By what time would you say the new consensus had arrived?

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

And some of my 9th grade female students were eager for attention and physical contact, which was a challenge. They would stand beside me almost touching me or grab my arm or hand. My choice was to put a hand on a shoulder or pat a head. Some seemed very much in need of male parental attention. As this was a private school I was hired despite lacking any college background in education, so I really do not know what was taught in teachers education at that time about those subjects. But some faculty and administration spoke positively about the Summerhill philosophy, though the school was much more formal and traditional than that.  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

Daniel Cohn-Bendit is very much attacked for some quotes on "erotic encounters" with children. This triggered off a discussion in today's newsroom. These encounters must have taken place in Frankfurt in the late 1960s or 70s, around the time of a huge reform of the German penal code regarding sexual offences.

Is there any way to manage such a radical shift in paradigm without attacking the old one by limitless provocation?

Recently, the French minister of culture nominated Bob Dylan for the Légion d'Honneur. The committee of superannuated dignitaries who vet candidates apparently objected to him, allegedly because of his former drug use and, incredibly, his opposition to the Vietnam war.

They were overruled.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

In the olden days, prostitution was criminalised, which mainly meant that prostitutes were criminalised. This was quite perverse considering that most prostitutes ended up as prostitutes against their will, as victims of human trafficking over ever longer distances: this means being kidnapped or tricked by pimps or brothel owners, then raped and then coerced with taken-away papers and money, physical violence, threats of telling the family at home or harming the family at home, or drug addiction.

Going beyond decriminalisation, there is the concept of turning prostitutes into "sex workers", practitioners of just another job paying taxes and falling under regular state control, giving prostitutes legal protections and healthcare. In Germany, a legal reform in this sense was enacted a decade ago. The concept hit some limits in popular  when it came to jobless people and their treatment: can jobless people be recommended for such jobs and penalised for not taking them, and is that worse than when done for any other job?

However, the bigger issue is how this influences the human trafficking part. Which, in much of Europe, goes east to west in the last two decades. (For me this means that is I live in a "source country" for Western Europe and an "export market" for countries further east and south, thus both ends of the trafficking.) My arguments (based on the stories of escaped girls and op-eds by some sociologists I read) that the full legalisation of prostitution does nothing against the trafficking weren't exactly popular in the past, but again:

• Prostitution exists to serve a demand, a demand for sex any way the 'customer' likes, at 'affordable' prices. That means that sex workers who only do what they are willing to do and what's safe for them and ask for a decent sum won't ever cover the demand.
  
• Controllers going into a brothel to ask the girls about their condition won't do anything about the extortion part: the same methods of blackmail and dependency used to keep them 'working' will also work to get them to lie to the controllers.
  
• With the above, for pimps and brothel owners, fully legalised prostitution means that they can expand unbothered and take even more off the girls while the state finances their healthcare costs: in effect, a subsidy.

Human Trafficking Persists Despite Legality of Prostitution in Germany - SPIEGEL ONLINE

When Germany legalized prostitution just over a decade ago, politicians hoped that it would create better conditions and more autonomy for sex workers. It hasn't worked out that way, though. Exploitation and human trafficking remain significant problems.

...The police can do little for women like Alina. The pimps were prepared for raids, says Alina, and they used to boast that they knew police officers. "They knew when a raid was about to happen," says Alina, which is why she never dared to confide in a police officer.

The pimps told the girls exactly what to tell the police. They should say that they were surfing the web back home in Bulgaria or Romania and discovered that it was possible to make good money by working in a German brothel. Then, they had simply bought themselves a bus ticket and turned up at the club one day, entirely on their own.

Web of Lies

It seems likely that every law enforcement officer who works in a red-light environment hears this same web of lies over and over again. The purpose of the fiction is to cover up all indications of human trafficking, in which women are brought to Germany and exploited there. It becomes a statement that transforms women like Alina into autonomous prostitutes, businesswomen who have chosen their profession freely and to whom Germany now wishes to offer good working conditions in the sex sector of the service industry.

Another concept has been attempted in Sweden: decriminalising prostitutes but criminalising their clients. For me bizarrely, this method has been blamed for human trafficking by proponents of full legalisation, as if it didn't happen elsewhere. But the method may be failing for other reasons: lack of application.

No jail time for Sweden's sex buyers: report - The Local

Despite Sweden's much-debated and soon 15-year-old law that bans buying sex, rather than selling it, the statute has not resulted in any convicted sex buyers spending time behind bars.

Why didn't that shock us? Mainly, what shocked us was the reactionary, repressive atmosphere in which our own childhood and early adolescence had taken place, and that we were rapidly freeing ourselves from. What still astounds me about my 1950s childhood is how appallingly ignorant we were about anything to do with the body and above all anything sexual, concerning either children or adults (I don't know how old I was before I learned that adults had pubic hair). We were brought up in a vacuum where sex didn't exist and entire parts of the body were not spoken of. In my case, it was due to religious bigotry, but none of the kids, of religious or non-religious family, that I went to primary school with knew any more than I did. There was some dirty whispering among boys, but an "underground" ethos surrounded it and it could not come out into the open. It was mostly ill-informed anyway - I remember a boy bursting with the news that babies (we had no idea of what caused babies to happen) came out of women's bums ("must be brown," another boy commented).

After this, in the fast-moving sexual liberation of the '60s and '70s, the notion that we had always wanted sex seemed self-evident. What's more, remembering some of my own pre-pubescent experiences (under the cloak of utter ignorance, and therefore all the more convincing imo), I'd say there certainly are pre-pubescent desires. What we did not do was look at that with any kind of nuance as to what those desires were exactly, and to whom they were addressed. And by the turn of the '70s the agenda was provocation and ridicule to chase the guardians of the old order away, and there was no room for nuance there. We really thought nothing could stop us from turning the old world upside down.

I'm quite sure we didn't think that it was OK for dirty old men to molest children. We just weren't thinking about dirty old men, or not very seriously. What we were saying was, if you want it, get it on.

Insofar as that served as a pretext for some adults to prey on children and do them harm, we were wrong. Insofar as we were blowing up a dismally repressive old order, I still think we were right.

One can understand, perhaps, the confusion of certain catholic priests in this context?

Personally, I don't think we can find understanding for that. Even when things were "morally fluid," at least for the more relativist among us, it should have been clear that in this particular topic, we are always and everywhere going to be confronted with power on the one side and powerlessness (of children) on the other.

That was never the case with women's sexuality or with homosexuality, both involving a shift in attitudes regarding sex between autonomous actors, in order to recognize their equality before the law. Children have never been considered autonomous and/or equal before the law (understood that there is ambiguity here regarding what constitutes the age at which a child becomes adult, but with the caveat that certainly there is no ambiguity as regards pre-adolescents and probably great agreement as regards early adolescents as well) , and with good reason

The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet. Winston Churchill

This is, without a doubt, progress. But substantial minorities remain who reject the new approach, and adhere to older codes, generally based on their religion. These comprise mostly autochthonous Christians, and mostly immigrant Muslims.

This poses a moral problem to society in general. Such people often reject equality of rights for homosexuals (as seen in the substantial mobilisation in France against gay marriage), but perhaps more importantly, they try to preserve a patriarchal, ownership-based control of female sexuality. This constitutes a problem of human rights for women whose family circle espouses such codes.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

So who or what was protected by this collection of absurdities? Peter or Christine? Hardly. Some sexual mores that require marriage and the wish to procreate, but these mores had become controversial. That's why their defenders tried to claim they were protecting children. These mores were challenged by the concept of self-determination. This is what DCB argues when he writes about children touching him: they wanted it, and they were free. All sexual mores necessarily had to be questioned. Only after self-determination became (at least ostensibly) the criteria for banning sexual behaviour, could the debate move on to limiting this self-determination, but that happened later. DCB wrote exactly in the time when one set of sexual mores had lost all credibility, but wasn't yet replaced by the new consensus.

The bits about self-determination are, I'm sure, all very interesting if one wishes to engage is deep philosophical discussion of sexual evolution.  More often than not, much of the talk of "they wanted it," "they were free," "self-determination," etc, simply strikes me as adults rationalizing their own or others behavior.

Also, writing of five-year-olds "wanting it" -- and I'll grant the assumption of the account being fictional -- and defending such a statement as merely a means of being provocative strikes me as (1) not very provocative and (2) sick.

Also, too, Roman Polanski should be in jail and the French elite have no taste in film.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.