Debate Guide: State hypocrisy

We have noticed a number of "tells" re. this policy outlook being a moral scheme completely unrelated to safeguarding.

• Common wisdom would tell us that a sexual offense has a victim and a perpetrator. Criminalisation of youth details examples where both minors were treated as perpetrators and victims at the same time. If this were not a moral scheme to appease prejudice, wouldn't our reaction to such events be fundamentally different?

• The very same governments who "protect" and "safeguard" minors by denying them a variety of civil liberties will allow foreign children to be abused in waged slavery for their own economies' benefit, and will punish children in much the same way as an adult when they see fit. All it requires is for a "child" to behave in an offensive, adult like manner, and we categorize them as delinquent at an early age - often an inescapable circle of criminality involving commitment to institutions and sex offender registers. In many western developed countries, a child is potentially responsible for his decision to commit crime from the age of ten or even earlier. If capable of choosing to commit burglary or murder at 10, why not a sexual relationship?

• Politicians and officials repeatedly talk up "evidence based" policies, but then go on to make ludicrous appeals to the "protective instincts" of parents. They can't have it both ways; either the measures are a reactionary moral scheme or have some grounding in an evidence based approach to child welfare.

• If governments were genuinely concerned about "protecting children", they would also be concerned about the results of cyclical paternalism and the associated phenomena. Only, these are adverse consequences of interventionism, so naturally they avoid addressing it.

• We seem to have a nepi problem in Western Society, so let's talk about it. Television networks allow adverts in which mothers intimately coddle, even kiss the buttocks of their babies. What if the father were to carry out such an abusive outrage? If he can't, then why? Surely this isn't because we are in the midst of a cynical moral scheme.

• One perfect example of the moral opportunism surrounding the "pedophile" is the theory of 'childlike', 'regressive' and 'weak' pedophiles who can only cope with 'childish' relationships. And yet the very trauma from these "childish" relationships is said to result directly from deliberate, intelligent manipulation and the abuse of a power gap.

See also

• Special Article: Adverse effects of hysteria.