Kevin_Lowe
Unregistered
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2003
- Messages
- 12,221
What are these properly controlled studies with older kids? That sounds like weasel words. The studies I am aware of showed no "psychological damage" to 14 and 15 year olds who had (simple) consensual sex with legal adults, much less damage "akin to being severely mauled by a dog".
I had a quick look and I couldn't find the relevant article again, which is annoying.
Anyway, as I recall it the crappiest, usually early studies lumped people together without doing any controls at all and concluded that having sex when young caused all sorts of psychological damage. This was mainly because people from poorer and broken homes tended to have sex earlier and tended to have worse life outcomes.
Then people did some studies that controlled for this to a reasonable extent and found no statistically significant link between early sex and poor life outcomes.
This bugged people, so even larger and better-controlled studies were done that did show a statistically significant link between early sexual activity and depression and whatnot. As I recall it (and I can't find the study as I said) they even tried to control for things like risk-taking behaviour, although I'm generally very suspicious about the scientific validity of psychologist's attempts to measure such characteristics with questionnaires in such a way as to yield data about long-term behaviour.
As I said, there's no scientifically supported story about the cause of the increased risk of depression and whatnot. It's just a correlation, and lots of people who start having sex quite young turn out fine.
It might just be that a certain percentage of people seek out relationships that are bad for them, and that those people would be better off in a chastity belt at any age, for example. The data doesn't say.
Until better data comes along I provisionally support age of consent laws in the general ballpark of age sixteen, in about the same way that I support speed limits even though I know that they are somewhat arbitrary. However better data could come along tomorrow.