this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2024
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Yeah, this is the first I've seen someone else weirded out by the constant push to up the age you're considered a 'real adult'. I've seen people arguing for the age of consent to be set to 25 and treating people in their 20's like they were 12 year olds.
Like I'm not arguing that old men dating young women isn't gross, but that doesn't make those young women in their 20's children. There's this dehumanizing element to the conversation that's really concerning to me, but the whole sexual abuse aspect of it overshadows the extremely troubling language they're using, so you can't address it.
You can acknowledge inherent power imbalances without resorting to treating the younger party like a kid.
God, the "age of consent" being at 25 freaks me out.. If I didn't become legally an adult when I did I don't know if I would have been still alive today
These thoughts about consent and everything are all well and good as long as you assume a perfectly healthy family. But what if it's not? What if it's dysfunctional? Or abusive? What if the environment you're in is straight up unhealthy for you?
It really feels like child abuse is very much an afterthought. Despite it being much much more common than people in the past thought. And child abuse is something that comes along with you through your entire life, and if you don't at least try to handle it, you're just left a broken person further harming yourself in ways that society is not kind towards, and we're left with what society considers to be "problem" people.
I'm truly sorry you went through that. I think there's room for taking the environment into consideration regarding emancipation. In a decent society there would be healthy families willing to foster young people who were dealt the shitty care givers card.
We really need a middle zone... Human brains don't reach full maturity until around age 25 when the prefrontal cortex is done developing, and quite frankly I think it could be argued that the thing that makes a human a human is the prefrontal cortex. However, that part of the brain "turns on" at the onset of puberty. It takes about 12 years for the human brain to really master the whole controlling a human body thing, and another 12 for it to master the whole thinking and conceptualizing and thinking ahead (and a bunch of other stuff). That second 12 year span should be treated differently than both the first span and adulthood.
Actually that "brain stops developing at 25" is a misconception, the study that spawned it just ran out of funding when the subjects were 25 and didn't see the brain development slowing down, iirc (no source on hand it's past midnight here).
25 isn't a hard line. The reality is that our brains continue to change forever. But, to use a metaphor, around our mid 20s is when it's done "cooking", but just like you might let meat "rest" on the counter for a bit after it's done cooking, your brain keeps changing, just not to the same degree. Maybe some day if brain scanning technology gets better, and we have a real healthcare system, people could get scans to see when their brain seems to have reached full maturity, especially if they've committed a crime. Of course "full maturity" will always be sort of an arbitrary choice because as I said, our brains are never truly finished.
25 isn't a hard line. The reality is that our brains continue to change forever. But, to use a metaphor, around our mid 20s is when it's done "cooking", but just like you might let meat "rest" on the counter for a bit after it's done cooking, your brain keeps changing, just not to the same degree. Maybe some day if brain scanning technology gets better, and we have a real healthcare system, people could get scans to see when their brain seems to have reached full maturity, especially if they've committed a crime. Of course "full maturity" will always be sort of an arbitrary choice because as I said, our brains are never truly finished.
I'm sorry you're going through that, that sucks.
I think we're trying to find a level of neurological development that describes a level of consciousness we'd mostly agree is sufficient to warrant responsibility for ones actions... For instance if a toddler shoots and kills someone, we know there's no way it was intentional, it was an accident or at least there's no way the toddler knew what they were doing or could grasp the consequences. But at some point in the development of that brain something changes. At puberty a whole section of the brain starts developing rapidly, and it just so happens it's the part that processes decision making. Exactly the part that changes us from what kids are to what adults are. So figuring out what a fully developed vs not yet fully developed one looks like seems pretty important. Then making scans regular procedure for when you need to determine if someone is developed enough to be responsible. But like you said, when a particular person gets there varies a lot, based on a lot of factors. I would hope a simple scan could help you prove you don't need your rights taken away.