SE 2 - Age of Consent

Mexico at 14, Holland at 12,

and the US at 18....
A sure recipe for legal woes and expenses,  

and for what?

    In Mexico the minimum age of sexual consent is 14. When they come to America the different ages of consent (it is of course 18 in the USA) are not something they learn about. Therefore, many Mexicans who come to the USA get into a type of trouble that they had no idea was criminal.

    An 18 year-old male becomes involved with a 15-year-old, and before they know it, the girl's mother, very unhappy with the relationship, turns them into the police.

    Trial or pleading follows and then a short prison sentence or even a quite long one if the charges can be made to stick. Then deportation is obligatory and so the ridiculous merry go round continues. Guess who pays for all this?

    Yes, the American taxpayer. The cost is 200 dollars a day for prison and another 200 dollars a day for holding them in deportation centers plus all the various ancillary costs.

   Multiply that by thousands and it is another really heavy bill for the USA, not to mention the human costs involved.

    To many American girls having a Mexican boyfriend is quite an adventure. Her “stepping out,” though, is often a huge button pusher for her parents. The young gent usually has quite a different attitude to sex that can be refreshing and even sometimes a bit scary.

    The US government could and should insist that all embassies hand any tourist in their own language, and at border crossings a pamphlet giving information on the highest age of sexual consent decree in the world (which I personally think is entirely necessary.)

    The US, despite or perhaps because of its protective laws, produces a huge number of sexual predators. All tourist offices should also carry this warning.

    There are also some Dutch persons in jail in the USA. The Dutch government has fixed the age of sexual consent at 12, with a proviso that a young person of 12 to 18 can bring a later charge of statuary rape if they feel that they were unfairly persuaded to have sex. That is quite a good compromise in its way. But it would only work in a place like Holland where there are quite extraordinary levels of trust between parent and child. As things are now, it wouldn’t work in the US.