Can there be “consensual sex” between 15-year-olds?
Now we have learned – from the ever-helpful WaPo – that the 15-year-old girl raped by the “boy in a skirt” in Virginia had previously had some sort of consensual sex with him on two occasions.
There are many huge issues connected with this story: the school board’s coverup, the use by the Biden administration of the father’s resultant rage to spark labeling upset parents as domestic terrorists, and the biased way the MSM has handled the story (including the disclosure of the previous “consensual sex,” which seems to blame the girl), to name just a few. But in this post I’m going to take up a separate issue than the rape, which is the more general one of “consensual sex” between 15-year-olds.
What is sexual “consent” for 15-year-olds? They are considered to be under the age of consent, and if that distinction is to mean anything – and I think it should – then neither is capable of consent in the legal sense. Nor were these two previous “consensual” acts statutory rape, because neither of the two had reached the age where that law would be applicable.
These days, however, “consensual” sexual activity at that age is not at all unusual. Even when I was in school some underage children were sexually active, but it’s very much more common nowadays. There are almost certainly many reasons why today’s children are so sexualized, but the upshot is that sex is almost expected of them in terms of peer and cultural pressures.
I’ve written about this before. An excerpt:
Feminists, of course, are actually at least partly responsible for the problem, telling girls it’s liberating to sleep around, which helps lead to the skewing of teenage sexual behavior more to the adolescent male ideal—with a vast vast assist from the internet.
It’s a mess, and the hookup culture among teens that I wrote about here is arriving at earlier and earlier ages, and fueled by the visual stimuli of easily-available porn on computers. Individual teens can resist it if they are very strong, but the pull and pressures to give in to it (whatever a girl or a boy might secretly wish to do or not do) is incredibly powerful. It’s one thing to know that holding off from easy sex at a very young age will protect you and help you in the end. It’s another to actually have the strength to do so.
This has been going on for many years, and oral sex in particular is now commonly expected and normed for this age group. Often “consensual” doesn’t mean what one might think it means, either, because even if there is no overt rape the sex can be exploitative and norm-pressured. This affects both sexes, and although sometimes there is obvious psychological pressure from one or the other in the pair, sometimes it’s just the pressure that comes from the atmosphere and peer expectations surrounding both.
Of course, there was plenty of sexual pressure in my day. But certainly not as much, and it was far more interpersonal rather than all around us in the culture. For example, a lot of girls were pressured into their first sexual experience by the tried and true “if you loved me you would do it” or “you must be frigid if you don’t want to” or “I’ll break up with you if you don’t.” In addition, by the age of fifteen, boys and girls both have sexual urges, and that’s always operating. But in the olden days society at least frowned on such sexual encounters very overtly, and there were rules about what could be seen on TV or in the movies or in music (the internet didn’t exist). That’s no longer the case, and we are seeing the results in the early sexualization of our children.
[NOTE: In this post I didn’t write about the role of the schools in encouraging sex, but they have a role, too. We hear about books in school libraries containing pornography, for example. Astounding.]
Feminists and Feminism really really improved everything…
So is the WAPO defending rape in this case?
Or only because the victim has a “Deplorable” father?
And/or because the perpetrator is a self-declared transgender individual?
And/or to defend Obama’s twisted contention that it’s all Republican electoral theater? All Republican “pouncing”?
Since, presumably, if the two kids DID have (or are ALLEGED to have had) consensual sex prior to the rape, then the perpetrator is justified in expecting further encounters?
And if he is refused, then he is justified in feeling deeply disappointment/let down/rejection?
And because of his deep disappointment and feelings of being rejected—because of his unfathomable HURT (he’s a very sensitive kid, after all)—it is PERFECTLY UNDERSTANDABLE, that in his emotional state he would act the way he did; that in his emotional state and because of his expectations, he would take what he felt—what HE WAS LED TO BELIEVE—was his?
Thus is the rapist transformed into a victim.
Thus is the victim transformed into the cause of her own rape.
Way to go WAPO.
(Of course, one expects nothing less from this deeply compromised, morally bankrupt rag.)
Many of the girls are on birth control so the outcome of pregnancy that prevented many of your peers from engaging is less likely. Additionally we are much less religious than we used to be so that is missing as well. Also oral was much less acceptable to the majority of people.
It’s hard to keep up with the MSM/institutional approach to sex. We had the whole “me too” dust-up not so long ago that for the most part involved women, not girls. The Kavanaugh accuser working from historical memory which we were suppose to weigh-in on with opprobrium. And now this, an actual occurrence in real time regarding 15 year-olds and it’s nothing to see over here.
“Also oral was much less acceptable to the majority of people.” from my understanding is was anal followed by oral
Related:
“Interesting” exchange between Hawley and Garland regarding the latest outrage against parents:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jILwhennws
Dante: Wait, but you said you only had sex with three different guys! You never mentioned him.
Veronica: Because I never had sex with him.
Dante: You sucked his dick!
Veronica: We went out a few times. We never had sex, but we fooled around.
–“Number 37!”, “Clerks” (1994)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OQl89ewXvc
_______________________________________
That was 1994.
I found “Clerks” a very funny film back then. I recommended it to my sister without going into details. She suggested it to some church friends at the video store and they all watched together.
Not quite what they expected.
“It’s hard to keep up with the MSM/institutional approach to sex”
SharonW, it really isn’t. It all comes down to what the MSM believes benefits the left overall, and the Democrat Party in particular. Rape will be ignored, rationalized and explained away if doing so helps elect Democrats and further establishes leftist hegemony.
In this instance, the girl and her ‘deplorable’ father are ripe for smearing, the rape is perfectly fine to gloss over, if doing so helps put McAuliffe back in the governor’s mansion.
Previous consensual sex was never a consideration for the kangaroo courts set up in many colleges after the Obama Admin “Dear Colleague” letter.
And those young ladies were of age.
Shorter WaPo: She was asking for it with him in that short skirt.
Any consent given for a previous sexual act is legally and morally irrelevant. Having engaged in sexual activity previously does not grant grant the other person permanent assent to all future sexual acts. The media knows this, but they don’t care about victim-blaming when their political needs require it.
On the subject of children engaging in sex at earlier and earlier ages, I read a report on our neighborhood newsline from a woman who reported that she and her young daughter had stumbled upon two middle-school age kids undressed and under a blanket in the playground of an elementary school two blocks from my home. I’m not sure what she thought her neighbors should be doing about it, but it’s a serious problem.
In our great-grandparents’ time 15 was old enough to start a family, and it was common for women that age to be mothers.
Teenagers have sat on thrones and led armies in the field. When Edward III said “let the boy win his spurs”, the Black Prince was all of 16–he was commanding the van (800 men-at-arms and 2000 archers), and surrounded by the French, and his father thought it best to send no help.
My grandfather was doing a man’s work, and my grandmother had her first child, by that age.
Part of our problem is we pretend that teenagers are children and then get surprised and indignant when they act in adult ways, such as committing crimes, knocking each other up, etc. We infantilize them and demand maturity.
And wouldn’t you know it.
George Soros(!) is terribly upset(!!) by media “disinformation” and is founding and funding (with a wealthy pal of his) an organization to “combat” this simply terrible, awful, miserable “disinformation” in order to…
…”RESTORE SOCIAL TRUST”!
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/billionaires-fund-anti-disinformation-media-companies-restore-social-trust
(And no doubt to promote UNITY!!)
We certainly know where this is going…
Oh, the name of this august org.? “Good Information Inc.” (of course….)
– – – – – – –
This might just be the time to repost this extraordinary piece by Greenwald, which deals with (among many other things) the subject of deception and the media:
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/pierre-omidyars-financing-of-the
What brought the sexualization of teenagers home to me happened about four years ago. I was walking along a side trail in the small park two blocks from my home. The trail is a footpath that winds along about halfway up a low slope; it is hidden from the paved road at the base of the slope by vegetation. I walked around a bend in the path that day and saw two teenagers– no more than 13, or 14 at most– making the beast with two backs, as Shakespeare put it. It was a chilly afternoon in mid-October, but the kids were not only not covered by a blanket, they had nothing between them and the ground except the boy’s jacket. They were too focused on what they were doing to notice that they had an accidental witness about 20 feet away– so I was able to turn back on the trail without being seen. In retrospect, I wonder whether they would have confronted me if they had seen me; the boy in particular was definitely tough-looking.
A 15 year old is not an adult and so can not make an fully informed decision about such a thing as having sexual intercourse with someone else. The understanding is that they are not yet able to weigh the pros and cons, to assess the potential consequences, and, most importantly, take full responsibility for the downside consequence of a pregnancy.
Is it consensual?
Well it depends.
If it promotes the agenda of the left / progressive, then by all means it’s consensual and just fine. Nothing to see here folks.
If it does not promote the leftist agenda, then clearly, it’s a no -no.
Or even worse, far, far worse, if it promotes the agenda of conservatives (I know, this is a real long stretch), than the supporters of the “consensus” view point, must be executed and the youths involved must be removed from their homes and sent off to re-education camps.
See how easy that was.
I just don’t understand why everybody does not understand this.
Frederick:
Fifteen years old is still “old enough to start a family” if you consider a single mother who keeps her child a family. Some couples even start at that age.
And that phenomenon is more common than it was when I was a teenager.
Neither thing means that such teenagers are ordinarily economically or emotionally ready or prepared for the experience.
What’s more, it certainly was not “common for women that age [15] to be mothers” in the US in “our great-grandparents’ time.” See this, for example, as well as this. This was true even when child labor was common; it didn’t necessarily follow that such people were considered fully adult.
You may have had ancestors who lived in a community or communities that had a trend for earlier marriages and childbirths, but it was not the norm even back then.
gmmay 70:
Touché.
I’m going to leave all consideration of the legalities of consent aside for just a second…there’s an issue that has completely turned my stomach here…
At what juncture in human history is “sex in the public toilet” considered acceptable? Who taught either of these young folks that “the girls’ toilet” was the perfect trysting place?
Of all the places humans have copulated…the damn public toilet has to be an offence to every sentient adult?
Nobody walks away from this one unsullied. No…that does not excuse his violent criminal behaviour…but damn! The public toilet?!?!? Yes…I’m almost old & try to maintain some semblance of decency in my small sphere of influence.
PA+Cat:
Of course he looked tough. Do you think she’d bang a wimp? It’s only when she’s about age 30 that Bob from Accounting starts to look like a good catch to her… (for about 7 years max anyway;P)
Details of this case aside…
Short of re-instituting a new old dispensation, I’d probably go with 15 as a hard lower limit… and below 18 prosecute anyone more than 12 months older than the other partner, regardless of whether they’re M or F. Informed Consent is just a convenient club with which to smack males around in this sick society. Better to just have some strict arbitrary rule and stop pretending we’re enlightened Solomons until we can be a Serious People again. Don’t hold yer breath on that.
As for rape, in the he said / she said cases need some kind of Sharia approach. Women in general simply do not have the same concept of truth and responsibility as males and happily lie through their teeth and watch men destroyed for life and marked out as sex offenders without a shred of remorse.
O Boomers.. If you spend any time around where teenagers gather, the air is going to be polluted with non-stop hip hop lyrics. Listen for 5 minutes with both ears to this bestial crap. Then ask yourself whence it comes and who profits by it. So of course Toilet Tranny banged her in the ass.. Probably to the appropriate soundtrack.
Search for almost ANYTHING at all with safe search off and you gonna get porno links. Bound to have an affect on attitudes, whether young or older.
Weimerica:
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-investigation-kentucky-high-school-hosts-drag-pageant?utm_campaign=64470
You’re going to have to start selectively removing individuals from the gene pool.
There’s no other way.
@Neo: Read both your links, and they support my characterization. If the average and the median ages were as young as it says in your links, then at least* 50% of people were under it, hence my characterization as “common”. “Common” doesn’t imply the norm or the most likely.
Women born in 1910 and 1935 started their childbearing at the youngest ages with an “average” or median age at first birth of 21 years…
In 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau started collecting marriage data, and the average age of marriage for women was 22 years.
early colonists married at an average age of around 20 if they were women,
Check the distribution curves here: even in 1960 15% of first births were aged 15 – 17. In 1960 it was hardly rare.
*Half the women must have been under the median age by definition. But more than half would have been under the average, for simple fact that you can start marrying at 60 if you want but you can’t start at -20, so if the average is around 20 than there must have been more people under it to make up for those who married much later: 1 woman who marries at 30 has to be balanced by 5 marrying at 18 to get an average of 20.
But wait, there’s more!
https://www.wnd.com/2021/10/watch-library-book-graphic-school-board-tosses-man-reading/
“…now a video has captured the move by the school board in Orange County, Florida, to have police remove a man who was reading – from one of the school’s library books…
He said during the Tuesday meeting, “this GP journalist used his allotted time to alert OCPS board members of the situation by reading some of the more graphic passages from Gender Queer…
That’s a product he described as a “graphic novel” that features drawings of “in lurid detail the sexual interactions between two young men…”
Remember ‘No means No.’
I think we often forget that, historically, a woman/girl was married and probably pregnant by 15. Not suggesting that is desirable, but the impulses are certainly there, by nature.
Another element of this: It’s not commonly known these days, but Romeo is 13-14, and Juliet is 12-13… but at the start of the play, the parents are speaking of her verging on “old maid”. Despite that, at this age, Romeo and his cohorts — basically a gang of teenaged punks exactly like the Jets and the Sharks in WSS. Yet despite this, they are, in fact, out fighting and carousing and raising hell with swords and having swordfights, just like adults. When you wonder where teen angst and resentment comes from… realize, we’ve infantilized teenagers, instead of treating them like the proto-adults, or “adults in training” which they actually are. They may not understand WHY this makes them angry, but they are wired to be more responsible than they are allowed to be (no, many kids, esp. today, aren’t ready, which is why you gradually give them responsibility and guidance about how to act… then give them more if they are learning to handle it, or less if they behave irresponsibly.)
BTW, if you ever thought that their reactions to a short separation were absurdly over the top (Note: It did to ME when I was **12** and read the thing)… perhaps it might make more sense knowing their ages were barely past true childhood… When you’re that young, everything undesired is still a calamity, and any time is an eternity.
The main objection to sex at that age (hence the notion of Statutory rape) is that you are easily manipulated by a more experienced partner, and thus cannot necessarily express consent, so, while I agree with the general notion of no consensual sex between 18yo & 15yo (there CAN be exceptions, mind you, but needs lots of close examination), yes, I have no issue with consensual sex @ 15 with other sub-18yos.
I mean, the real question, if not, is, “who raped who?”
MY first time was @ 14, with another 14yo, and trust me, she seduced me, not the other way around. And I was not her first.
THAT SAID, and even if you disagree with THAT aspect of things, what the hell happened to “NO MEANS NO!” all of a sudden? Seriously? The fact that she consented to sex in the past means she’s now obligated to put out if he wants it?
I’m sure battered wives everywhere will be happy to know this… (>_<)
This is just beyond ridiculously hypocritical of those dickhead fuckwads, and, sorry, those words posdef applies to anyone trying to demonize her, here.
}}} What’s more, it certainly was not “common for women that age [15] to be mothers” in the US in “our great-grandparents’ time.” See this, for example, as well as this. This was true even when child labor was common; it didn’t necessarily follow that such people were considered fully adult.
You may have had ancestors who lived in a community or communities that had a trend for earlier marriages and childbirths, but it was not the norm even back then.
Neo, I have to question and challenge your sources’ validity. The one is census data, yes, but it does not cover the pioneer days at all. And the other notes that census data did not track until after 1890, when we were already becoming much more “civilized” and “modern”… then makes a bunch of unsupported claims that it makes no effort to provide any reliable notion of how they justify them. Sounds like possible — possible — axe-to-grind territory.
And again, we are not talking even just the history of this nation, but the longer-term behavior of mankind, going back thousands and thousands of years. And when your lifespan is only 25-35 years, you need that extra 5-odd years to have a couple extra kids so at least 2 survive to reproduce… and 2 out of 5-7 is not particularly odd numbers for pre-industrial, pre-medical, pre-sanitary days. Kids died of COLDS, FFS.
And there are, or were until about 30-40y ago, plenty of laws in various locales that set the marriage age as low as 13. I assert that those laws would not exist if there were not a substantial percentage of people making use of them.
This is a very awkward issue. Amongst my relatives’ kids, I have seen 15 year-olds that were (in my opinion) emotionally mature enough to be responsible with sex. I have also seen 21 year-olds who were not. I would not be so bold as to pass judgment without knowing the facts and details better, and neither should the WaPo.
“Age of Consent” is a legal term. It’s a one-size-fits-all solution that is not very satisfactory. Mostly, we have to rely on the judgments of prosecutors in these cases and they can produce gross injustices just as easily as the reverse.
This is also why I disagree with mandatory sentencing laws. They often tie the hands of prosecuters and judges.
@OBloodyHell:Neo, I have to question and challenge your sources’ validity.
The sources are valid, but they don’t say that teen births were uncommon either. The sources do not give a distribution by age, they just give average and median ages. The median first birth age in 1910 was 21 according to Neo’s first source, and that means 50% of women were younger than 21, and a non-trivial fraction would be 15.
I cited a source
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-guzzo-distribution-age-first-birth-fp-20-11.html
showing that in 1960 15% of first births were to women aged 15-17, and in those days the median was 23, only 2 years older, so it seems highly likely that 15-17 first births in 1910 were more than 15% and so I guess it comes down to what do you mean by “common”, but if you take a classroom size group of 30 random women 4-5 would have been mothers at 15-17 in 1960. Hardly rare, anyway.
@OldTexan:
“Remember ‘No means No.’”
Check your Chromosomal Privilege, Sir.
Except when she means Yes. Which can also mean No. Depending Feelz at any given time during or after the event….even unto many years after the event if you’re sufficiently famous and wealthy.
In most Western jurisdictions she can perjure herself into a pretzel with near absolute impunity.
Four Witnesses sounds like a good start. Although given modern propensity to video everything and post it on Tiktok, maybe can moderate this…. Must go check the Sunnah.
Emotional maturity is a function of two items; the maturing, the physical maturing of the brain. And experience to that age, whatever it is.
To the extent that kids are protected from the negatives of dumb decisions, they don’t just fail to learn that particular lesson, they fail to learn how to make good decisions.
It is said that the Skara Brae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skara_Brae tombs show that the least common age group is mid to late teens to maybe the late twenties. IOW,that was the age group doing the work. Things were fat enough that this limited cohort could not only build elaborate stone dwellings, but laboriously build elaborate tombs. That means they were able to spare time and energy which means they were exploiting their environment and technology with skill and good luck.
Winter nights are long in those latitudes and I suspect sitting around a fire indoors for eighteen hours a day would do your lungs a mischief. Worse than two packs a day. Got to catch up pretty quickly.
Point is, the “kids” could keep things going. Didn’t need the old folks. Did their synapses get wired up earlier than today? I figure instead that the lives they lived up from toddlerhood matured them to a point helicopter and snowplow parents cannot conceive. And so they were ready.
Wasn’t much fun, I accept. But the evidence is that they were ready.
That said, a calendar date today may reflect today’s reality. References to other times are not necessarily relevant unless we want to raise kids in a kind of Neolithic boot camp.
FWIW, the age of consent in Europe is mostly 14-16.
@Richard Aubrey:unless we want to raise kids in a kind of Neolithic boot camp.
I humbly suggest we could explore the vast middle ground between Neolithic boot camp and adolescence that extends well into the late twenties.
There isn’t anything biologically different about kids today vs kids two hundred years ago: what’s different was expectations and responsibilities.
OBloodyHell; Frederick:
And some new mothers are under 15 today (see this). They face unique physical risks at that age and often miscarry. Most of them who do bear the child are single mothers who live with their own parents and try to raise their babies under the parental roof rather than being married and going off in an emancipated way as a couple.
I doubt very much that in the 1800s there were a lot of births in the US at or under 15, because that would be too much of a standard deviation from the mean. What’s more, you have offered no evidence that 15 was a not-uncommon age for birth back then, and I’ve never seen any. A range of 15-17 is meaningless because it’s almost certainly skewed towards a far higher distribution in the older ages in the range.
I have done a lot of genealogical research and I have never encountered births that young even back in the 1800s, not here and not in Europe. Of course they occurred, but not at all often even then.
Again, I have no doubt there were such births, but I see no indication they were anything more than a tiny proportion of births (and some were the result of the rape of young teenagers by older men, and still are). If the births were illegitimate at that age, the child was probably raised by relatives or friends, and any record of the real parentage may have been lost.
And no, we weren’t talking about the history of mankind in general. I was responding to Frederick who specifically made a reference to great-grandparents’ time.
Child marriages have occurred in other cultures (often children married to grown men, I might add). But we are not a tribal culture in which children grow up really fast, have kids early, and often die young. Nor are we a culture that institutes child marriage – fortunately – although such cultures exist (and certainly used to exist more often).
And those laws about the lowest possible age for marriage do not indicate that there were many such marriages at ages like 13; they indicate that there were some. There still are some (fortunately very few).
Take a good look at this map which gives you the current minimum age for marriage in each state. You will note several things. The first is that in some states the age of marriage with and without parental consent is the same, although for most it’s different with the parental consent age being significantly younger. But despite these ages, there is no age in which it is common to have marriages that young – and yet these minimums exist. A good example is Massachusetts, a state not known for very young marriages. The minimum age without parents consent there is 18, a very typical age. But with parental consent it’s 12 for girls. You read that right – 12. Do you think there are many marriages of kids that age in Massachusetts? I’m not even sure there is ONE. And yet that’s the law. Meanwhile, in contrast, in Louisiana – a state one might think would have a fairly low minimum – the age for parental consent and for no parental consent is set the same at 18 for both. That’s high.
There’s no seeming rhyme or reason that matches up with the actual ages at which people generally get married in these states.
In general…
I believe that our attempts to extend childhood for our children as long as possible is a good thing. It gives them more time to explore the limits of their creativity and imagination prior to putting on the yoke of adult responsibility.
However, once the kids’ brains and bodies decide that “it’s time”, short of locking them up, there is no way to prevent it. Life happens… Our own maturity as adults determines how well we deal with that fact. My brother-in-law believes to this day that his daughters were virgins on their wedding day… in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary. We don’t try to contradict him.
How do these people expect anyone to take them seriously? For Kavanaugh, they wanted to apply the “might conceivably have happened” standard. Anyone who disagreed was the moral equivalent of a rapist. Then we learned, as most of us already knew, that standard only applies to Republicans. Now you have major press outlets publicizing the history of an adjudged rape victim to minimize the damage to the leftist narrative.
So again, why should anyone take these people seriously the next time they troll up someone willing to accuse a Republican of something?
Also, what do they actually stand for? I get Me Too. I can respect and even stand with the goals of Me Too, if not all the tactics. Now, though, Me Too is sold down the river. Obviously they want power, but to what end?
Age of puberty has decreased quite a bit over the past few hundred years.
“Now, though, Me Too is sold down the river.”
“Now”?
(Apparently, Tara Reade was unavailable for comment…)
As John Tyler said (above), the “spin” on the “story” all depends on who stands to gain and who stands to lose. A free press, indeed—free from any pretense of any smidgeon of objectivity. Or decency. Or truth.
And since the Democratic Party has the media in the palm of its hand, well then, it’s The Narrative(TM) uber alles…
(Meanwhile, Republicans keep on “pouncing”…to try to save the Republic…)
Age of puberty has decreased quite a bit over the past few hundred years.
Which is another reason why the whole transgender mania is so harmful– giving puberty blockers to children as young as 10 is playing with fire. If 15-year-olds can’t have “consensual sex,” why should 10-year-olds be considered mature enough to make a decision that will leave them permanently sterile even if they later decide to detransition?
As long as we’re on the topic of child abuse…
“FDA Committee Member Admits He Doesn’t Know If The Vaccine Is Safe For Kids But Approves It Anyway”
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2021/10/28/fda-committee-member-admits-he-doesnt-know-if-the-vaccine-is-safe-for-kids-but-approves-it-anyway/
And by the by…
“FDA Committee Members Reviewing Pfizer Vaccine For Children Have Worked For Pfizer, Have Big Pfizer Connections”
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fda-committee-members-reviewing-pfizer-vaccine-children-have-worked-pfizer-have-big-pfizer
@neo:because that would be too much of a standard deviation from the mean.
I don’t think you can possibly have looked at the link I sent you which shows the distribution curve. Any one reading can, of course, and easily see for themselves what the curve shows for 1960. Quite a large chunk of it extends below 15-17 so it’s not vanishingly rare, and it skews to the young side:
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/schweizer-guzzo-distribution-age-first-birth-fp-20-11.html
I have done a lot of genealogical research and I have never encountered births that young even back in the 1800s, not here and not in Europe.
I don’t doubt it but the source I cite uses a very large historical data set.
As for “too much of a standard deviation”, I’m having trouble parsing this. Any set of numbers can have its standard deviation calculated and it can be of just about any size relative to the mean. I think what you are trying to say, and maybe are a little out your comfort zone saying, is that 15 is too large compared to the standard deviation of the distribution, but a look at the graph I linked to belies this in a very obvious way.
If the distribution were a normal one (the classic bell curve), then about 10% is more than two standard deviations from the mean. I would say anything happening 10% of the time is not rare, and I base that on the likelihood of a small group of people having it happen within that group (most people could be counted on to know a few people it happened to).
And this is not a classic bell curve, it is skewed to younger births. 15 is maybe 1 or 1.4 st dev out from that mean.
Bauxite —
Obviously they want power, but to what end?
“The object of power is power.” — 1984
Considering that through American history up into the twentieth century, marriage and child-raising was commonly done at or before the age of 15, this is nothing to get outraged about. The idea if infantilizing youth until far into their 20s is from the socially ‘advanced’ cohort who’ve never faced the common activities and experiences of farm-raised kids.
I was writing about a topic related to this (prompted by the porn-y school writing assignment discovered by parents, and publicly brought to the attention of the school board). http://www.libertystorch.info/2021/10/28/the-difference-between-public-and-private-actions/
Rape (vaginal/front hole) and sodomy (anal/back hole… black hole… black whore or oral/top hole), or just sodomy?
Longevity, unPlanned parent/hood, and social progress raised the age of consent.
NOW, Planned parent/hood, and social progress have lowered the age of consent.
What came first, transgender/homosexuals, feminists/masculinists, or other queers and fetishists?
Can they abort the baby… “burden”, cannibalize her profitable parts, sequester her carbon pollutants, and have her, too?
Bryan,
I was going to say exactly the same, but didn’t have the quote.
In any case, you and George Orwell are exactly right.
The vast majority of people see power pragmatically as a means to achieve other goals. We understand that power implies responsibility and don’t seek any power greater than that required to meet those goals.
Unfortunately, there are damaged and evil people who seek power for its own sake. They actively seek to dominate other people… for pleasure. It’s related to malignant narcissism and sociopathy.
Insufficiently Sensitive:
No, it was not “commonly done” – and we’ve had a long discussion here in the comments about that issue.
Frederick:
Perhaps it depends on what “common” means. There are still quite a few births in that age group – but not “common.” And most of them – as was true earlier in the history of the US – are not the result of ordinary “consensual” relationships but are the result of rape and other types of exploitation of young teenage girls by older men.
@neo:Perhaps it depends on what “common” means.
Well, reasonable people can disagree about where to draw that line. And I think reasonable people would also recognize that arguing about the adjective that describes the data is kind of pointless once we’ve recognized that we are indeed looking at the same data. I think you’re reasonable and I like to think I am, and since we know we’re looking at the same thing, I won’t argue with you about the adjective anymore.
As for whether the births are mostly as you say “the result of rape and other types of exploitation” I think the 1960 data is consistent with that, as the age of first marriage distribution (linked below) shows that first marriage below the age of 18 in 1960 was much, much less common than first birth below the age of 18. I’m not in the camp that says marriage before 1960 was exploitation, and not every unmarried teenager who gives birth is exploited, but I think for the 1960 data your description is the way to bet based on the difference in the curves describing age at first marriage and age at first birth:
https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/hemez-distribution-age-first-marriage-fp-20-09.html
For 1910, or 1860, I am much less certain about that. I’m not finding a source that shows distributions, I’m only seeing medians and averages, and without knowing the standard deviation as well you can’t determine much. So I don’t have any way to show that birth at age 15 is closer to marriage at age 15 in times before 1960, or the reverse. I’m sure the raw census data is somewhere but I don’t have the kind of time to make a big project out of that… but if I have that kind of interest to keep looking for it and you have that kind of interest I will be happy to share anything I find.
When I was a medical student on OB at the County Hospital in Los Angeles, I delivered a number of “multips” (second child or more) who were 14. Most were Hispanic children of illegals. It was not that rare in a subpopulation at the time, 1966.
In 1972, new in practice as a surgeon, I was called to evaluate a 12 year old girl for appendicitis. When I reported my findings to the GP, I explained I had done a rectal exam, not vaginal as she was only 12. He assured me that she had had one abortion already.
Considering that through American history up into the twentieth century, marriage and child-raising was commonly done at or before the age of 15,
See Angus Maddison on this point. Not characteristic of occidental societies at all, and a feature differentiating the occidental world from the Islamic world and from India.
I’m recalling some data I saw compiled by a social historian of records in colonial Massachusetts. Median age of brides was around 20 and grooms around 28.
FWIW, I can look at my own great-great grandmothers, women born between 1824 and 1860. Married at 22, 25, 22, 18, 22, 20, 22, 18.
so it seems highly likely that 15-17 first births in 1910 were more than 15%
Not true. The 20th c nadir of age at 1st marriage was reached around 1955.
Agree with Neo and Art Deco re historical marriage ages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern
Things were different in the East, and in a few other bits of Europe. Just let your common sense have its head and the rest kind of falls into place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
In our great-grandparents’ time 15 was old enough to start a family, and it was common for women that age to be mothers.
The median age of a working adult is 42 years. The great-grandparents of such a person would be people born on one side or the other of 1889. So, you’re positing it was ‘common’ for women in 1904 to marry at 15. Per ancestry.com, there were in the 1900 Census 13.7 million women recorded as ‘married’. The count of each estimated date of birth was as follows:
1886: 4,215
1885: 6,968
1884: 21,770
1883: 46,119
1882: 98,607
1881: 143,502
1880: 234,678
1879: 261,028
1878: 325,094
1877: 362,022
1876: 411,606
1875: 453,295
1874: 440,963
1873: 415,917
1872: 475,644
1871: 398,892
1870: 505,179
1869: 406,863
1868: 395,779
1867: 396,402
1866: 394,328
1865: 413,676
1864: 377,772
1863: 345,880
1862: 380,330
1861: 354,554
1860: 432,772
@art deco:Median age of brides was around 20 and grooms around 28.
Median age says nothing about standard deviation. 50% of brides would have been 20 or under and that’s all it tells you. It doesn’t tell you if 90% of that 50% was over 18 or over 15 or what have you.
Not true. The 20th c nadir of age at 1st marriage was reached around 1955.
“Age of 1st marriage” != “age at first birth”, and you clearly didn’t look at the graph I linked to for 1960, for which births at age 15-17 are cleared labeled with how frequent they are….
Per ancestry.com, there were in the 1900 Census 13.7 million women recorded as ‘married’.
Without the link I can’t check your source, but if the data is what you say it is, it is not the same data that I’m talking about and your source does not refute my point.
The 1900 data you posted is a snapshot of the ages of all women married in 1900. It is not data on how old they were when they first married. Every single one of these women could have been married at 15 and it would still be compatible with the data set you posted. For example, look at the 235,000 in the 1880 cohort who were 20 in 1900. In 1895, what percent of that 235,000 were married at the time? Your data does not say. It could have been none of them, all of them, or anything in between…
What your data is showing is that at one moment, 15 year old women were a small fraction of the married population, which is not at all responsive to what I said which was that at “15 was old enough to start a family, and it was common for women that age to be mothers.”
If we make a few simple assumptions we might be able to estimate age at first marriage from the set you posted. It’s a complicated math exercise though, so don’t wait up for me to post the answer… but I do like math and may find time for it soon.
Looked up a couple of militia laws. Usually, the eligible started at age eighteen, one at age seventeen. Kind of just on the upper edge of the age group we’re discussing in terms of decision making.
Saw one some time ago where it was all men from 14 to 43, need to show up with three days’ food, a blanket and a rifle. I think that was a state law, not a federal law.
I have to think the people who wrote that law saw a different fourteen year old guy than we do. Otherwise, they’d have thought it would be enormously counterproductive to have them in the ranks.
The 1900 data you posted is a snapshot of the ages of all women married in 1900. It is not data on how old they were when they first married.
You have 27 cohorts which have a mean of 300,000 married women. The cohort of 15 year olds has 7,000 married women in it. It’s not that difficult to figure out what the implications are.
Median age says nothing about standard deviation.
It doesn’t occur to you that the population to the right of the median occupies very few age cohorts. This is what you’re struggling to deny.
@Art Deco: This is what you’re struggling to deny.
It’s not necessary to impute motives. The data is what it is. It’s just not easy to find.
It’s not that difficult to figure out what the implications are.
No, not so hard as I expected, but you have to use math and not words. I used your data set (for which I thank you) and made a couple of simplifying assumptions:
1: The snapshot would have looked the same in 1899 – 1895. (Probably close enough.)
2: None of the women aged 14 – 20 in that time period divorced or died. (Again, probably close enough.)
According to US Census for 1900, median age at first marriage was 20, so the women who first marry between 14 and 20 represent 50%, so we can use that to help simplify by looking at just 14-20.
So looking at your 1885 cohort and applying the assumptions, of that 6,968 women:
4,215 had married at 14
2,753 had married at 15
6,968 total
For the 1884 cohort:
4,215 had married at 14
2,753 had married at 15
14,802 had married at 16
21,770 total
Carrying forward, you find that for the women in 1900 aged 20 and under:
29,505 were first married at 14 (5.3%)
16,518 were first married at 15 (3.0%)
74,010 were first married at 16 (13.3%)
97,396 were first married at 17 (17.5%)
157,464 were first married at 18 (28.3%)
89,790 were first married at 18 (16.2%)
91,176 were first married at 20 (16.4%)
555,859 total
Since the 20-and-unders are 50%, you can cut these percentages in half, and if we review the bidding we see that in 1900:
About 2.7% were first married at 14
About 1.5% were first married at 15
About 6.7% were first married at 16
About 8.8% were first married at 17
About 14.2% were first married at 18
About 8.1% were first married at 19
About 8.2% were first married at 20
About 50% were first married older than 20
Ok, so was marriage at 15 “common”? Here we may be arguing about adjectives, but marriage at 15 and under was about 4% which is not the usual thing, obviously, but it’s not exactly rare in that most people in 1900 would known at least one person who had been married at 15 or younger.
Marriage at 16 and under was about as common as being left-handed. You might not describe left-handedness as “common” but it’s hardly rare.
And the mode of the distribution, the most likely age at which women first married, was 18 which is under the median age of 20, typical for a distribution that skews young. Almost 20% of married women had married under the age of 18. That’s getting near “common” and quite different from today.
Oh for crying out loud. This is perfectly straightforward.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf
Frederick:
Obviously, by your own figures, marriage at 15 was not at all “common” even back then.
Something can be relatively rare – and certainly “uncommon” – and yet many people can know at least one person who has that rare or uncommon thing.
Not only that, but even today there’s a small percentage of people of that age who get married – a smaller group than before, to be sure, but not only was this group small then and now, but the decline probably reflects the decline in demand by parents for shotgun weddings for young pregnant teens.
You were trying to make some point about such marriages having been “common” in the past but not now, and you have certainly failed to prove anything of the sort.
And no, we’re not talking about marriage at 18. That used to be noticeably more common, as I recall – even in MY youth. But that’s a different thing, particularly in terms of the issue of consent, which is what began the entire discussion. Eighteen-year-olds can give consent.
@Neo:You were trying to make some point about such marriages having been “common” in the past but not now, and you have certainly failed to prove anything of the sort.
Like I said, won’t argue about the adjectives, since it’s more important we all agree that the number in 1900 was something like 5% and 20% for those under 18. And I did rather more work to establish those percentages than anyone disputing my characterization did, and I do think I’ve showed it was not as rare as you thought, though less common than I thought.
Eighteen-year-olds can give consent.
In 1900 in many states so could 14 year olds. In Canada 16 year olds can today, it was 14 in 2008…
@Art Deco: Thanks for the Census median age at first marriage link but I’d already found that and quoted it to you. As well as showing you from the figures you provided that of that 50% under 20, about 8% of them were 15 or under. There are many ways to get to a median age of 20 and we need more than one descriptor to understand the distribution. Which now we all do.
Frederick:
You miss the point about the 18-year-olds.
Of course in some and even many places the age of sexual consent can be and is lower. The point is that virtually everywhere, now as well as then, 18-year-olds have reached the age of consent. So 18-year-olds were never the issue and how many of them were married then vs. now is irrelevant to the question of how commonly marriage and childbirth occurred in 15-year-olds during the 18th and 19th centuries in this country. It is well known that marriage generally takes place later now.
Plus, I have no trouble with the idea that marriages of 15-year-olds were more common in the 19th Century than they are now. In fact, I assume it. But I have seen nothing that indicates they were common.
@neo:You miss the point about the 18-year-olds.
Or maybe we just got in the weeds and lost sight of where we were. Sorry for contributing to that. And I confess I found it was not as common as I had thought, somewhere between “lefthandedness” and “gayness”. Do bear in mind that I am honestly trying to figure out what is true, and am willing to put in work to find it, and transparent about what I have found…
It is well known that marriage generally takes place later now.
Yes it is. And is that because we’re more right than our forebears about such things or is it because we unnecessarily infantilize teenagers? Let’s go back to can 15-year-olds consent? We all know that under our current laws the answer is legally “no” but that’s rather boring, it’s just definitions. The more interesting question is can they “really” give consent? That was the only reason I brought up marriage at 15. I gave other examples, like commanding armies in the field, where there was an expectation that in some circumstances 15-year-olds were expected to be “adults”. Marriage was until recently identified closely with adulthood; never-married, not-young adults were thought to be odd in some way and it was odder as they got older. (In literature the “spinster” or the “confirmed bachelor” always have some other eccentricity besides their unmarried state, or they have some deep trauma in their past, or something. They never just ARE, they have to be EXPLAINED.)
If you’ve ever applied for student aid between 1990 and 2000, you know that you had to give your parents’ financial information unless you were a veteran, or married, or checked some other boxes I disremember. In the times when marriage age and age of consent were lower than today, the age of majority was generally higher than today, usually 21, and how do you reconcile those two facts in terms of the capabilities of teenagers?
In the wilds of Canada, their barbarous laws said 15 year olds COULD consent back in 2008 but in 2009 the laws said they couldn’t. I know Canadians are a strange and exotic people. But did anything essential change in the nature of 15 year olds in that year? I think few of us would say so. Rather they would say the laws were badly out of date and are now more correct. Yet they differ from ours by a big chunk considering the ages involved. We can’t both be right. So how would we judge whether our laws are based in reality?
Since Richard Aubrey brought militias into the discussion on marriage (hmmm), I note that the word for foot soldiers – “infantry” – literally meant “infants,” or those who had not yet reached the age of majority, which ranged from 17-21 in most European countries back in the day.
In a fictional book about the 19th century navy, our hero Horatio Hornblower, when he enlisted as a midshipman, was told (paraphrased from memory), if you haven’t started on a ship before the age of 10, you’ll never make a good sailor.
And there are all those very young boys who carried flags & served in the supply wagons.
https://dictionarywebster.com/dictionary/infantry#note-1
The most complete is
https://www.etymonline.com/word/infantry
from which I liked this archaism we ought to resurrect:
A Middle English (c. 1200) word for “foot-soldiers” was going-folc, literally “going-folk.”
From the trenches –
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-history/origins-of-the-word-infantry/
In the context of “war” in general https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infantry#Etymology_and_terminology
@Aesopfan:“infantry” – literally meant “infants,”
Not your fault, it’s all over the internet, but I don’t think this etymology makes sense, as a wide range of ages is found in any kind of effective military unit. I’ve read other derivations which you can also find online from “infanta” or “infante” referring to the soldiers under nominal command of a Portuguese or Spanish prince or princess (Infante or Infanta is the title, which of course derives from “infant” but doesn’t mean “infant”). I think this would make more sense as the word doesn’t appear in English before 1570 and the Spanish were making quite a figure in the world then (the Eighty Years’ War started in 1568).
Foot soldiers have been around a long time, and can be of any age, but the word in English only dates to the 1570s, seems odd that that if we were going to call them “children” based on what kind of people they were we wouldn’t use the word already in our language for that. (English seems to have had “infantry” before “infant” which dates to 1580.)
Also odd that the Romans didn’t use a word meaning “children”, nor the Greeks, both cultures being renowned for their foot soldiers.
The idea that infantry were troops too inexperienced for cavalry seems bogus to me too. In ancient up to early modern times you provided your own arms and horse, so cavalry were higher social status because they could afford horses, it wasn’t that they were older or better at war, it was that they came from richer families. I never heard of a system where you started out in the infantry and got promoted to cavalry once you’d learned enough (though of course I can’t say I know every military organization that ever existed). Everybody started young, as most people were young, especially soldiers, most of whom died in camp of dysentery and whatnot.
Well, plenty of genuine etymologies don’t make much sense having started as a joke or a metaphor. Something about this one doesn’t smell right to me though.
@ Frederick –
My interpretation is not that “infant” means “child” in the sense we use the term, but merely means “not adult,” that is, below the age of majority, which is still true of a lot of enlistees today (if 21 is taken as the age of majority for legal purposes; the US is all over the place with different “adult” ages for different things).
The etymology of the word “infant” is only a source for the use of that particular word in English.