lonely lesbian hours

true youth liberation acknowledges that the treatment of children in our current society is oppressive and discriminatory, and believes that you can and should treat children with the same amount of respect and dignity that you give adults, and that as children people should have access to their rights and have autonomy in a way that isn't just the huge raffle of "Will I have Good parents or Bad parents?"

true youth liberation understands that you don't have to be "mature" or "fully developed" (you are always developing) to require respect and autonomy. true liberation acknowledges that children are still children who are still learning about the world, hold ignorance, and cannot make informed consent decisions (this is especially true of younger, prepubescent children). they can't choose to be a part of a family channel, they can't choose whether they need education (this is referring to skills that would lead to them having informed consent in the future, such as reading, basic maths, and the development of critical thinking skills. this doesn't refer to the education system), and most importantly, they can't choose to have sex with an adult. true youth liberationists are very against the idea of biological children "consenting" to sex with adults, because they cannot. anything close to that is sexual assault, and any child "consenting" to sex with an adult was likely groomed and coerced to say that. The same goes for large age gaps between children because of their physical and mental development over time, such as between a nine year old and a 15 year old. true youth liberation believes in sex education for children as young as they can begin to comprehend it, consisting of knowing genitalia, how to keep it clean, who should be touching it and why (no one without your consent, and the only people who should be touching are doctors and your guardians for medical purposes only, with you able to revoke it), etc. There's nothing wrong with children knowing about the basics of sex as an action/activity at that age in my opinion, they just don't need to developmentally until they are pubescent

child predation under the guise of youth liberation uses the fact that children are people to say that children are as mature as adults and can consent to sex. they believe that saying a child can't is adultist and underrating their mental capacity, when we have studies to show that children are not mentally developed for large age gap relationships at that age. child predation takes advantage of the fact that children are naturally curious about their bodies, including in a sexual nature, and uses that to justify adults using their bodies for sexual purposes. it is the same form of manipulation you see non-youthlib predators using for children, the "you're so mature" "you can handle it" "this is just what people do when they love each other" and the fact that as a grooming tactic, they will make the child feel autonomous and respected in ways that our adultist society will not allow for.

Because a thing about the narrative surrounding child and youth molestation that really fucking irks me is that in this discussion two assumptions are being made from the beginning:

Up till a specific age people absolutely are incapable of a very vaguely defined idea of "consent" (not just sex), usually building on the assumption that until that age people are incapable of understanding consequences.

Sex is something inherently harmful and negative.

I will say here again: yes, currently it is indeed not possible for children and youngsters to consent to anything with an adult. And that is because someone who legally is being treated as a non-person can never consent, because due to their non-personhood their consent is meaningless. Specifically because people who are legally treated as non-people lack the ability to meaningfully deny someone who is legally treated as a person. This holds true for other scenarios as well where a group has no legal rights.

Researchers who do research on this topic - be it from the perspective of anthropology, pediatric psychology, pediatric sexology, or sociology - do all agree that a lot children technically have an interest in sex, with this interest usually starting somewhere between the ages of 7 and 11, so before puberty. Even before there are interests in the body, though usually that is more curiosity driven rather than sexual. But it is fairly normal, for example, for primary school children to masturbate (or at least try to do that). And depending on opportunity and cultural context some might engage in sexual behavior with one another.

And I think technically speaking I do not need to talk about what happens once puberty starts.

If you go through anthropology and history, obviously the current way we deal with sex, and especially sex among younger people, is almost entirely rooted in Victorian ideals. It was usually a Victorian ideal that the rich, white child was an example of purity, with sex in Victorian times obviously being seen as impure (and this is a thought that has been around ever since). There is some studies out there suggesting - though given it is an understudied topic and the replicability crisis is real I do not want to emphasize them too much - that in fact this construct: of children as pure and therefore non-sexual is a big driver of more recent issues in regards to pedophilia. With some evidence suggesting that a lot of pedophiles (as in people who are actually attracted to children) being more rooted in severe OCD, that is specifically brought on by the fact that sexuality of young people being such a taboo.

Though it should again be noted: at least half, if not way more of all cases of child molestation are crimes of opportunity, committed by people who target children because of their legal status as non-people, allowing the molester, who very likely is a person of authority in the social life of the child, to assert more power over a child victim than they could over an adult victim.

And that is the core of the issue here. Anon asking about this implies that treating children like people would create a scenario where adults would without legal consequences sexually molest children. Even though sexual abuse would very much still be illegal - like it is for adults as well.

What youth liberation would create though would be a scenario where a child is no longer constantly in situation under the control and authority of their abusers (including sexual abusers, because again: more than 90% of sexual abuse cases involving minors have the perpetrating adult be a person of authority), and also allow children more easily to access legal protection. Because I need to note this again: due to legally not being people, a child cannot go to the police or even fucking youth protection services and say "I want to get [adult] charged, because they raped me". In most countries this can only be done by an adult. So if the most likely sexual abuser of a child (a parent) is committing the sexual abuse, the current system is in fact set up to make it highly unlikely for the child to escape this sexual abuse, unless there is another adult around who protects them. And even in those cases where another adult is around, there is a bunch of cases where it still ends with that other adult being charged for defamation.