spanky wrote:
312player wrote:
not sure how he would feel about slaves..you are getting sidetracked ....
Yes, quit getting sidetracked, Hank. Let's stick to the age of consent in the State of Hawaii.
Economist magazine article in last week's issue. Age of consent in Brazil is 14. But a court there just ruled that 12 year prostitutes (apparently they are common) were not raped because they had engaged in their business many times over. As such, the John who was caught is not guilty of rape because the girls had shown a history of consenting. Here is the article:
"Prostitution in Brazil
The wrong signal
A court decides some children are less equal than others
Apr 7th 2012 | SÃO PAULO | from the print edition
TO HAVE sex with young girls, said Brazil’s highest criminal court on March 27th, is “immoral and reprehensible”. But a man who had sex with three 12-year-olds in 2002, it decided, had committed no crime. Since 2009 the age of consent in Brazil has been 14, but at the time there was merely a presumption that sex with a child below that age involved violence and should therefore be regarded as rape. Reversing a previous ruling by other members of the Higher Court of Justice (STJ), the judges decided that this presumption could not be absolute, but must stand or fall on the facts of each case.
In this case, all three children worked as prostitutes. The mother of one had previously told a lower court that her daughter often missed school to join the other two turning tricks in the town square. That showed that the girls were “far from innocent, naive, ignorant or ill-informed about sexual matters,” the judges said. Whether they were mature enough to consent had to be decided with reference to their wide sexual experience, not just their age.
The judgment has provoked uproar. A congressional committee said it violates children’s constitutional rights, perhaps opening the way for referral to the supreme court. The government will seek to reverse the ruling’s effect. The president of the STJ has offered to take another look, though he warned that the judgment was technical and based on the law as it stood.
Child prostitution generally starts with rape, points out Atila Roque of Amnesty International. The child is often forced into the work. He worries that the judgment could weaken children’s legal protections. “The judges decided that a child who has been brutalised becomes freer to make sexual choices,” he says. “So a child prostitute is somehow no longer a child.”
Some of the outrage is misplaced, says Juliana Belloque, a public-defence lawyer in São Paulo. “People have the idea that the court has decided that prostitutes cannot be raped. That’s not right.” Tackling child prostitution is a matter of enforcing laws that make it a crime to persuade or force under-18s into selling sex, she says.
Under-age prostitution is very common in Brazil. Research in 2006 by the University of Brasília, the federal government and Unicef found children and adolescents selling sex in nearly 1,000 municipalities, a sixth of the total. Seaside cities such as Fortaleza, Recife and Rio de Janeiro are hotspots, as are ports and border towns. In 2007 the federal traffic-police said they knew of nearly 2,000 roadside locations where sex with children was for sale.
Ahead of the 2014 football World Cup and 2016 Olympics, the tourism ministry is promoting Brazil’s beaches, food and biodiversity. But the ministry says research into which websites were using its trademarks quickly turned into an attempt to stop many of them promoting Brazil as a destination for sex tourism. It has written to the webservers hosting 1,770 sites asking them to take down such material. It made this public on the same day as the STJ’s judgment muddied the message."
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