Talk:Age of consent reform

Fall 2011 developmental editing + place of pedophile advocacy groups

This article has just gone through some significant editing, basically by User:RJR3333, adding and subtracting material. I just want to check in here on that. I consider these changes to be improvements, and if any one disagrees here's a place to say so.

I did add back in some of the material that User:RJR3333 redacted, particularly on the place of pedophile advocacy goups. I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, these were really really small groups. They did get some press, essentially for the shock value of covering them, I suppose. On the other hand, if we are going to include these groups, we need to make clear that they never came close to getting any kind of real support.

I'm not sure they fit in here at all, and it'd be arguably OK to just delete the entire section, or reduce it to something like

"During the late 1950s to early 1990s, several paedophile membership organisations advocated lowering or abolishing age of consent laws[29][30][31][32] to legalize sexual activities involving an adult and a child. This advocacy did not gain any public support[29][32][34][38][39] and today those groups that have not dissolved have only minimal membership and have ceased their activities other than through a few websites.[32][39][40][41]"

The way I see it, the article is titled "Reform" and to be considered reform (or even a valid if unsuccessful attempt at reform) one has to be a reform movement, which is a recognized type of social and/or political movement. I guess (not being an expert on the subject) that there have been three movements:

• The movement (even if sporadic) to establish in law the concept of "age of consent" at all. There must have been one, but we don't have any coverage of it. We should.
• The movement to raise the age of consent to (usually) 16. This is and was a real reform movement and (thanks to User:RJR3333) we now have some coverage of it.
• The Romeo and Juliet exemption movement. This is a real political movement and we now have some coverage of it.

I don't see where the pedophile advocacy stuff fits in here at all. I hate to throw away accurate material, but since it doesn't really fit my inclination is to either remove this material or reduce it to a couple of sentences. (I'm not too concerned about potential lack of coverage on this topic in the Wikipedia generally -- we have plenty, such as the article Party for Neighbourly Love, Freedom, and Diversity, a party which had three members but nevertheless has an article. The René Guyon Society had, apparently, one member and has an article.) Herostratus (talk) 15:14, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

My edits to this article were a mess, not to mention the fact that no age of consent for people below 18 exists, that is a misconception. I regret editing here and putting false info here, this entire article needs to be changed to remove what I wrote. --RJR3333 (talk) 05:43, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

What do you mean "no age of consent below 18 exists"? That is not a misconception. Age of consent is set below age 18 all the time. The Age of consent and Ages of consent in North America articles are examples of this. Flyer22 (talk) 06:26, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Malke_2010#Age_of_Consent_Chris_Hansen Then why won't this editor allow me to edit based on a claim that that's not true? Clearly Malke is correct. --RJR3333 (talk) 06:31, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

I have no problem with the topic of this page at all, but I do object to the very serious inaccuracies. The "Close-in-age exemptions" section implies that the "Romeo and Juliet laws" have specific things in common, i.e. that they "provide that a teenager can legally have consensual sex with a 14 or 15 year-old provided that he or she is not more than a given number of years older".

In the next paragraph, it is pointed out that Florida passed a "Romeo and Juliet law" in 2007. However, the provision passed in 2007 only allows for convicted persons to petition the court to be removed from the sexual offenders list if the victim was close in age. By some definitions, this is a Romeo and Juliet law, but it's not what they've just described as a Romeo and Juliet law.

It's true that the citation to the "laws.com" website supports some of these claims. Whether laws.com is otherwise a reliable source of legal information or not, it's clearly not trustworthy in this case.

Unless somebody is willing to clean up this and remove these blatant inaccuracies, I would vote to remove this page. Fabrickator (talk) 03:36, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

You are correct, and thanks for pointing that out. The problem is, Florida's law is called by the state and others the "Florida Romeo and Juliet Law" (I don't think that that's its actual name, but that's what it's called). But it doesn't decriminalize these encounters, only allows the the convicted person to not also be subject to listing on the sex offender registry (maybe). I could have changed the article to point this out, but since this is such weak tea I just removed Florida from the list. (Interestingly, it appears the de facto age of consent in Florida is 18 UNLESS the other person is 23 or younger, if I'm reading this correctly.) If there are any other specific errors, feel free to fix them or point them out. Herostratus (talk) 05:05, 12 November 2011 (UTC)