Like any law, however, age of consent laws are materialised in police action. What effect they really have depends in part on how police choose to enforce them. That in turn depends on the political and moral culture that police officers partake of. The very fact that there are children being arrested and cautioned for having sex, or being charged on child pornography offences merely for sending one another semi-naked photographs, or sexts, indicates what some of that culture is like. The fact that people are actually reporting children to police, and that police are keeping intelligence databases on children who sext, and threatening them with the sex offenders register, is another indication.
This is where the ideological presumption of childhood innocence – a presumption which is all the more effective since everyone knows it is bullshit – feeds into the institutions of the state, and is embodied in violence. And it is violence directed, not mainly against ‘paedophiles’, but against children who are experimenting with their sexuality, as they always will. The potential problems with sexting – abuse, online humiliation, shaming, bullying – are cited as reasons to surveille and punish sexting among children. When we talk about childhood sexuality, we only tend to talk about the problems and dangers, in a manner that implies that the chimera of a danger-free sexuality could be a reality. We don’t talk about how exciting it is for them to discover their own sexuality because, when it comes to childhood sexuality, we want to know nothing about it. We want innocence: ours, as the precondition for theirs; or theirs, as the precondition for ours.
All of
this is very good, not least because Mr Seymour spends as little time as humanly possible on the circumstances that provoked the piece: the quite repugnant weaponisation of accusations of sexcrime engaged in by partisan hacks of the "left" gloating at the doing down of a fellow who thoroughly deserved to be done down almost entirely for other reasons than those which brought his downfall. Instead, Mr Seymour carefully and sensibly discusses matters of considerably greater importance, dealing with the incitement with all due brevity:
If the discussion about the age of consent is had on the terms set by Yiannopoulous, it won’t be anything to do with preventing child sexual abuse. It will be a mirror of alt-right-style snark predicated on the intrinsic bad faith of any such discussion, hinting that anyone who thinks this is a debate worth having must be either a paedophile or an apologist. It will be people strutting about and attempting to intimidate others into not saying things they can’t bear to hear. And indeed, that is exactly what is happening, on the social media Left.