Interesting article

[Bether6074]

I guess there are a lot of gray areas. It's the entire idea of "taking advantage" of someone who has a lower mental capacity that I personally would have a major problem with.

[CoffeeCat]

^ who has the lower mental capacity tho, the victim or the predator?

But I understand what you mean. It's like corrupting innocence or violating another person's conscience - which is outright detestable.

[blacknblue]

Juliette was 13 I believe. Romeo wasn't much older. He fought a duel and killed a man at that age, if I recall correctly. In a time when the average lifespan was in the thirties to forties, early teens was not quite as young as it is now.

My mother's eldest sister got married in the early years of the twentieth century, just after WW1, at the age of 15. She stayed married to the same man all until death did them part and gave birth to a small army of children. They were quite content with each other.

I have read that in Ancient Rome it was a joke that you could "go halfway to Athens but all the way to Alexandria". Meaning you could marry your half-sister in Athens but you could legally marry your full sister in Alexandria. Modern day France abolished its incest laws, along with several other European nations, quite some time ago. I believe that the USA is the only modern developed country in the western world that makes it illegal anywhere to marry your first cousin. In Mexico and Canada it is legal, to the best of my knowledge, and (I think) it is legal everywhere in Europe.

(European, Canadian, etc. readers please correct me if I am wrong.)

So maybe we should first define our terms, like Dis said. What exactly constitutes pedophilia? I lost my virtue at 16. I am not proud if it either. She was rather nastily indiscriminate, as well as being a poor girl lost soul with lousy self-esteem and a drug problem. Neither of us had any business engaging in sex, considering our general ignorance and emotional immaturity. But that doesn't mean that we abused each other.

Note that according to the laws in place at that time and locations, even though we were both 16 I could have been arrested for statutory rape if we had been caught. How sensible is that?

[Elessar]

Just to meddle over facts, I think Romeo was 19 or 20, and the life expectancy wasn't 30 or 40 then, that's like Neanderthalian. It would have been in the 50's or 60's I think... But taking young brides was definitely common. Juliette, though, was considered to be on the young side, and she was 14.

[blacknblue]

Just to meddle over facts, I think Romeo was 19 or 20, and the life expectancy wasn't 30 or 40 then, that's like Neanderthalian. It would have been in the 50's or 60's I think... But taking young brides was definitely common. Juliette, though, was considered to be on the young side, and she was 14.

Just to be stubborn. Here are some links.

From the Boston University Medical Campus web site:

http://www.bumc.bu.edu/Dept/Content.asp ... ageID=5749

The Boom in Centenarians: From Pyramid to Rectangle.
The age composition of the population is changing dramatically. More and more people are now able to achieve their individual life expectancy potentials. This is a dramatic change from the turn of the 20th century, when many people died prematurely especially in infancy and the average life expectancy was 46 years. Families on average would lose a quarter of their children to infectious diseases.

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancies

The greatest improvements have been made in the richest parts of the world. Life expectancy increased dramatically in the 20th century. Life expectancy at birth in the United States in 1900 was 47 years. At the end of the century it was 77 years, an increase of 64% (or an increase of 30 years). Similar gains have been seen throughout the world. Life expectancy in China was around 35 years in 1950. At the century's close it had risen to around 71 years. Life expectancy in India at midcentury was around 32, by 2000 it had risen to 64 years.

You don't have to go back to Neanderthal times. Just back to your grandfather's day.

[pookha]

well it depends on from what age is one calculating the life expectancy . is it done at birth which of course would have been skewed by the high mortality rates in early childhood or was it calculated from say teenage years on which would give a more realistic number for someone who did survive childhood .

The arithmetic mean of the distribution of ages at death is called life expectancy (i.e., expectation of life at birth), and is widely used as an indicator of the health of the population

Since mortality changes over time, no actual population experiences the survival depicted in a period life table. Such a table represents, instead, a hypothetical, or synthetic, cohort. Comparing values of life expectancy from different period life tables is really equivalent to comparing age-standardized mortality rates, since reciprocal of life expectancy is a form of age-standardized mortality rate.

from the oxford dictkionary..

The average number of years which an individual can expect to live in a given society, normally derived from a national life table. Life expectancy is usually given from birth but may apply at any age, and because, in all societies, mortality rates tend to be rather high in the first year of life, life expectancy at birth is usually significantly lower than at one year old

also social standing is going to affect this number.
plus, fun variables such as was one lucky enough not to live during one of the yes many plague periods.

also social standing would have played a part in the expectation of when juliet would be involved with some one else.
frankly her father states she isnt ready yet and is two years away from being ready. for one thing she isnt 14 yet.

Capulet
But saying o'er what I have said before:
My child is yet a stranger in the world;
She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,
Let two more summers wither in their pride,
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

kick in that shakespeare really seemed to want to get across juliet was just too young and immature he lowered her age from some of the source material in which she was a little older but still for her standing ect considered to young to wed.

interestingly enough 16 in several states is the magic number between statutory rape or not.

[pookha]

as for what started this discussion ..
the whole thing has been debated since the first article appeared.
at different times the toronto police have said they were misquoted though they also have said a majority of those arrested had some form of star trek or star wars stuff.
what is interesting is that from multiple articles it appears it took just one item to get someone to be considered to be a trekkie even if it was just an image on ones computer of someone in a trek costume.
or an autograph photo of william shatner.

as for ellen ladowsky a lot of what she wrote makes me laugh
and wonder just how much trek did she watch.

In fact, Star Trek paraphernalia has so routinely been found at the homes of the pedophiles they've arrested that it has become a gruesome joke in the squad room. (On the wall, there is a Star Trek poster with the detectives' faces replacing those of the crew members). This does not mean that watching Star Trek makes you a pedophile. It does mean that if you're a pedophile, odds are you've watched a lot of Star Trek.

Despite the cartoonish trappings of sexiness, there are, in fact, no sexual or romantic relationships aboard the Enterprise.

hello we actually see a wedding.
that off duty among the lower ranks there is hand holding and people getting interested in each other.

as for pedophilia even though she was over 200 years old or so kirk was weirded out by the seemingly teenage miri being attracted to him/

[Bether6074]

I guess the whole thing that bothers me is this idea that being accepting is somehow bad. I really believe that any kind of society has moral codes. Accepting differences in people does not necessarily mean that "anything goes", I wouldn't think. I wouldn't think it would mean that you can abuse others for your own pleasure. It's probably much like the studies about violence in video games leading to real life violence. If there is some problem there to begin with and information isn't being clearly processed in a person's brain, they may get the wrong messages. That likely doesn't happen with a large percentage of folks. I've always seen the world of Star Trek as a place where everyone is more tolerant of differences than in today's real world. I've always felt that that was a beautiful thing.

When I was thinking about the pedophile thing, I was thinking of a major age gap. I never mean to say anything that might upset or offend anyone personally. I hope everyone understands that. If I did, I apologize. Maybe the subject is a bit touchy right now with me because I have an 11 year old daughter.

[justTripn]

Twenty years ago I was working in a foreign country and needed to learn to speak Hmong. I was reading a poem in Hmong with my teacher and it was all about first love and flowers and butterflies on mountain tops in Laos and my teacher was enthused about it and I was like, sorry it doesn't grab me, I must be missing something. (We were both in our early twenties.) He had gotten married around 13 or 14 to a wife of the same approximate age. He said "Oh, you would have to have been there, young in Laos and you would totally get it." (Or something to that effect) and I said, "Really?" And then he very candidly changed direction and said, "No, not really. When I got married I didn't know alot about love, and then the babies started coming. I learned later." Yet, he and his wife were very evidently in love, with like five kids. I could tell they were close because of a serious illness he later had.

Anyway. OT?

[Bether6074]

That's a very sweet love story.

I honestly never meant to say anything against other cultures or other time periods. That is really NOT what I intended. I would never do that. I'm just not very good at explaining things the way I'm thinking them sometimes.

[blacknblue]

I hope I didn't offend anyone either. I certainly don't feel offended by anyone. What struck me is something that I have often noticed about our culture, and that is our ethnocentrism when it comes to morality. In both directions. For example, an american who travels to a country where it is legal to have sex with a young teenager and does so can be arrested when he comes home. Yet that same country might be condemned by the powers that be here because they make homosexuality illegal. One the one hand, we demand that other people adhere to our standards of what constitutes right behavior. But on the other hand, we also demand that other people adhere to our standards of tolerance.

Isn't demanding that someone else adhere to your standards of tolerance kind of a contradiction?

[JadziaKathryn]

Isn't demanding that someone else adhere to your standards of tolerance kind of a contradiction?

Yes, it's one of the more problematic things about people who demand tolerance.

All the same, I think anyone who thinks pedophilia would be okay in the Trek universe is delusional. Then again, I also think pedophiles are several crayons short of a box (in a sick way) as it is.

[blacknblue]

As the father of two children, I have to agree. And I would not hesitate to skin and scalp anyone who tried it with my kids. But it is interesting to see people try to justify something when they obviously have not completely thought it through, isn't it?

[Rigil Kent]

Isn't demanding that someone else adhere to your standards of tolerance kind of a contradiction?

Yes, it's one of the more problematic things about people who demand tolerance.

It has been my observation that the people who scream the loudest about tolerance are usually the most intolerant of people.

[CoffeeCat]

^ I'll agree with that.