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Notes -
How much of that is authorities tolerating Stone Age norms about consent and marriage, and how much is creepy uncles?
I don't know, but my impression is that there's plenty of both.
While that doesn’t surprise me, and a lot of Stone Age norms about age of consent, marriage, relationships, and sex wind up as just celebrating creepy uncles, it seems like it’s an important distinction to be made, especially because the authorities can in theory just say ‘no, you don’t get to marry 11-year-olds just because it’s your cultural tradition’ and the people stopping the authorities from doing so are probably mostly woke people who will proceed to pointing at that statistic in order to justify more of the woke program.
To be clear, I don't think there's any child marriage going on. But I think there's a non-trivial amount of 17 year old boy having sex with 12 year old girl and that being shrugged off as pretty much normal. As well as much older men using their power in the community to pretty much do what they like.
But, again, I'm no expert.
I’ve definitely read articles about aboriginal tribes that get to marry prepubescent or very early adolescent girls if they pinky-swear not to consummate it until she’s of age, which doesn’t seem like it actually happens(the waiting). Certainly similar arrangements among less sympathetic to the media people(eg Saudi Arabia’s child marriages with a clause delaying consummation), it seems pretty well documented that consummation is not in fact delayed, to say nothing of the ‘duh, married couples have sex’ aspect. But it’s entirely possible the authorities have put a stop to that custom and it’s mostly later adolescent on very early adolescent abuse(statistically the median case of CSA) being culturally accepted.
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