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The testimony from one of his accusers is interesting. She was 16 at the time (the UK age of consent) and her parents felt they couldn't do anything to stop her seeing Brand. It's as if they considered the limits of their own parental authority as extending to the letter of the law and not a jot further. I personally would have expected a good mother to stop her daughter 'dating' a celebrity sex addict, age of consent be damned. The girl herself comes to the conclusion that the law needs to be changed to protect 16-18 year olds.
Although to answer your rhetorical question, it's pretty easy to have lots of consensual sex without doing the stuff Brand is accused of. Holding a girl's mouth open so you can spit into it isn't a case of blurred lines and miscommunication.
The problem is, if she's legally the age of consent, what can they do? Lock her in her room? That's abuse and the second she calls the child abuse hotline, social services and maybe the cops will be at the door. Stupid young 16 year olds are going to threaten to run away or kill themselves or other stupid stunts if their parents interfere with "True Love".
Tell her she's too young to have sex? The entirety of society is going to condemn such shaming and controlling and repression.
Mutually assured destruction, motherfuckers. See you after the cops brought you back from running away. Or in the hospital after your suicide attempt. Or the morgue.
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And in America preventing 16-year olds from dating older men is a thing that parents probably do more often than they allow it. 16 is a common age of consent in the USA. Britain's legal and cultural environment is probably not that different unless you can point to relevant differences.
Yes, there's parents that are unable or unwilling to put their foot down and stop their teenaged daughter from being a toy for an adult man. While parents who are able and willing to do so have somewhat less support from society at large than they would have had in 1200 AD, lots of them still manage it. Thus we can conclude that the former subset of parents generally have some hangup in themselves rather than being stopped by broader society from controlling their daughters.
True. Which makes it so hilariously sad two years later when those same parents send their daughters off to college in another city/state without a second thought, where they will completely lose the ability to prevent their daughters from making such mistakes.
How many fathers who proudly subscribe to the "Rules for Dating my Daughter" would react with shock and outrage if you suggested that maybe paying for their little princess to spend four years away from parental supervision in an environment full of sex, drugs, and alcohol is not the best idea? Probably most of them.
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I think there's some major cultural differences based on filter bubble about what is acceptable parenting as far as intervening in your 16-18(/21) year old's personal life. Obviously these parents lived in a bubble where they considered it unacceptable intervention to stop their sixteen year old daughter from dating an adult male celebrity with a bad reputation for treatment of women; lots of parents would think that a pretty reasonable intervention based on just one of those factors, let alone all of them.
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