So the "age of concent" of 10 isn't really an age of concent. It's an age of culpability before civil court in which your actions can have some barring on judgments a court applies to you, in original common law.
That is if at 11 you do something sketchy the court can hold you accountable. But at 6 you are immune to the court, because you can only be punished for your agencied actions and at 6 you don't have agency. At 10 in common law it is considered that you do. That ended up carrying over to sexual things in time when no one was really thinking about that because the issue didn't really come up that much.
The feminists came in and tried to fix that issue and tried to bump up the age as far as they could. They in some cases aimed for 21. They managed to get to 18 in some states but not all by far. Not even most. But then those other states started conforming to other state's expectations, and we now have almost universal 18 age of concent.
I don't mean to come off as the wrong kind of guy but I think the feminists kind of jumped the shark a bit with 18. I say this mostly because of the people just over 18. I don't think the romeo and Juliet laws are far enough and don't account for months. I say this as someone who at 18 was dating a girl who was going to be 15 for three more months. Senior-sophmore. Thanks to my religious persuasions I didn't do anything stupid but I could have been a criminal just for dating a girl I knew when we were both kids in high school. Because of not accounting for months it makes a weird timing issue where one second you aren't a criminal if you date someone, so you do, and the next day you are. And now it's even tighter. It used to be three years, now in some states it's two, including mine. I legit know a kid in my area that just graduated that's a sex offender for having consensual sex with a junior. She later decided she didn't like him (he one night standed) and #metoo. They couldn't prove rape, though that was her allegation, and it was disproven by polygraph and shown that she was lying. He was still slapped with the age difference though. A senior and a junior we are talking about.
Nice post, sad story.
Common law was such a low age because in bygone days 1- the life expectancy was much shorter, who knew if she would live to be 16 or 17? And 2- there was no notion of "childhood". Children born into peasant farming families worked the fields or house as soon as they were able. Children in the cities worked in factories or roamed & stole from the streets (think the Artfull Dodger & his gang from Oliver Twist). For sure if some little 10 year old spit stole from my shop I'd want him punished as an adult, they need to learn that type of behavior is not accepted in our culture.
(post is archived)