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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Usually, the distinction is to call it "statutory rape", distinguishing two concepts, factual consent and legal consent. That is, "rape" is often used to describe cases where the victim did not factually consent to the sex act, and "statutory rape" captures a range of scenarios where the victim may or may not have factually consented, but in either case, the statute would not have accepted that factual consent as providing legal consent (and thus, it is not actually necessary to even ask/answer the question about factual consent). My sense is that, usually, cases involving children are pretty trivially easy to prosecute as "statutory rape", and it's only when there are significant other factors (usually clear evidence of force/violence) that can be shown, where it is 'promoted' to your category of "aggravated rape". There's often little point, from the standpoint of what is actually prosecuted, to pursuing a 'partially-promoted' case, where they try to show that there was no factual consent, but without sufficient evidence to bump it all the way up to "aggravated". Like, sure, it can help you with the jury to have the victim say that it felt bad and icky and they said they didn't like it and didn't want it, but I don't think it 'bumps the charge up' in a lot of cases.

Thus, I would generally find an unqualified use of "rape" to be rather ambiguous, as well as the slightly-qualified "child rape". It's still not entirely clear which bucket it would fall into.

...of course, if you start asking more pointed questions about whether children can factually consent, why/why not, and why/why not a statutory regime should accept that factual consent, you open a whole box of absolute conceptual mess, which is a historical sore spot for the more Foucauldian-inspired left.