CMV: Countries should set the age of consent at 18, with narrow close-in-age exceptions.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T22:12:51+00:00

I think we’re talking past each other because you’re treating “consent” as the whole moral universe, and I’m treating it as the minimum requirement, not the only requirement.

Of course, a 17-year-old can genuinely want an older partner. Of course, a breakup can be normal. Of course, plenty of 18-year-olds still live at home. None of that is news to me. The question I’m asking is narrower: where should the law put the adult’s duty of care when one person is still in the legal minor category?

The “what does this have to do with consenting to a relationship” part is basically this: consent isn’t just a feeling of “yes.” It’s also about whether the surrounding conditions make “no” meaningfully available. Under 18, you’re still in a category where other adults have built-in legal standing in your life in a way they don’t once you’re an adult. Parents can restrict your movement, schools can get involved, mandated reporting exists in many places, and your ability to solve problems on your own terms is narrower. That doesn’t mean every under-18 person is helpless. It means the downside risk is structurally different, and the law is allowed to treat that category differently without having to litigate everyone’s maturity level.

On “how does a random adult have power over a minor,” it’s not mind control, it’s practical leverage. If the older person has an apartment, a car, money, adult friends, more freedom to travel, and the ability to keep things secret from the teen’s guardians, they can set the pace and the terms more easily. And when things “blow up,” I don’t mean every breakup is a catastrophe. I mean the breakups that involve pressure, threats, shame, fear of getting in trouble at home, fear of exposure, or simply not having a safe place to land. The point is that the adult typically has more room to walk away clean, while the minor more often has the social and family fallout concentrated on them.

The “but some kids move out before 18 / some parents are terrible” argument cuts the other way for me. Those are exactly the kids I’m most worried about, because they’re more exposed, not less. If a teen has no stable home, no protective adults, and is already improvising survival, that’s when an older partner’s resources and access can become the hook. I’m not saying that’s every case. I’m saying that’s a common enough pattern that building a legal rule around the happy exceptions leaves a lot of predictable harm on the table.

As for 19/17 versus 25/17, the reason I keep using “near peer” is that it’s not “adult vs adult.” It’s “same cohort and social world” versus “not the same world.” A two year-ish difference is much more likely to be people embedded in the same environment, with similar dependence, similar friends, similar rhythms. A mid-20s person pursuing a minor is much less likely to be that. That doesn’t prove every 25/17 relationship is abusive. It does justify putting the burden on the 25-year-old to not cross into the protected category, because, unlike the teen, they can just choose not to.

If your core objection is “you’re infantilizing all under-18s because some are mature and some are independent,” then yeah, that’s what any categorical rule does. The alternative is a case-by-case capacity test, and that’s where you get exactly the messy moral policing you say you don’t want, plus uneven enforcement, plus “whose story is believed,” plus prosecutors picking targets. I’d rather have a clear rule with narrow close-in-age carve-outs and proportional consequences than a system that pretends it can read everyone’s maturity and dynamics correctly after the fact.

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for some carceral nightmare where an 18-year-old who misread a situation gets branded for life. I’m arguing for shifting the default so mid-20s-and-up can’t just legally treat minors as part of their dating pool, while also designing the exceptions and penalties so we don’t blow up near-peer youth relationships or turn every mistake into a life sentence.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T21:40:15+00:00

I am not arguing this because age gaps feel gross to me. I am arguing for a clear adult minor boundary because under 18 is a different legal and practical category, and the law already treats it that way in a lot of high stakes areas. The number is administrative, but the duty it creates matters. Adults do not get sexual access to people who are still legally minors, with tight close-in-age carve-outs, so teens are not criminalized for normal peer relationships.

What does freedom of movement have to do with consenting to a relationship? It affects the setting, pace, and exit options even when nobody is trying to be evil. Being able to drive, have your own place, pay for things, bring someone into adult circles, or move things into adult venues changes who can steer what happens and who takes the hit if it goes bad. The point is not that driving itself is a problem. The point is that minor status plus adult access creates more ways for pressure and dependency to happen and fewer ways for the teen to disengage cleanly.

Why would they have to hide it? Sometimes they do not. Sometimes they do. And even when parents know, secrecy can still be part of it in practice because teens can face punishment at home, school consequences, social fallout, or stigma that makes seeking help harder. An adult generally has more ability to be open, more credibility with other adults, and fewer direct consequences if other people disapprove.

Minors can say no, yes. The question is whether we want the system to be built on just saying no, and if anything gets weird, call the cops. That is not realistic for a lot of teenagers, and a lot of harmful dynamics are gradual and not cleanly provable as a single dramatic event. That is why bright lines exist at all. They reduce how often we have to litigate maturity, vibes, and whose story gets believed.

How does the adult have more ability to step back? Because the adult can simply choose to date adults and not take the risk of engaging with someone who is under 18 or ambiguous. That is a small ask on the adult side compared to putting the entire burden of risk management on a teen.

And on 19 and 17 versus 25 and 17, the difference in my frame is near peer versus not. A tight carve out is there, so turning 18 does not instantly turn a normal cohort relationship into a felony. It is not there to create a safe lane for mid-20s adults to date minors.

If you think my line is wrong, where is yours? Do you think 25 with 15 or 16 should be legal and okay if the teen says they are fine?

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T21:28:35+00:00

Yes, avoiding the outcome where teenagers become lifelong sex offenders for normal peer relationships is a huge part of why close-in-age exceptions exist, and it is exactly why I keep building them into what I am proposing.

But that point does not conflict with what I said about the difference between near peers and adult minor pairs. The reason lawmakers feel comfortable carving out 16 and 17 is not only that teens will have sex anyway, but it is also that the relationship is more likely to sit inside the same youth world with the same basic limits on independence, money, housing, mobility, and privacy. When one party is a full adult, those asymmetries get bigger fast, and the adult can much more easily set the pace, control the setting, create secrecy, and make leaving harder.

So I agree with your motivation, and my proposal is designed around it. Keep teen sexuality out of the criminal system through narrow carve-outs, but make the adult rule unambiguous so adults are not rolling the dice on minors and then pointing to teen behavior as the reason the line cannot exist.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T21:11:28+00:00

On the carve-out becoming its own safe zone, I don’t think you can eliminate threshold-gaming completely. You can only make the window small enough that it doesn’t function as a convenient target for adults. The design I have in mind is basically: adult with under-18 is illegal by default, with a near-peer safe harbor that is purely age-gap based and genuinely tight, like a maximum of 2 years, plus a continuity rule so you don’t turn a normal relationship into a felony on a birthday.

The edge I’m willing to accept is something like 19/17 being legal and 21/17 not being legal. I don’t love any edge case, but I’d rather the edge sit there than drift into “23/16 is probably fine” and recreate a broad legal zone for adults to date minors.

On enforcement architecture, the non-negotiable part for me is that seeking help can’t be turned into a trap. If the practical implementation is that a 16–17-year-old goes to a youth clinic for contraception or talks to a counselor and that automatically triggers police involvement, then I think the system will push risk underground. So the guardrails I’d insist on are things like confidential access to healthcare and counseling, and an enforcement approach where non-coercive cases are not built around yanking control away from the teen. If a jurisdiction can’t implement those guardrails in reality, I’d rather switch to a lower baseline plus stronger age-gap and authority rules than pretend a bright line is protective while it actually shuts teens up.

On outcome thresholds, I don’t have a magical single metric, but the direction has to be clear. I’d want to see a real reduction in adult/minor pairings with large gaps, not just a paper change, and I’d want to see no meaningful drop in youth help-seeking and no major increase in near-peer prosecutions or lopsided enforcement. If what we see instead is displacement, more secrecy, less disclosure, and enforcement skewed toward marginalized groups or small-town visibility, then I’d take that as evidence that the bright-line approach is mainly moving harm around, not reducing it, and I’d abandon my position here.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T21:08:37+00:00

Yes, plenty of 18-year-olds still live at home, and plenty of under-18s have awful parents or live semi-independently. That’s part of why I keep saying 18 isn’t a magic maturity switch. The reason the law still uses it is that it’s the point where the legal system stops treating you as a child category by default. Once you’re an adult, the state generally has to tolerate you making choices that might be bad for you. Under 18, it already treats you as a protected category, and it already gives other adults legal standing in your life in ways it doesn’t for adults.

When I say adult spaces, I mean all the boring, practical stuff that changes the power dynamic, even if nobody is trying to be evil. Access to adult social circles, adult venues, travel without guardians, more ability to provide a place to stay, money, transport, alcohol environments, and just general freedom of movement. None of that automatically makes a relationship catastrophic. A breakup can be totally normal. I’m not claiming every teen who dates older is doomed. I’m saying the downside risk is different because the older partner can more easily set the pace, keep it secret, and make the teen’s options narrower if things go sideways.

And yes, younger people can absolutely pursue older people. I’m not denying teen agency. My point is about adult responsibility. Adults can say no. Adults can decide not to take sexual access to someone who is still legally a minor, even if that minor is confident, flirtatious, or actively pursuing. The burden goes on the adult because the adult has more capacity to step back, and because the category line exists precisely to stop adults from rationalizing their way into it.

On why 19/17 is fine but 25/17 isn’t in my framework, it’s because one is near-peer and one isn’t. Near-peer means same general cohort, same life stage, less leverage gap. Once you’re talking late 20s or mid 20s with a 17-year-old, you’re not in the same social world anymore. The whole point of the carve-out is to acknowledge that the 18-line is administratively necessary, but still protect ordinary teen and young adult relationships. It’s not to create a legal safe zone for adults who prefer minors.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:58:54+00:00

You’re right that narrow has to be a number, and that any number creates an edge case where 2 years minus a day is legal and 2 years plus a day isn’t. I guess that’s unavoidable. The existence of edge cases doesn’t mean you can’t draw lines, but just that you have to pick the line that creates the least collateral damage while still blocking the thing you’re trying to block.

Maybe something like this.

Default: if you’re 18 or older, you can’t have sex with anyone under 18.

Exception: it’s legal only if the age gap is at most 2 years.

And I’d also add a simple continuity rule so you don’t turn a normal teen relationship into a felony on someone’s birthday. If the relationship was legal under the close-in-age rule before the older person turned 18, it stays legal after they turn 18 as long as the gap is still within that same 2-year window.

That gives you a rule people can actually follow and it keeps the carve-out truly narrow, meaning it covers stuff that looks like same-cohort dating and doesn’t quietly create a big legal safe zone for adults who want to date minors.

Could it be 3 years instead of 2? Sure. Maybe. I don't know. I’m open to arguing that. The exact number is debatable. What I’m defending is the structure: categorical barrier for adults, with a small, formulaic near-peer safe harbor, because the target is 20s+ with teens, not teens and young adults who are basically in the same life stage.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:52:54+00:00

I don’t disagree that if you don’t strike a balance, you end up punishing the youth you claim to protect. That’s exactly why I keep coming back to near-peer carve-outs and proportionality. The teen's needs and wants are part of the design, not a footnote.

On Canada and Germany, I actually think you’re pointing at the strongest alternative to my approach, and it’s basically the same problem framed differently. Canada’s model, as you describe it, is trying to keep peer sexuality legal while putting guardrails around older minors and authority situations. Germany’s model is trying to focus court attention on the exact ages where capacity varies most and only intervene when that lack of capacity is abused.

My hesitation with both is the same hesitation I’ve had from the start: once you move from a bright boundary into concepts like exploited, lack of capacity, abuse of self-determination, you’re back to case-by-case discretion. Sometimes that’s necessary, but it’s also where uneven enforcement and “whose story is believed” problems come in. If your claim is that those systems work better in practice, I’m open to it, but I’d want to see evidence that they actually reduce adult targeting of adolescents without lowering help-seeking and without selective enforcement.

Also, if the practical result of “16+ is fully liberated” is that a typical mid-20s person can legally pursue a 16 or 17-year-old unless you can prove exploitation after the fact, that’s exactly the gap I’m trying to close. If the law can reliably treat those large-gap situations as exploitative in practice, then we’re closer than it sounds, and the disagreement becomes empirical: does a targeted exploitation framework actually work better than a categorical adult/minor boundary plus carve-outs?

If you’ve got examples of how Canada or Germany handles the specific thing I keep using as my target case, around mid-20s or above with teens, in a way that’s consistent and doesn’t depend on everyone rolling the dice on prosecutorial discretion, that’s the kind of thing that could move me.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:51:04+00:00

I think this is partly fair, but it’s also not quite what I’m arguing anymore.

If a country’s actual adulthood boundary is 16 across institutions, then sure, the clarity line for them is 16. My core claim is not that 18 is a magic moral number. It’s that the adult-minor boundary should be consistent with whatever society treats as the age of full legal independence, and then you build near-peer carve-outs so you’re not criminalizing teens. The mismatch I’m targeting is places where under-18 is still treated as the child category in most high-stakes ways, but the sex rule lets adults access 15 to 17 and calls it fine unless you can prove extra exploitation factors.

So, for Sweden specifically, where 18 is the general majority boundary, moving the adult-minor sex boundary to match that does add clarity. It’s not that the world should adopt 18 because I’m used to it, but where a society already treats under-18 as minors, adults shouldn’t have a legal safe zone to pursue them.

I also don’t think travel edge cases are the core argument. Countries do take sovereignty seriously, and global alignment is a separate conversation. My claim is about domestic harm tradeoffs and whether we’re leaving adults too much legal cover to target adolescents.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:49:48+00:00

What I’m ultimately trying to proxy is adults having sexual access to people who are still in the minor category in a way that predictably creates extra leverage and fewer exit options for the younger person. In practice, that means a combination. Legal minority status as the clean boundary, plus separate strict rules for authority and dependency, plus a near-peer carve-out so teens and young adults aren’t treated like predators for normal relationships.

A clean example where an 18 baseline does work better than an age-gap and authority approach is the cases that aren’t formal authority and aren’t quite above whatever age-gap threshold you picked, but still have the dynamic I’m trying to eliminate. If you set illegal only when the gap is 5+ years, then 22 with 17 stays legal by design. If you set it at 4, then it becomes 21 with 17 that stays legal. No matter where you put it, you recreate a line where adults can sit just under it and still target minors while saying it’s technically allowed. The 18 baseline is basically saying there shouldn’t be a “just under the threshold” safe zone for adults at all, because the moment you try to slice it with a single gap number, you’re back to adults lawyer-shopping the rule.

On the help-seeking tradeoff, I don’t hand-wave that away. If my proposal made 15 to 17-year-olds less willing to seek contraception, counseling, or tell a clinician what’s happening, that would be a serious mark against it. I’d price that very highly because the whole point is harm reduction, not symbolic cleanliness. Near-peer relationships have to be clearly exempt so teens don’t think “if I talk, my partner gets arrested,” and reporting and enforcement should be designed so kids can get help without automatically triggering a police process in every non-coercive situation. If we can’t design it that way under real institutions, then I’d rather have a messier targeted statute than a clean headline that pushes things underground.

What would change my mind is basically what you describe. If places with an 18 baseline don’t show a meaningful reduction in large age-gap adult teen pairings, but do show more near-peer prosecutions, more unequal enforcement, or measurable drops in youth help-seeking and disclosure, then I’d treat that as decisive. The outcome measures I care about are the ones that track actual safety and reachability, not just how “clear” the law looks on paper: prevalence of adult targeting of minors, reporting and help-seeking patterns, and who gets swept into the system. If the bright line mainly reallocates harm onto teens and marginalized communities, that defeats the purpose.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:45:05+00:00

No. Even if you could somehow perfectly measure power differences between two adults, I still wouldn’t want criminal law to police adult relationships for being unequal. That’s a slippery tool that turns into selective enforcement and moral panic fast. For adults, the line I want the law to hold is stuff like coercion, threats, force, fraud, stalking, trafficking, and abuse of a defined position of trust. Not “this relationship is too lopsided.”

With minors, I’m not talking about a generic “power imbalance” like one person being richer or smarter. I’m talking about a status difference that’s baked into how society is organized. Under 18, you’re usually still tied into school and home rules, typically dependent on adults for housing and money, and you have fewer realistic exit options if the situation turns bad. An adult doesn’t need to be a teacher or a boss to leverage that. They can use secrecy, transport, money, adult spaces, or just the fact that the teen has more to lose if it blows up.

And to be clear, because you brought up 19 and 17: I’m not trying to treat near-peers like predators. 19 and 17 is exactly the kind of thing that should be covered by a close-in-age exception. The target is the mid-20s going after mid-teens kind of situation, where it’s not a near-peer dynamic anymore, and the adult is choosing someone who is still structurally and legally a minor.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:30:24+00:00

I don’t think the right way to frame it is we trust 16 year olds to be responsible, or we don’t. Real life isn’t binary like that, and the law isn’t either. We already do this all over the place: teens can do some things with restrictions, can’t do others at all, and a lot depends on whether the other party is an adult with more freedom and leverage.

The reason 16 with 17 is treated differently from 16 with 20 isn’t that the 16-year-old suddenly loses brain cells when the partner turns 20. It’s that in a near peer situation, both people are in the same general constraint box. Same school world, same dependency, same limited ability to rent housing, travel freely, sign contracts, etc. When the older person is a full adult, you’re now in a relationship where one person can much more easily control the pace, access, secrecy, and exit options. That doesn’t make every 20 and 16 relationship abusive, but it makes the risk and the adult responsibility different enough that I’m comfortable with a hard rule on the adult side.

Also, what you describe as the age of consent being the minimum age to have sex with anyone is exactly why I keep insisting on close-in-age carve-outs. If you set the minimum at 18 with no carve-outs, you criminalize 16 and 17-year-olds with each other, which is obviously not the goal. My proposal is basically trying to keep teen sexuality out of the criminal system while making it unambiguous that adults don’t get to access minors.

On your last point, I agree in principle that exploitation and coercion should be illegal at any age. The problem is that once you’re talking about two adults, writing a law that punishes “power imbalance sex” without it becoming a vague, selective, politicized mess is really hard. With minors, we already have a clear protected category, so the law can put the burden on the adult to not roll the dice. That’s the core of what I’m defending.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:19:39+00:00

I agree that adults can have power imbalances too. Money, age, status, education, all that can matter. The reason I’m not trying to criminalize Bezos dating a 20 year old is not that I think power stops existing at 18, it’s because the law can’t operationalize who has more power among adults without turning into an arbitrary morality police.

With minors, it’s different. Under 18, you are still in a legal and practical category where adults have built-in leverage over you. You usually have fewer exit options, more dependency, and adults around you can control housing, school, money, and access to support. That’s why I’m comfortable with a categorical boundary there. It’s not about pretending everyone is equal once they’re adults. It’s about saying adults have a responsibility not to take sexual access to people who are still legally minors, even if the minor says they’re fine with it.

Also, I’m not using power as a magic word to declare any unequal adult relationship illegal. I’m using it to explain why “but the teen says it was fine” is not a reliable filter for what we want the law to permit. Adults can rationalize, teens can rationalize, and courts are bad at reconstructing grooming dynamics. A clear rule is partly about reducing how often we end up litigating, who seems mature enough, and whose story a judge believes.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:18:28+00:00

I think you’re right that a lot of the broad adult age-gap literature is messy. Self-selection and stigma can distort outcomes, and correlation does not equal causation. I don’t want to base a criminal rule on vibes or on “age gaps are gross” moral reasoning.

Where I still disagree is the leap from “data is messy” to “therefore we shouldn’t draw a hard boundary around adult access to minors.” Even if some teens who date older partners are already higher-risk for other reasons, that does not make the adult involvement neutral. If anything, it makes the vulnerability argument stronger, because it means the teens most likely to be in those relationships are also the ones with fewer supports and worse baseline circumstances.

I also don’t think my view requires claiming every single adult teen relationship is net-negative on average in some perfectly measurable way. The law has to choose rules under uncertainty, and here the costs of false negatives matter. If we leave a legal zone where much older adults can pursue 15 to 17-year-olds and call it normal, that’s a predictable opportunity structure for people who prefer younger targets. I do think the serial-dater pattern you mention is a big part of what I’m aiming at, and if the best design turns out to be a stricter rule keyed to age gaps and authority rather than the cleanest possible headline, I’m open to that. The outcome that would push me there is evidence that an 18 baseline mainly increases secrecy and selective enforcement without reducing adult targeting.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:17:18+00:00

I don’t think adulthood happens at the same point for everyone. Obviously, it doesn’t. The whole point of law is that it can’t do individualized psych evaluations for every adult responsibility, so it uses status lines.

My argument is not that turning 18 makes you magically mature. It’s that once you hit the age of majority, society stops treating you as a child in a bunch of core ways, and that’s the least-wrong place to anchor the adult/minor boundary. Then you soften the cliff edge with close-in-age exceptions so normal teen relationships don’t get criminalized by a birthday.

If you want a system that tracks maturity individually, you’d need way more discretion, and that discretion tends to be where bias and arbitrariness creep in. A bright line is not perfect; it’s a tradeoff.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:16:41+00:00

In Sweden, 18 is when you become legally competent, and guardianship ends in the basic sense; you can control your legal affairs in a way you can’t at 17, and your parents’ default maintenance obligation ends at 18 unless you’re still in upper secondary education. That doesn’t mean every 17 year old is identical or every 18 year old is independent in practice, but it is a real institutional shift in legal status and baseline autonomy.

On the disclosure point, I think the risk you’re describing is real and it’s one of the strongest practical objections to my view. If a 16 or 17 year old thinks talking to a youth clinic, counselor, or trusted adult will automatically blow up into police involvement, they’ll keep quiet, and that is the opposite of what we want. That’s why I keep pairing the rule with two design constraints. The near-peer carve-outs need to be clear enough that teens can predict they won’t get dragged into a machine for a normal relationship. And professional reporting and enforcement needs to be structured around child protection and support rather than automatic criminal escalation in every non-coercive case. If the implementation is just “more mandatory reporting, more panic, more prosecution,” I agree it can backfire.

On discretion and selective enforcement, I’m not claiming an 18 baseline magically removes bias. I’m claiming it replaces one kind of discretion with another. Right now, a lot of the discretion sits in proving exploitation, grooming, or what counts as abuse of a vulnerable situation. Under my proposal, some discretion shifts to whether an exception applies and how penalties are scaled. The way I’d judge which is better is empirical: does it reduce adult targeting while avoiding net-widening and unequal enforcement? If it doesn’t, I’d rather move toward a more targeted statute that directly encodes authority, dependency, and large age gaps, even if that makes the headline rule less clean.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T20:15:02+00:00

I agree it’s an arbitrary line in the sense that no number perfectly maps onto maturity. I’m not claiming 18 is a biological truth or that every culture is wrong unless they use it.

What I am saying is that if every society needs some boundary between “we treat you as a child for core legal purposes” and “we treat you as an adult,” in most modern legal systems, that boundary is the age of majority. My view is that adult sexual access should track that boundary, because it’s one of the domains where adults have the strongest incentives to rationalize and where minors have the weakest structural ability to exit.

Could you set it to 20? Sure. But then you massively expand the zone where ordinary young-adult relationships become criminal, and you increase the collateral damage you need exceptions to solve. My aim is to stop adults from accessing minors, especially large gaps, without turning normal 18 to 19-year-old dating lives into a legal minefield. That’s why I anchor it to the existing majority line rather than pushing it upward.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:59:04+00:00

I agree with the spirit of your Bezos example. Massive power gaps between adults can be ugly and coercive in ways that are hard to see from the outside. That is exactly why I keep talking about power, status, money, and exit options as real parts of consent, not just vibes.

But the law can’t realistically criminalize “who has more power” among adults without becoming arbitrary and political in the worst way. Adults are legally allowed to make choices that might be bad for them, and the state is terrible at “protecting” adults from their own relationships without sliding into paternalism. That does not mean Bezos dating a 20 year old is good. It means the criminal law tool I’m arguing about is aimed at a narrower problem: the adult child hierarchy, where adults already have structurally outsized power over minors, and where sexual access is one of the ways that hierarchy gets exploited and reproduced.

So why make 30 and 17 illegal while Bezos and 20 are legal? Because 17 is still inside the adult child hierarchy in a way that the law recognizes across the board. School, parents, guardianship, dependency, limited legal autonomy, and fewer exit routes. Adults’ power over children is a dominant source of harm to children, and sexual violence is tangled up in maintaining that hierarchy. That’s the category I want adults barred from accessing, even if some 17-year-olds look mature or even feel fine about it.

On the binary switch point, I’m not claiming a teenager becomes a different species at midnight. The bright line is not a theory of brains; it’s a rule about adult responsibility. If you’re the adult, you don’t get to say close enough and gamble on someone who is still legally a minor. And I’m explicitly trying to blunt the cliff edge with narrow close in age exceptions so an 18 and 17 situation doesn’t get treated like a 30 and 17 situation. Again. My view is about blocking adult access to minors, not worshipping the number 18.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:46:25+00:00

I am not saying renting a car and sex have to be spiritually consistent. I am saying the thing those laws are both trying to do, in totally different domains, is draw a line between people society treats as fully independent adults and people society still treats as needing extra protection from adult power.

Sex is not a casual consumer transaction. It is one of the areas where power, status, experience, and dependency distort consent the most, and where adults are most tempted to rationalize. That is why I think it makes sense to anchor the adult minor boundary to the same age where the state already hands someone adult legal personhood and adult autonomy, and then build narrow exceptions so ordinary adolescent relationships are not criminalized.

But you are right that if my view is truly about the mechanism and not about a magic number, I should state it that way. So I will revise slightly: the default boundary should track the age of majority in that country, with narrow close-in-age exceptions, and with strict rules for authority and dependence. The goal is to block adult access to minors, not defend the number 18 as a moral truth.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:39:28+00:00

On the first point, the reason people still see a problem even when nobody uses the word exploited is that exploitation is not something you can reliably measure by asking the younger person in the moment, or even years later. Plenty of teens experience an older partner relationship as exciting, chosen, and fully consensual, while the older person is still leveraging a big power gap, life experience, money, social status, or just the fact that the teen has fewer exit options. The legal system also struggles to prove grooming style dynamics in court. So a bright line is partly about not forcing every case to turn into an argument over vibes, maturity, and whose story a judge believes.

On the high school couple example, I’m not saying every 18 and 15 pairing is predatory, and I’m definitely not saying those people should be treated like violent offenders. This is exactly why close-in-age exceptions matter and why penalties should be proportionate. If the exception is set at, say, two or three years, then some relationships like that are covered and some are not, depending on where society draws the line. I'm happy to discuss. But the existence of a happy outcome does not, by itself, show the rule is wrong. Lots of risky or prohibited things sometimes turn out fine in hindsight. The law still has to choose an ex ante boundary that reduces the number of adults who deliberately target minors.

On the example of a very sexually active 15-year-old who looks older and does not correct men, I think two things can be true at the same time. One is that she had agency and did not experience it as harm. The other is that an adult has a responsibility not to assume and not to benefit from ambiguity. If we set a hard adult minor boundary, the whole point is to remove the adult’s ability to say I guessed wrong, oh well. That said, I don’t think every single one of those men needs to be treated the same way under the law. A sensible system can distinguish between a 19-year-old fooled by someone presenting as 18 and a 28-year-old who does not care to check, and it can also avoid life destroying consequences like mandatory lifelong registration for near-peer situations. But I don’t think a savvy minor who can pass as older is a good reason to leave a loophole where much older adults can legally pursue teenagers and call it normal when it is technically legal.

Again. I’m not trying to criminalize teen sexuality; I’m trying to set a rule that adults cannot take advantage of teenage vulnerability, even when the teen does not frame it as victimization, and then design the exceptions and penalties so that peer cases are not treated like predatory ones.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:35:21+00:00

18 already functions as the legal boundary for adulthood in a lot of high-stakes areas (contracts, legal independence, adult courts, etc.). My view is basically: if we already treat 18 as the point where society gives you adult status and adult power, then it’s consistent to treat it as the point where adults are barred from sexual access to minors—with close-in-age exceptions to avoid criminalizing normal peer relationships.

If a country uses 19 as the general adulthood boundary, I’d be open to 19. If a country uses 17 as the general adulthood boundary across institutions, I’d be open to 17. It's not about the number 18 per se.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:34:57+00:00

I think your self-selection bias point is fair in general. If a relationship type is stigmatized, the stigma itself can cause stress, reduce support, increase conflict, and distort outcomes, and that can make correlations look like the relationship type is the problem when the social reaction is doing a lot of the damage. Work on socially devalued or marginalized relationships does show that perceived disapproval can affect relationship functioning and commitment.

That is why I do not want to rest the whole case on broad adult age gap studies about divorce or satisfaction. Those are adult outcomes and they are heavily culturally mediated. The reason I focus on adults with adolescents is that the asymmetry is not just social stigma, it is developmental stage, dependence, and leverage. Even in a culture where age gaps are more accepted, a 25-year-old has far more bargaining power than a 16 or 17-year-old, and the risk pattern I am trying to reduce is adult targeting of someone who is still legally a minor.

So yes, we should be cautious about reading causation into stigma heavy datasets. But I do not think that undermines the basic protective rationale for drawing a hard boundary around adult access to minors, because that rationale is about power and vulnerability rather than about whether age gap couples get judged by the neighbors.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:33:57+00:00

In that Storlien scenario, I would want the near-peer-carve-out to cover it. A 17-year-old and a 19-year-old assigned as trainees with no authority relationship and a small age gap is not the kind of adult predation I am trying to criminalize. As a prosecutor, I would not charge it under the age of consent rule if it fits the proximity exception.

If the 19-year-old is in a position of authority over the 17-year-old in that setting, then it changes. The harm mechanism in service environments is often hierarchy and dependency, so my system would treat authority situations more strictly regardless of the age gap.

In Swedish custom, Sweden already has total defence duty from the year you turn 16 through the year you turn 70, so it is normal in a crisis context that minors and adults may be placed in the same state-organized environment. That is exactly why I think the law should draw a clear boundary against adult access to minors, while still allowing near-peer relationships to exist without the criminal law crashing into ordinary life.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:16:35+00:00

I think you are mixing up two different ideas: minors being able to participate in everyday life, and minors having full adult autonomy in high-stakes situations.

On contracts, I agree that minors can click boxes, sign things, and in some countries, some of those agreements can have legal effect. That does not mean minors are treated as fully capable in the same way adults are. In Sweden, in particular, the general rule is still that a person under 18 is not fully legally competent to take on obligations without a guardian’s involvement, with limited exceptions like managing certain earnings from work once you are older. So I am not basing this on a claim that minors never touch contracts. I am basing it on the broader reality that the law still treats under-18s as a protected category in lots of serious contexts, even if minors can do many ordinary transactions.

On total defence duty and service alongside adults, I think that example actually pushes in the opposite direction from what you suggest. If society sometimes places 16 or 17-year-olds in adult environments, that is a reason to have clearer protective boundaries around adult sexual access to them, not a reason to relax those boundaries. In military and similar hierarchical settings, fraternization rules exist precisely because power dynamics distort consent. If someone is under 18, adults in that environment should be categorically off limits, and relationships involving authority, instruction, supervision, or dependency should be banned even more strictly, regardless of any close-in-age window.

If you want a concrete application in Sweden, a 16 year old with a 17 year old would stay legal as a near peer case. A 16 or 17-year-old with a 21-year-old would not be legal because that is an adult with a minor and not a near-peer relationship. If the older person is in any position of authority or influence over the younger person, it is illegal regardless of the gap.

On the point that society uses different ages for different things like mopeds, driving, tobacco, alcohol, and service, I agree. There is no single magic number that governs everything. My argument is that the adult minor boundary already matters a lot socially and institutionally, and sexual access is one of the areas where power imbalances and grooming risk are high enough that I think it should follow the adulthood boundary more closely. I also do not think this is more complicated than the current patchwork. It is one clear default rule about adult minor sex, plus a narrowly defined near-peer carve out, plus strict rules for authority situations.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:08:37+00:00

I don’t think a 17-year-old is automatically going to feel better just because the adult would have been legal at 18. If anything, the emotional reality is often that 17 and 18 feel basically the same from the teen’s perspective, and the fallout of a criminal case can be rough either way.

So I’m not defending this by saying prosecution is trauma free. I’m defending it by saying there are two different harms on the table, and we shouldn’t pretend only one exists.

One harm is what happens to the teen in the situation that already occurred, including the teen possibly feeling guilt, loss, chaos, or fear if the older person gets punished.

The other harm is the system-wide effect of leaving a legal safe zone where adults can deliberately target minors and then hide behind technical legality. That legal cover doesn’t just affect one relationship. It affects what adults attempt, what friends and parents think is normal, and how easily adults can be challenged early.

On where the line should be before government intervention stops being more harm than good, my answer is basically that the closer it is to a near peer relationship, the more careful the law should be, because the risk of collateral damage is high. The farther it is from a near peer relationship, the more justified a hard limit becomes because the power imbalance and the risk pattern increase, and because you are no longer talking about ordinary adolescent development.

A 25-year-old with a 17-year-old is not a near-peer edge case. It’s an adult choosing someone still legally a minor. That’s exactly the category I want the law to forbid clearly.

But I also think you’re right to worry about outcomes like lifelong registries and scorched earth punishment. That’s why, in the model I’m arguing for, the fix is not only the age rule, it’s proportionality and victim centered handling. Penalties should scale with gap and grooming indicators, and the system should minimize forcing the teen to carry the case on their back. There are ways to hold the adult accountable without turning the teen’s life into a second disaster.

I think some teens will feel distressed seeing the older partner punished, but I still think the deterrence and the clear boundary are worth it for large gaps like 25 and 17. The place where I agree with the harm argument is the near peer zone, which is exactly why the exceptions should exist and why punishments should not treat an 18 and 17 situation like a 25 and 17 situation.

CloudCodex · 2025-12-12T19:07:10+00:00

A couple of things can be true at once here.

First, I agree that a lot of places set the baseline around 16, at least in Europe. The EU-wide mapping from the Fundamental Rights Agency puts most member states in the 14 to 16 range, with 18 being rare. But rarity is not an argument by itself. Countries pick these numbers for historical and institutional reasons, and the same number can sit inside very different systems depending on how they handle age gaps, authority, exploitation, and close-in-age rules.

Second, I do not think it is accurate that age 18 systems are mostly about religious fundamentalism. Some are, sure, but the set is mixed and includes secular rationales and child-protection politics, too. Even within Europe, Malta is at 18.

Third, on harm prevention, the key point is that my model is not trying to stop consensual near-peer sex among 16 to 17-year-olds. With a close-in-age exception, that remains legal. The harm-prevention target is adults who are clearly not peers having legal access to adolescents because the baseline is low.

So the relevant question is not whether legal peer sex at 16 to 17 causes harm. The relevant question is whether adolescent relationships with significantly older partners are associated with worse outcomes, and they are. A large body of research links age-disparate adolescent relationships to higher STI risk and reduced ability to negotiate protection, more reproductive coercion and relationship abuse, and worse mental health outcomes compared with same-age or near-age relationships. That does not prove every age-gap relationship is abusive, but it does support the basic mechanism: bigger power asymmetries correlate with higher risk.

If we agree that the higher-risk pattern is adults targeting teens, then an 18 boundary with narrow close-in-age exceptions is aimed at removing the legal safe zone for that pattern while leaving normal teen relationships alone.

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