I'm afraid the subject is a bit too complex to get into with any real substance here.
Suffice it to say that I believe that labeling a ten-year-old boy as a sex offender (for some little act of affection toward the opposite sex - not rape or assault) is more than simply unethical, it's unconscionable.
People who do this are acting from a variety of motivations including honest fear as well as a simple exercise of raw power over others. Although conservatives sometimes get the blame for this kind of thinking, it's often liberals who are behind it, using public fears of kids having sex way too early as a lever to get this kind of insane law enacted.
I don't believe it's about what you or I did at 10 or 12, but about control and a reaction to the earlier sexual awareness of children, which is sometimes manifested in pregnancy and STD's in young teens. It won't work of course (you can't stop nature, just divert it, which is what sports are for) but the folks who wish to control everyone else will keep on trying...and ruining young lives in the process. They need to be stopped but it isn't easy when you have a mob mentality and the insane 'Zero Tolerance' attitude about sex, drugs and guns that make a criminal out of a fifth-grader that gives an asprin to a friend, carries a plastic watergun in his packback or gives a girl a peck on the cheek.
Sometimes I believe we're losing our collective mind in this country, but then, half the country voted for Al Gore, so I suppose that proves it and it may already be too late.
As for the age of consent in my state (CT);
it's 16 but they want to drop it to 14 (dumb) and it's not rape if the boy is less than two years older than the girl (up to 18 of course), so if an 17-year-old guy has sex with his willing 16-year-old girlfriend it's some kind of misdemeanor but not rape....unless she claims it was.
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