Graded Age of Consent Laws

Why not propose a scheme along these lines?  The first number is the age of one partner, and the range of numbers is the range of people of a certain age who can legally have sex with a person of first.  It goes for any combination or number of sexes.

14: 11-17
15: 12-18
16: 12-24
17: 12-25
18-21: 14-up
21: 15-up

The thing that really bugs society is the whole ADOLESCENCE/children question around the consent laws.  In theory, we have no immediate moral problem with a 25 year old fucking an 80 year old, since both of them have made the mystical transition into adulthood.  However, we say that a 40 year old and a ten year old is RIGHT OUT.  To quantify the ages so precisely around adolescence seems strange, as well.  To accomodate this, we could have less nasty non-jail sentences (seeing a shrink/community service) for, for example, an 18 year old tapping a 13 year-old), all the way up to whatever age is right-out.  Send a 25 year old who got with an 8 year old to jail.  The process of fixing the age cutoffs could be helped by the psychological establishment.

>>23
>>24
>>27

Kids just gone through puberty are still kids themselves, and naive and ineffectual in a great many respects.  If you don't understand this simple principle, then you're not too far removed from puberty yourselves.  sex between persons of very different ages usually connotes a "power question", and it's much easier for a middle aged man to abuse a younger teenager (which is not to say that it's not often the case that a middle aged man can abuse a middle aged woman)  Why then, do we not pay special attention to the adults who are abused?  For one thing, it's another discussion.  In the second place, criminology starts with the assumption that abuse is a usual component when there extreme age gaps-and one participant is on the shy side of adulthood, having practically no autonomy.

HOWEVER, it is pretty nuts to me that a 17 year old and a 21 year old can have sex and one of them gets in legal trouble for it-that's what spurred me to suppose a graduated law in the first place, and that's what spurred me to think that there must be a (happier) medium.  Some states already have statutes in a similar spirit.  The idea of these laws is not to condone early sexual contact, but to remove an unnecessary stigma from two young people experimenting.  All laws with respect to abuse, assault, and rape remain intact.

Finally, >>27, you are obviously wrong when you make the blanket statement that "if you are having sex, you are an adult".  Lots of folks may make it to full fleged adulthood with minimal sexual contact, but most don't.  It's-gee-a component of the TRANSITION to adulthood, for most people.  The false dichotomy of "adults" and "little kids" is also inadmissable, since the main group under discussion is adolescents.  As for 12 and 13 year olds who do get caught doing things, I don't see too much use for the law, except if there was an abuse of some kind.