree that teenagers are neither adults nor children and would opt for a three-tiered system yourself; I just feel we need one more. And this isn’t due to brain studies but to the obvious behavioral differences I’ve seen between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings; did you know many escorts won’t see men under 30? And how about “never trust anybody over 30”? The change in attitudes at that age is well-attested outside of labs.
After having a couple of hours to cool down, and reading both of your replies, I must admit that my own reply was snapping and snarling. I’ve heard this enough times that I have about ZERO patience with it, but neither of you were deserving of my berserker rage.
Maggie, I started writing my reply before you posted yours, so I hadn’t even seen your four-tiered system before I took to ranting. I know that young people would be better off in many ways under your benevolent dictatorship than they are in today’s America. I tend to suspect they’d be even better off in mine. 😉
Ingrid, however many times I may have heard about this before, and however much fire-breathing it may inspire me to, YOU have not mentioned it to me before. I’m glad that my blow-up didn’t put you off the teens’ side forever.
To me, it is not so much the claimed behavioral differences that are important, but their effect on society as a whole, or at least on whatever privileges/rights are being given (or denied) a certain age group. I don’t see many cost-benefit analyses being done, and I’m more than a tad distrustful (given the high number of exceptions either way that I’ve seen throughout life) of claims such as “people under 30” shouldn’t be / not be administrators, elected officials, etc. (Most traditional government is clearly post-30, and yet considering how often it ends up doing the wrong thing, I’m not sure 30 is such an important barrier.)
IF YOU SAY SO!
Two problems: 1) what does final brain growth have to do with competence to consent to sex or sex play? Regardless of the stage of brain growth, it’s arbitrary to associate competence to consent with it.
Some individuals are competent earlier and others are competent later, regardless of the number of birthdays counted or brain growth reached. Choosing any age is merely an administrative convenience.
An alternative method of deciding when someone is competent to consent is to give paper and pencil tests to average adults traditionally considered competent to consent (18+ or 21+), to measure their level of understanding the possible consequences of sexual choices, alternatives available, ability to resist manipulation and deception, etc., and use their scores as the minimum that everyone must achieve.
We might find that some young people are more competent than older adults.
Second problem: Some research has found little difference in the reasoning skills of middle school children and universty students, and significant improvements in reasoning skills are achieved through specific instruction. (Quoted in “Thinking in Education” by Mathew Lipmann.)
We need to recognize that people are individuals, and especially that not all individuals are the same. The courts lump everyone above or below a certain age into groups so they don’t have to spend time really evaulating the individual case before them.
By the way, mature and sensible young people are welcome in Europe. http://www.TeachItaly.com
OH, AND BY THE WAY!!!!
Can somebody explain this to me??? A fourteen year old sex offender? How can you be a sex offender and at the same time not old enough to consent to sex? That is what you would call a fucking contradiction.
Hey, I’m thinking that maybe an enterprising lawyer can make a case out of this. As in, there is no way that Johnny can possibly be a sex offender because he’s not old enough to consent to sex! That might be a way to get the vast majority of people on the sex offender list off of it.
I think the old man, young girl is a pattern that we as a society really need to look at closely to figure out what is okay and what is just sick behavior. Here is an interesting analysis of that question as discussed by a leading male and leading female author: http://bit.ly/HefnerEffect
Two-part solution:
1) Government needs to get its nose out of private business and recognize that NO arrangement between two consenting adults, regardless of age, is any of the government’s business.
2) Reduce the penalties for statutory rape to allow judicial discretion for the actual case at hand rather than simply screaming “she’s a child!” in reference to a girl who is better-developed than most 25-year-olds at 15.
This is a hot topic indeed.
I agree with the tier system, but it seems that the state/federal government is more intent on ruining people’s lives than protecting them.
And the monsters that have a pattern of kidnapping, raping, molesting, brainwashing children seem to get back out on the streets. Unbelievable.
1 way to stop people from getting out of prison is parole protest petitions. They WORK and thank God for them. They take very little time to sign and even if you have to send an e-mail, letter, etc., these also take very little time to do. You can find them by searching under “parole protest petitions”. Another great resource for them is the group Parents of Murdered Children. We have to do what we can do to stop these things. If we do nothing, then nothing will ever get better. I’m going on here, but know 1st hand how these petitions work and how important they are. Thanks for listening.
Ah-ha! I think I’m beginning to understand why I was having problems understanding the difference between legalization and decriminalization. I don’t view prostitution as legalized if its saddled with so many restrictions that it’s really not legal at all. And that is pretty common in European countries. Prostitution is legal, but not brothels. And not stret walking. And not working out of bars. And not working out of hotels. etc. etc. etc.
Nevada’s another example: Prostitution is legal IF you work for a politically-connected rich man in a rural county and submit to arbitrary and demeaning rules set by other people. Every other form is illegal.
Terms like “legalization” and “decriminalization” may have different meanigns in activism on different issues — an activist for legal marijuana once wrote (here in Maggie’s blog I think) that the meanings were reversed in the case of marijuana (‘decriminalization’ meant lots of regulation, ‘legalization’ didn’t).
Females of all ages are victims when it comes to sex. Being born female means that you are not structurally designed to be capable of making decisions about your own vagina.
😐
Or, at least, that you are ignorant of the profound social consequences that any decision you may make about your vagina will have, and thus should not be allowed to make them. Vaginas are too important to be left in the hands of women!
To listen to some of these idiots, you’d think all women have thermonuclear weapons in our pelvises.
Thermonuclear, eh?
You know how the bikini got its name? American servicemen compared the new swimsuit to the nuke tests on Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific.
Funny, Sailor, I had exactly the same thought! 🙂