The thing you need to understand about consent, is that children need to be understood as capable of consent. This is not about letting adults have sex with children.
You need to do this for children's sake, to give them the agency they need to traverse life, otherwise you will end up being abusive to the children around you.
This is something you must understand. The inability to consent cannot exist without its natural conclusion, the inability to revoke consent. They are both part of the same system, because they both stem from the same root, of the child as something unable to decide for itself.
Consent is not just about sex! I hope we all recognize this, but consent is about the ability to choose what happens with our own body — with the clothes we wear and how we are dressed, with the food we eat and who chooses it, with the medical care we receive and who practices it, and countless more moments of personal freedom.
If you cannot ask a child, for example, if they're okay with having the doctor touch them for their medical checkup, you will either Never be able to touch the child (something that, in practice, is never the case) or you will end up violating their boundaries.
Beyond that, the idea of children as unable to consent is foundational to the removal of agency and boundaries from children. Because a child cannot consent, and because there are cases where that child must be touched (for a very stark example, grabbing a child about to walk on a car-filled road, or otherwise, the needs of medical examination), we create a world where that child's boundaries are managed by the adults around them. Where and how the child can be touched is up to their family, or any authority figure present.
This is altogether bad! Children need to be understood as able to say when they do not want to be touched, for this reason. Because children are understood as unable to say yes, they are not listened when they say no. This goes from silly things, like the food they eat, the things they choose to wear, to important things.
Furthermore, then, in the realm of sexuality, it is plainly obvious that this framework of children as unable to consent is abusive by design. A child, because it, as it's parent's property, is unable to say yes, because that consent is offloaded to their authority figures, cannot be allowed to say no. This framework then does not prevent CSA, but is rather the thing that creates it!
Think about the way spanking (something understood as a form of CSA) is so common, so acceptable. This is because the boundaries of a child are treated as secondary to the parent's authority. In the same way, the way parents do not ask before stripping their kid, before touching them.
The class of child is vague and vast, but we need to let them express their ability to consent, to say whether they want things or not, or we WILL enable and create abuse.
You may ask yourself, if children can consent, then does getting rid of the aforementioned framework mean accepting that children should have sex with adults? To which, as I have said earlier, of course not. No matter the framework, it is true that adults will have power over those younger, those still discovering the world. It is our responsibility to understand that power exists, and it is your responsibility to understand that i am not advocating for child-adult relationships.
kianamaiart
origamiaround
blakekathryn
2087
