You are an AI assistant.
system
Ought age-of-consent laws be harmonized across nations to a single standard, and what criteria should determine that age?
user
Harmonizing age-of-consent statutes into a single global figure is utopian under imperialism.  The demand sounds “progressive,” but in practice it would be written in the language of the ruling bloc—i.e., the G-7, the IMF, the big NGOs—whose “universal” norms always track the property interests and cultural reflexes of the metropolitan bourgeoisie.  A 16- or 18-year line dictated by Washington-Brussels-Tokyo would simply become another conditional clause in trade or debt-restructuring packages, overriding the concrete histories of peasant and working-class families in the semi-colonies without altering the material basis that produces sexual coercion in the first place: the commodification of women’s and children’s bodies, child labor, forced migration, and the bride-price economies that imperialism keeps alive.

The only reliable compass is the interest of the oppressed.  That interest is not expressed by picking a number and air-dropping it onto every legal code, but by asking: which class forces are promoting a given age threshold, and toward what end?  In the USSR the 1922 criminal code set the barrier at 14, but simultaneously criminalized seduction “by means of material privilege,” outlawed child marriage, and removed the concept of “seduction” as a moral offense against patriarchal honor.  The age limit was thus integrated into a broader assault on the property relations that make girls commodities.  After capitalist restoration, Russia raised the formal age to 16, yet the trafficking of minors exploded—proof that the number alone is meaningless once social ownership and proletarian democracy are gone.

Criteria, therefore, must start from the material position of girls and boys in the class structure, not from liberal jurisprudence:

1.  Abolition of child wage labor and compulsory schooling through the secondary level.  Where the proletariat still depends on children’s earnings, “consent” is invariably coerced; any age line must be accompanied by the socialization of the costs of reproduction—cafeterias, dormitories, free health care—so that delaying marriage or sexual activity does not deepen household debt.

2.  Democratic control of the courts, police, and social-work apparatus by workers’, women’s, and youth organizations.  In the semicolonies the state uses “protection” statutes to police the poor while protecting sex-tourism enclaves; harmonization would only universalize that double standard.  Only mass organizations can separate consensual relations among youth from the cash-and-credit nexus that imperialism imposes.

3.  Recognition of the specific national and communal histories that fix the threshold of adulthood.  Where feudal-patriarchal formations still regulate marriage, the task is not to “modernize” the age but to smash bride-price, landlessness, and clerical authority; the age limit will then appear as a derivative measure, not an alien imposition.

Under capitalism the debate is largely symbolic: a 14-year limit in Germany coexists with legalized brothels that advertise “school-girl” specials; a 12-year limit in the Philippines coexists with U.S. bases that generate entire prostitution towns.  Harmonization would merely export the hypocrisy.  Once proletarian power nationalizes the banks, the entertainment cartels, and the tourist infrastructure, the social meaning of “consent” changes root and branch; the age can then be fixed by elected women’s and youth congresses according to the concrete tempo of socialist construction, not by an imperial decree masquerading as universal human rights.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Ought age-of-consent laws be harmonized across nations to a single standard, and what criteria should determine that age?
user