Sorry, can’t agree with you there. When authorities openly refuse to intervene, social predators are not only enabled, they are encouraged. If the police department in your area announced that they were no longer investigating car break-ins, how long do you think your stereo would stay in your car?

Whether the authorities intervene in any particular area or not definitely can affect whether predators do their hunting there, but not as much whether they do so at all. Should the police crack down, for example, on car break-ins on the street, I’d expect those pursuing that activity to shift their activities into a safer line, maybe going after car stereos in long-term parking for example.

We’ve got 2 million-plus people locked up in this country, and more than twice that number under the supervision of the criminal justice system to some degree as a whole.

And I made a distinction between the choice to exercise authority and the ability to exercise it. Even parents and schools are limited, often enough by the fear of lawsuits these days, into what they can do with troublemakers.

I don’t believe that social predators are enabled to the greater degree simply by the unwillingness of authorities to intervene.

Sorry, can’t agree with you there. When authorities openly refuse to intervene, social predators are not only enabled, they are encouraged. If the police department in your area announced that they were no longer investigating car break-ins, how long do you think your stereo would stay in your car?

In the case of children, who are subject to parental and school authority, the work-it-out-with-bullies message says “We do have authority over you and choose to exercise it. We just don’t choose to do so in the area of protecting you from predators your own age.”

“begal” should be “be legal”

This hypothetical woman does not automatically become anthing. She chooses to make decisions motivated by her desires without regard to her parent’s values, or society’s. In this case, her parents values are pro-feminist, pro-equal rights, pro-vegan, anti-privilege, anti-global warming, and anti-fur. Therefore, to she is asserting her agency to make decisions in opposition to parents’ and society’s expectations.

Some thirty year old men do have sex with thirteen year olds. It is called statutory rape. Statutory Rape is illegal sexual activity between two people when it would otherwise be begal if not for their age, i.e., sexual intercourse with a person who is younger than the statutory age of consent. Most ages of consent for women in this country are between 16 and 18. Society labeling a 16 year boy as a “sex offender for life” for commiting statutory rape with his 16 year old girlfrind is a form “legal” shame.

Hugo used the the example of high school and college age daughters having protected sex with someone that her family finds “threatening” as a good kind of assertive risk-taking. I used the age of 13 because there are a lot of 13 year old high school students in this country. I could have used 14 or 15 years old for my example instead.

“I do want young people, girls in particular (who are so much more vulnerable to shaming social messages) to act in accordance with their desire for adventure and experience and less out of anxiety about how they will be perceived.”

It would be interesting to see how a daughter of parents, with similar views to yours, would accomplish this. I could see something similar to the 80’s sit-com, “Family Ties”, where the two very liberal parents had a conservative son, Alex P. Keaton (played by Michael J. Fox). She could go the other way and have even less limits on her own behavior than her parents. Or, she could do both!

I was 13 in ninth grade and so were quite a few of my fiends. So I could see the daughter being a 13 year old high school student dating her 30-something year old teachers, out of a desire for adventure and experience. Then when she was 18, she could marry a rich, privileged, white, 40 year old, oil executive and start having the first of her ten children. She could wear chinchilla fur coats to various “Stop Global Cooling, Burn More Oil” and “Ban Feminist Studies in Public Colleges” fund raisers. Being raised not worry about how her parents and society perceive her, she could use her millions from her husband’s trust fund and stock options to help politicians get elected to repel Title IX and the Civil Rights Act. I’m sure her parents would be proud of her not being vulnerable to shaming social messages or being anxious about how her parents perceive her.

This was written in the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick.

I would imagine that where we probably differ is in how much responsibility ought to be and can reasonably be assigned to the relevant authorities in any context; and in how efficacious they can be at that task both in any specific case and in general.

The courts have ruled, in some pretty awful cases in which people lost their lives as a result, that the police cannot be legally held to answer for the failure to investigate or prevent any specific crime. That’s a practical recognition that the criminal justice system has a general responsibility to control crime, and not the sole responsibility to protect anyone or everyone.

I don’t believe that social predators are enabled to the greater degree simply by the unwillingness of authorities to intervene. In my view, some people simply will take what opportunities they can to take things for themselves and aggrandize themselves at the expense of and without regards to the rights of others, and there are always going to be such people out there. This may be a difference of opinion on human nature between us I suppose, and thus one that we could debate quite a few times without convincing each other either way.

What I will say, bringing the ideas of responsibility and efficacy together, is that we have certain norms and presumptions, both in our criminal justice system and in the grievance and disciplinary structures in most of our institutions, such as presumption of innocence, meeting a burden of proof, rights of the accused to challenge accusations, and so forth. We also limit, most notably in the criminal justice system, the ability of the authorities to investigate anything or detain anyone that they might wish to without cause based on articulable facts. These norms do inevitably provide a gap through which some bad conduct will always go uncorrected, and predatory people who cannot attenuate and modify their behavior at least enough to slide through that gap eventually tend to be relegated from society and its institutions, being variously incarcerated, expelled or fired. Those who are left often learn to skate by, and empowering the authorities sufficiently to deal with any significant proportion of such people would probably require discarding those norms that protect the accused to a degree that most of us would not countenance.

This goes all the more so for risks other than overt victimization by others, in which the inherent threats themselves do not change with the actions of the authorities, but arise simply from the risks and hazards of the natural and social world. An even GREATER degree of control and regulation of everyone’s behavior would be required if we were to try to stamp out utterly the dangers posed by unwise sexual choices or drug use (the apparently limitless rise in both the powers and size of the criminal justice system and the prison population in this country arising from actions against the latter prove my point).

It’s something of a Hobbesian argument, that we all are stuck with some degree of responsibility to protect and fight for ourselves. The only ultimate solution though would require empowering Hobbes’ unlimited sovereign to rule us all.

While interventions need to be made in cases in which people are facing threats that they are not equipped to handle themselves, exploitative, domineering and even violent or physically threatening behavior is an unfortunate fact of life that doesn’t end when one leaves school.

You do realize you just contradicted yourself there? “Facing threats that they are not equipped to handle themselves” is an unfortunate fact of adult life, too, so should we just leave our kids to figure that stuff out? Why is it OK to intervene for some threats, but coddling to intervene in others?

djw, while I agree with you about projecting anxieties, the flip side of that is projecting our nostalgia and middle-aged longing for our ‘exciting youth’ onto kids.