Posted on 03/08/2006 4:24:41 PM PST by Former Military Chick
The parents of all these kids should be the ones locked up and/or forced to register.
This whole thing is a travesty of injustice and a huge waste of taxpayers' money. In most of these cases where a girl eagerly goes to the same sort of party she's gone to and enjoyed before, and does the same sort of ill-advised things she's done and enjoyed before, and then cries "Rape!", it's because this time her parents somehow found out, and it was lot easier to claim she was an unwilling victim than to say "Look mom and dad, I really LIKE getting drunk off my a$$ and getting laid by several different guys in a row". First story puts mom and dad into "Our poor little darling!" mode, while the second story puts them in "When we're done with you, you'll wish you'd never been born!" mode (somehow, nothing ever seems to put them into "Man, did we ever screw up bad in raising you!" mode). And how does a 17 year old boy getting "serviced" by a 15 year old girl constitute "child molestation"? They're both "children" and very close in age, and SHE was more active participant in the event. How come that doesn't make HER a "child molestor"?
This was a bunch of undersupervised teenagers all willingly behaving like wild animals. How does one of them end up in prison, with the total tab to the taxpayers for his trial, public defender, imprisonment, likely to top $1 million? Add in the fact that he won't be working and paying taxes for up to 10 years, and that this record will put a major damper on his future employment opportunities that will cut his lifetime earnings and tax payments in half, and we're probably looking at closer to $2 million.
>>But that's exactly why I say they should be allowed to be children longer. >>
No society has prospered once this action was taken, Not one. We would not be the first. The increase in knowledge requires that they be responsible for that increased knowledge at an earlier age, and remove the years of no responsibility.
>>People got married at puberty!>>
Yes, and the marriages LASTED! Notice, no teenage period of non-responsibility. All of childhood was in preparation to be an adult.
I'd sure like to know what evidence you are basing that broad statement on.
The increase in knowledge requires that they be responsible for that increased knowledge at an earlier age, and remove the years of no responsibility
You all keep talking about childhood as years of no responsibility. That seems to be the problem in a nutshell.
My children had many more years of responsibility as children before I threw them out in the adult world and let them make adult decisions. Those added years of learning responsibility have helped them make better decisons when the time came for them to be fully in charge of their life.
Throwing kids out into the world at an early age might have seemed to work in the 'old days', but children were also raised a lot different than parents are raising their children now. Society as a whole was,at least outwardly, more moral. Children worked a lot harder and a lot more was expected out of them in terms of good behavior and perhaps they did learn more responsibility at a younger age.
I can't understand the people that seem to think that children getting married younger is somehow going to make our society more moral. That is just whack! We would only end up exchanging one problem for another, as cases of adultery would go up. I guess we would have a lot less problem with pedophiles, though.
I'm not a feminist by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to point out that in 'the old days' it was more prevelant for young girls to marry older men. While the girls might have been 13 or 14, the men was usually 19 or older. The girls usually had little choice in who they married due to the fact that their parents pick and chose who they could socialize with and marry. I don't think we can begin to imagine how many desperately unhappy marriages there were in the 'old days'. I would never condemn my daughters to making a life choice like that when they were 13 or 14. They don't even know enough about life to make a choice on a mate for life if it was up to their choosing.
Go to an old age home and have a talk with some of the old women there. My mom is in a home in a rural area of the south. It was very traditional for women of their age to get married young and raise a family.
Sitting around talking to those women is a real eye-opener. I told my mom that it freaked me out how many women told me they were so unhappy in their first marriages that they were happy when their husbands died. Yes, those marriages lasted for years because it was taboo to get a divorce in this very moral, rural community, but this idea that they all were happy and everything was just great is far from the truth.
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