Consensual sex – at thirteen?

THE WAY THINGS ARE

‘It wasn’t just the pain of violent penetration when I was dry and ignorant of what was happening, it was also constant fear when he threatened to beat me if I told someone what he’d done.’ This admission from a childhood friend came many years after rape at a tender age by an uncle. We noticed she had always been hesitant to date boys, and thought she was just shy.

Alone she carried that horror into adulthood till she found a man who loved her and made her feel safe enough to talk about what was perpetrated against her.

In small communities girls and women are often afraid to tell they have been violated. Fear of shame, blamed for encouraging a man or boy to feel it was all right to take advantage. If pregnancy followed, the female was wanton, a sinner, and had to take responsibility for a baby.

Now young children are abusing other children. What sick mind decided it would be amusing to rape the avatar of a real person, the effect of which was appalling and damaging to the girl involved. UK authorities failed to act while men groomed hapless children for sex. The blame for so many young boys acting like unaccountable savages likely lies with easily available internet porn whose content illustrates that it’s fine to treat girls as whim-objects; they’re the ones having ‘fun’.

Rape and torture of unarmed women and girls has probably been a weapon of tribal warfare since humans began to fight each other. Celtic women, and their counterparts under the collective ‘Viking,’ were treated as equals and fought beside their menfolk. Yet both peoples subjugated female slaves.

Modern human rights regulations state it’s a crime to use sex as a terror element against women, but in the dark reality of conflict those laws rarely carry accountability and armies know it. Some cultures marry very young girls to older men. Convenient male notions of supremacy, no matter the race or creed, dominate the lives of many women.

Not much has changed in what pretend to be civilised times. Consensual sex at a very young age is another matter still. Netflix’s latest season of the engrossing The Good Doctor, showed a girl of 13 in need of immediate invasive surgery after consensual, supposedly protected sex with her same-age boyfriend.

One of the doctors is shocked the girl’s mother lets them sleep together. She feels 13 is too young physically and mentally. The mother says better in the open than having furtive sex, she can advise about safe sex. Yet contraception, as the fictional case showed, isn’t always 100 per cent safe and pregnancy can be life threatening at that age.

The young body needs years to mature, and mental ability to weigh risks and consequences should also be allowed to mature. Hormones kick in understandably, but a certain amount of self-discipline is needed with parental support and non-judgmental guidance.

A woman’s body has to cope with more complexity than a man’s: messy periods; giving nine months to a life-changing event carrying a baby; the agony of birth and the huge discomfort of menopause. Acne and a quick-fix, demanding penis in boys doesn’t come near.

In Europe and elsewhere there are long lists of women weaponised as tools of humiliation, brutal retribution and death. But who paid? These actions are deplored but continue mostly without justice.

The history of Cyprus is stained by rape and murder of women and girls of both ethnicities through men at warring odds with each other on the island. Cyprus knows first hand how repeated weaponised assaults can cause irreparable damage to the mind and body of women and girls. Again, who paid? Irish women suffered brutality and murder in past and more recent civil conflicts. Who paid?

The USA has walls of names of dead soldiers, the UK has its war memorials. There are no walls in countries where such crimes have been committed bearing the names of women and girls who suffered horribly for the decisions and ambitions of men in power whose women and daughters are safe.