Party Vibe

I agree the UK system has some flaws and anomalies but its coped relatively well with things like the Internet and most people have set their own boundaries. I know a chap a bit older than me only a year or so who got with a younger girl of around 19/20 but it is a stable loving relationship and they are now proud parents.

Abusive and controlling relationships are illegal at any age from teens to OAPs and in our country and Northern Europe there appears to be a greater level of protection against them than in the USA and Southern Europe.

The Northern European countries (including to a lesser extent the UK) do have some mechanisms for dealing with the complex issue of teenage relationships where one or more partners are just below age of consent so they aren’t judged too harshly, whilst being aware that predators do exist at comparatively young ages.

My interest in criminology means I research the history of repeat offenders who make the news and modern surveillance and evidence gathering techniques often shows that the “dirty old men” very often started out as “dirty young men” but lack of childrens and womens rights until the 1980s meant they went unpunished.

this rise in equal rights intermixed with a rise in free expression and championing youthfullness has made things complex, it is true you often cannot easily tell if a girl or young woman is 13 or 40 especially round here where there are a lot of precocious girls and young mothers (one obviously leading to the other), as well as relationships with larger age differences (more so south of the Stour in Essex). At the same time few of us would want to sacrifice the permissive society as the music scene would not exist without it or would be even more downsized and censored (like in conservative Eastern countries).

its not a dodgy subject but a difficult one, what is dodgy is creepy Americans posing as different people to try and use perceived “European permissiveness” (i.e. cherry picking what bits of European law they think helps older men) to eat away at what smaller level of women and childrens’ rights exist in their country.