Session 8: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Age and Sexual Consent
1st Global Conference
Monday 4th May 2009 – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Sexualities—Consentualities: Cross-Cultural Aspects
Diederik F. Janssen
Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Schmidt (2007) signals the emergence of age as a category of analysis in sociolegal studies, and argues that studies of age and the law could benefit from cross-cultural and transnational approaches. Matthew Waites also notes paucity of “global comparative data on age of consent laws” (2005:44) as well as, paradoxically, a sustained globalization of their logic. Agrees Richard Phillips, examining age of consent legislation in colonial Australia: “A comparative historical geography not only of legislation on ages of consent, but also of the meaning of such legislation, which has yet to be written, would do much to illuminate the international and imperial dynamics of moral regulation” (2002:357). Indeed, comparative (Helmut Graupner) and historical (Vern Bullough) work on “consent” has been limited to primarily occidental law texts; Graupner’s lastest survey (2004) provides data on only fifteen countries outside North America, Australia and Europe, and offers little information on colonial influences. Ethnographic research, meanwhile, is near-absent; studies focusing on teens’ discourses of consent are sparse and limited to the geographic West. Here, researchers find “inconsistency, contradiction, resistance and the movement between a range of discourses and values regimes” (Thompson, 2004:145-6; 2000).
Sexual consent is entitled to a genealogical (Foucault) project, exploring its premodern and modern permutations. However, the problem requires a wider, historical-anthropological appreciation of ethnotheoretical nuances in concepts of identity as “sexual” and “developing”, behavior as “intimate”, reproductive versus “sexual” “health”, choice as “informed” and anchored by cognitive autonomy, and “discourses of readiness” (Ashcraft, 2006). What are the cultural paradigms in reckoning with these interlocking ideas, their logic, authority and timing? My contribution explores some of these “local” questions as they complicate contemporary “global” sociologies, “Western” histories, and transnational comparisons that focus primarily on jurisprudence and legal texts.
A Multi-Perspective Examination of Assumptions concerning Age-Discrepant Sexuality
Bruce Rind
Philadelphia, USA
Sexual relations between adults and minors, and even between two minors of different ages, have been problematized in late modernity as never before in history. The consequences have been ever-increasing state vigilance to intercede along with increasingly harsh punishments for the older partners, especially in Anglophone countries. In the U.S., adult partners are routinely sentenced to decades in prison, with many others getting life sentences, for nonviolent sexual interactions that, 30 years ago, would often have resulted in little more than probation. Older partners in such interactions, even when minors themselves, are routinely put on registries for life, which make re-integration in society (e.g., housing, employment) extremely difficult and expose them to various forms of retribution from a public that has been primed to loathe sex offenders above all other offender-types. As in other areas, America’s influence on this issue has been spreading, such that its assumptions and solutions may tend towards normative elsewhere, especially in Western countries. The basic assumptions associated with late modernity’s hyper-concerns about age-discrepant sex with minors are essentially that (a) such relations necessarily involve a power difference, (b) this power difference is inherently exploitative, (c) younger partners are incapable of “informed consent,” (d) these relations are intrinsically developmentally abnormal (i.e., “inappropriate”), and in consequence (e) such relations are by nature psychologically injurious. The current presentation critically examines these assumptions by briefly drawing upon empirical, historical, cross-cultural, and cross-species perspectives.
This analysis deconstructs prevailing assumptions as cultural inventions tied to political discourses, especially feminist and victimological. By contrast, the multi-perspective approach shows that “nature” outside of late modernity is not validly described by these discourses and offers contradictions sufficient in degree to sharply question the prevailing assumptions and, consequently, to challenge the associated systems of hyper-vigilance that have grown around them.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Sexual Consent and the Adolescent Male, or What Can We Learn from the Greeks?
Thomas K. Hubbard
Austin, USA
Historical study has usually been considered irrelevant to discussions of contemporary social and legal policy, particularly in the area of sexuality, where historical societies are assumed to be exploitive, sexist, undemocratic, and non-egalitarian. Few historical scholars would break down the wall of separation between past and present by proposing that earlier cultures might offer positive paradigms worthy of consideration by policy-makers today. However, I wish to propose doing just that by examining an advanced historical culture from which we have abundant material and textual remains illuminating the nature and consequences of adolescent male sexual activity and by testing against that evidence the validity of assumptions (a)-(e) listed by Rind above. Although Athens of the Classical period was arguably not a model society in its treatment of women and slaves, it was democratic and egalitarian in its treatment of male citizens, including adolescent males on the road to becoming full citizens.
Evidence demonstrates that the Athenians assumed sexual desire to be natural and normative for adolescent males, that male adolescents were capable of either consenting to or refusing sexual advances by adults with impunity, and that the younger partner in an age-discrepant relationship was considered to be the more powerful party, because of his superior ability to attract other partners either of his own age or older. On the other hand, social pressures did motivate adolescents to choose their partners carefully; promiscuity or behavior that might be viewed as prostitution could result in negative consequences to one’s later reputation and legal standing. Along with freedom came responsibility. Classical Athens seems to have discovered a way to channel and control adolescent male sexuality without repressing it.
In the final section of my paper, I will consider the demographic and educational factors which are alleged to differentiate modern Western society from that of the Greeks, and demonstrate that none of them impinge on the question of “developmental appropriateness” or the capacity for “informed consent.” If anything, adolescents today are even better informed about sexuality and more independent in other aspects of their life. Accordingly, restrictive legal regimes, such as those in the US, that deny freedom of sexual choice to male adolescents past the age of puberty should be questioned. None of my conclusions, however, necessarily apply to the very different issue of adolescent female sexual activity, which has been shown by numerous studies to be more often coercive in nature and to entail more serious risk-factors.
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