Sex in front of a child is "child abuse"

[softwareNerd]

A Rhode Island woman and her boyfriend were sentenced for felony child-neglect charges for having sex in front of their 9-year old. From the reports, this does not appear to be a case where the couple were doing this to induce the girl into having sex, nor does it appear that any obvious coercion was involved. It's about a couple who believed that sex is natural, animals do it all the time, kids can watch...things like that.

So, regardless of how one judges their philosophy and child-rearing approach, this does not appear to be a child-neglect issue at all. It appears to be an instance of the courts forcing its own particular ideological view on parents.

[Whoisjohngalt]

A Rhode Island woman and her boyfriend were sentenced for felony child-neglect charges for having sex in front of their 9-year old. From the reports, this does not appear to be a case where the couple were doing this to induce the girl into having sex, nor does it appear that any obvious coercion was involved. It's about a couple who believed that sex is natural, animals do it all the time, kids can watch...things like that.

So, regardless of how one judges their philosophy and child-rearing approach, this does not appear to be a child-neglect issue at all. It appears to be an instance of the courts forcing its own particular ideological view on parents.

Basically, the parents have wrong views. But this issue must be not settled by courts/state intervention.

That brings me to a question: how to deal with this kind of thing outside of state intervention?

[blackdiamond]

I'm on the fence on this one, SN.

I'm inclined to think the courts were right. Just as a child is at an age at which it can't marry or take strong alcohol (do you agree?), it's also at an age where it can't watch people in the act. an older person like myself can decide that it is psychologically harmful for me to watch this kind of thing and look away, but a child is unable to make this choice. Shouldn't the law protect it the same way it's protected against other such adult choices? (I'm not sure i've worded everything correctly, but i'm sure you get the point; i'll come back to it later when i have some time.)

[dan_edge]

I believe this is arguably an instance of child abuse. Should it be against the law to have sex in your front yard, in full view of passersby? I say "yes", this should be against the law. Normally, one has to give his consent to be exposed to this sort of thing. But children are unable to consent. This is why it's illegal to have sex with a child, even if they "consent" to it. I think that forcing a child to watch pornographic material could qualify as an instance of child abuse. That is essentially what happened here.

--Dan Edge

[utabintarbo]

I believe this is arguably an instance of child abuse.

Abuse, as determined by...? By what standard? What role are the parents to play in your definition?

Should it be against the law to have sex in your front yard, in full view of passersby? I say "yes", this should be against the law.

This may be considered rude behavior. Should rudeness be a crime? Do passers-by have a veto on what may go on between consenting individuals on private property? Should the state get involved?

Normally, one has to give his consent to be exposed to this sort of thing.

You haven't been to Mardi Gras, have you?

...

I think that forcing a child to watch pornographic material could qualify as an instance of child abuse. That is essentially what happened here.

--Dan Edge

Would "allowing" the child to watch said material constitute abuse? If the child could have gone off to play Nintendo rather than sit there and watch, does that change the equation at all?

[Inspector]

I believe this is arguably an instance of child abuse.

Dan's argument sounds plausible to me. If you agree that statutory rape laws are rational, this would seem to be similar. The only problem is a lack, so far, of an objective definition of "pornography" in our legal system. The famous "I know it when I see it" being an example of non-objective.

Edited March 20, 2007 by Inspector

[Moebius]

think that forcing a child to watch pornographic material could qualify as an instance of child abuse. That is essentially what happened here.

I think the abusive part might be in the "forcing", but not necessarily in the "watching".

Basically, the parents have wrong views. But this issue must be not settled by courts/state intervention.

That brings me to a question: how to deal with this kind of thing outside of state intervention?

I'm not really sure if the parents are necessarily wrong. I think parents should be allowed to raise their children with any value they want, as long as the child's rights weren't violated. Having sex in front of the kid isn't really violating any of his rights...

[DavidV]

What criteria should we use to decide what constitutes "coercion" as applied to a child? Parents do all kinds of mentally and physically harmful things which are not typically considered coercive. The only obvious form of coercion that comes to mind is intentionally causing physical harm.

This seems like an issue sorely in need of objective standards. The definition of "child abuse" varies widely - in Germany, parents are put in jail for homeschooling, in England, poor single mothers have had their kids confiscated without cause, and in Georga (USA) a 17 year old teen was sentenced to 10 years for consensual oral sex with a 15 year old.

Edited March 20, 2007 by GreedyCapitalist

[softwareNerd]

I think that forcing a child to watch pornographic material could qualify as an instance of child abuse.

I do not believe it rises to a legitimate legally enforcible standard. i think it is no different from a parent making a 9-year old watch Gibson's "The Passion".

[DarkWaters]

Should it be against the law to have sex in your front yard, in full view of passersby? I say "yes", this should be against the law. Normally, one has to give his consent to be exposed to this sort of thing.

Does anybody know if any prominent Objectivists have voiced opinions on objective criteria for legal standards of public decency? At first, some minimal criteria does seem to be okay but then again enforcing a minimal level of public decency does not appear to be in the nature of government.

Obviously it would not be in an individual's rational self-interest to do something obscene on his front yard.

and in Georga (USA) a 17 year old teen was sentenced to 10 years for consensual oral sex with a 15 year old.

This sounds like a disturbing and an arbitrary enforcement of an archaic law. Such a law probably makes it really easy to incarcerate a large number of high schoolers who may otherwise be decent kids.

Edited March 20, 2007 by DarkWaters

[BrassDragon]

Of course, if children were adults, this whole discussion wouldn't be happening.

The key question, then, is this: What makes a child different from an adult, and thus leads to a child having different rights? It seems that Objectivists I've talked to argue that children have some extra rights (right to be taken care of by their parents) and lack some rights (right to enter into a contract, or to "consent" informally, as in the current case). There is a thread about it somewhere, but I never understood this.

It seems there is a continuum of "man qua man-ness" children achieve as they grow older, until they are adults (man qua man). There seems to be no "child qua child." So how can there be objective rights for children, and objective answers to the questions being raised in this thread?

This post isn't intended to "explode" the discussion; just throwing it out there.

Edited March 20, 2007 by BrassDragon

[DavidV]

I do not believe it rises to a legitimate legally enforcible standard. i think it is no different from a parent making a 9-year old watch Gibson's "The Passion".

I would argue that it's worse, since sex is a natural activity that is mostly incomprehensible to a child, whereas glorifying sacrifice and suffering is how aspiring suicide bombers are created.

[DavidV]

The key question, then, is this: What makes a child different from an adult, and thus leads to a child having different rights? It seems that Objectivists I've talked to argue that children have some extra rights (right to be taken care of by their parents) and lack some rights (right to enter into a contract, or to "consent" informally, as in the current case).

I think we should think of parenthood as a contract similar to a tort case rather than "special" rights. If you are at fault for injuring someone and causing them to not be able to work, you should be responsible for their recovery and lost wages. Likewise, a child is mentally and physically "disabled" for a time due to your actions, and you are responsible for equipping them to survive in the world.

[softwareNerd]

I would argue that it's worse, since sex is a natural activity that is mostly incomprehensible to a child, ...

I agree. Having a child watch sex as appears to have been done in this case could, at worst, trivialize sex; and, it may well not be so. If one bans this then one must also ban parents from telling kids that sex is not to be enjoyed and only something they should do for procreation. Edited March 20, 2007 by softwareNerd

[BrassDragon]

I think we should think of parenthood as a contract similar to a tort case rather than "special" rights. If you are at fault for injuring someone and causing them to not be able to work, you should be responsible for their recovery and lost wages. Likewise, a child is mentally and physically "disabled" for a time due to your actions, and you are responsible for equipping them to survive in the world.

I really like that way of thinking about it!

[punk]

For most all of human history people have been having sex in front of their children.

I mean, what are you going to do when you live in some sort of one room dwelling with family?

In the US the colonists and settlers were having sex in front of their children.

The fact that this is even an issue has to do with the degree of affluence enjoyed by American society, where houses are large enough that people can expect privacy.

This shouldn't be an issue.

[BrassDragon]

Basically, the parents have wrong views. But this issue must be not settled by courts/state intervention.

That brings me to a question: how to deal with this kind of thing outside of state intervention?

I was thinking about the same thing.

Government is the means of instantiating morality in society. To have grounds for government intervention in something (e.g. homosexuality, murder, having sex in front of children, etc.) two criteria must be met (let me know if this is correct):

(1) The action in question must be immoral

(2) It must be in the interest of individual citizens to intervene.

So for example, homosexuality should not be outlawed/prosecuted because it doesn't meet #2, and murder should be outlawed/prosecuted because it meets both criteria.

Can we say #1 applies - that having sex in front of a child is both harmful to the child and coercive (i.e. the child doesn't have the right of "consent")?

Can we say #2 applies to the well-being of children at all? (i.e. that government should ever intervene when children are being treated immorally)?

I have my thoughts on both questions, but I'd like to see what others say (if they're interested in this line of reasoning).

Edited March 20, 2007 by BrassDragon

[DavidOdden]

Here's my proposal for this case. I'm making a small ($5) bet [first taker, only, BOP to you] that the father is the custodial parent, and mom is acting out against the father, trying to undermine him as parent. So on the face of it, I can't see this as being an innocent act by mom. The issue is not whether there is an abstract level of decency that no rational person could imagine transgressing, but rather whether the mother willfully did cause unjustified harm to child. The burden of proof lies on mom to be certain that her acts do not harm the child. I think that taking a child (of a certain age) to a horrifying slasher flick would be an analogous potential infliction of harm. The problem is that psychological harm is less obvious than physical harm (such as missing teeth, broken limbs). While there cannot be any rational discussion that cutting off a child's finger causes harm, it isn't clear that playing practical jokes on a kid predictably causes harm, nor that watching mom crawl all over her boyfriend always causes psychological harm.

If the concern is over nitpicking the concept "causes harm" in the wording of statutes, then of course you're simply dealing with the problem of how to precisely express the class of immoral acts that one person may not perform against another -- it is hard to come up with a complete list.

[blackdiamond]

I think we should think of parenthood as a contract similar to a tort case rather than "special" rights. If you are at fault for injuring someone and causing them to not be able to work, you should be responsible for their recovery and lost wages. Likewise, a child is mentally and physically "disabled" for a time due to your actions, and you are responsible for equipping them to survive in the world.

I doubt that a parent who can have sex in front of a child can ever realise or accept that their action caused the child's psychological problems.

I think i can also bet 2 million Zimbabwean dollars that this is a very Jerry Springer kind of couple: they are both on drugs, they are both uneducated, and quite poor, etc. If anything, this one act might just have been used by the judge to extrapolate that these are very bad, unwittingly abusive parents - at least psychologically - and i think he is right to save the child before it gets worse. [i can bet another 2 million dollars that there is no one on this forum, no matter what position you have taken in the discussion, who can ever bring themselves to do this in front of their child or any child for that matter!]

I also don't agree that watching Passion of the Christ is equal or worse simply because this is the child's own parents, and it is live - not acting. I wouldn't think the experience of art is as powerful as the experience of real-life reality in shaping a person's psychological makeup, especially if the latter involves one's own parents. a child who is old enough to understand anything in Passion is old enough to watch a movie with a bit of a skeptical eye (it's not "real"), but your parents in the act, behaving like animals, is an undeniable and unforgettable terrible experience.

[dan_edge]

I agree that objective standards are needed here. I haven’t reached a conclusion on this issue, but I lean towards the view that it is child abuse to force your children to watch pornography. I also think it would be abuse to force your child to watch scenes of torture or extreme violence. I’m trying to hash out what my gut is telling me. I think I need to understand the concept of legal consent more fully, and how it applies to children. In many contexts, it would be illegal to have sex in plain view of others without their consent. Children are not old enough to give that consent. Here's my reasoning:

In American law, it can be a punishable offense to play music so loud that it affects your neighbors (assuming you are in a residential neighborhood). Even though you are acting on your own property, your actions affect other people’s property. It is assumed that your neighbors do not consent to this noise unless consent is expressly given. Loud music (beyond a certain volume) is thought to be outside the realm of acceptable sounds coming from a house in a residential neighborhood.

The same principle applies to actions which affect senses other than hearing. If you move into a residential neighborhood and begin producing chemicals that create a god-awful smell, for instance, this could be considered a nuisance to your neighbors. Your neighbors could seek a court order forcing you to stop. If you hung a mutilated horse corpse in your front yard, this could be considered a visual nuisance, and the court could force you to move it. When you move into a residential neighborhood, there is an implicit consent that you will not do these sorts of things.

If you moved into an industrial neighborhood, then it would be assumed that you consent to the smells, sounds, and sights associated with that kind of neighborhood. You couldn’t move in to such a neighborhood and immediately report the chemical company next door as a nuisance. Your case would be thrown out of court. When you move into a residential neighborhood, however, it is understood that you must gain the neighbor’s consent before taking actions that would impact their sensory experience of their own property in a negative way. This, I believe, is the spirit of nuisance laws, and they are ethical laws.

By this principle, it could be considered a nuisance to have sex in your front yard in a residential neighborhood. Doing this is similar to playing excessively loud music; you must gain the consent of all surrounding property owners who could be affected by this kind of action. The same is true for other “public” places.

Consider a Burger King restaurant. It is implied that Burger King consents for you to walk onto their property during normal business hours, placing orders, using their bathrooms, and many other things. However, Burger King could prosecute you if you and your wife walked in and started having sex on the counter. It is implied that they do not consent to this kind of action, even if they fail to post a “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” sign. For this to be legal, you would have to gain the consent of the Burger King owner. Further, if you get a job at Burger King and agree to a one year employment contract at Burger King, you do not necessarily give your consent to work in the nude, or be exposed to nude co-workers or customers.

I have offered evidence for the case that in many contexts, it would be a punishable offense to have sex in plain view of others without their consent. It is clear that children are incapable of consent in the adult sense of the word. In some contexts, a child’s powers of consent are delegated to his parents (eg., a parent can legally “ground” a child). In other contexts, consent is considered to be withheld until the child is old enough to decide for himself (eg., neither the child nor the parent can consent to sex with the child). What is the difference between these two contexts? I don’t have the time to go into it right now. But consider: If a child’s consent is required in order in order to have sex in plain view of him, then is this a consent delegated to the parents? Or is this consent assumed to be withheld until the child is of appropriate age? My gut tells me the latter.

--Dan Edge

Edited March 20, 2007 by dan_edge

[dan_edge]

n Georga (USA) a 17 year old teen was sentenced to 10 years for consensual oral sex with a 15 year old.

The defense for the 17-year old in that case could argue that the 15-year old was intellectually competent enough to consent to sex.

Again, objective principles are definitely needed here. I thought I was competent enough to consent to sex when I was 15, and it's ridiculous to me that my first-love 17-year old girlfriend could go to prison for 10 years for "taking advantage of me". On the other hand, you don't want to end up legitimizing a 31-year old having sex with a 9-year old. There needs to be an objective way to determine a child's capability to consent.

--Dan Edge

[softwareNerd]

To my mind, seeing a mom and boyfriend have sex isn't really a big deal, as such. It's all about the larger context. If, as David guesses, this is the mom's way of getting back at the custodial dad, then the kid probably has psychological issues arising out of that whole situation, of which seeing sex is just one aspect. To my mind, it would be a minor aspect.

If, on the other hand, one were to remove that from the example, and have a hippie couple who simply believe in some vague "love should not be hidden" ideas, I doubt it would cause psychological problems much different from much of the other psychological baggage parents heap on their children.

I don't see this as being equivalent to making a kid watch porn. For instance, what if mom and dad decide to show junior a very explicit sex-education video. Let's assume the video does not hold back on any images, but also has a tone of being factual. Whether the video is appropriate for a particular age really depends on how it is presented rather than whether the kid sees sex organs and the act of sex. So, whether this rises to being porn, depends on more than simply what physical body parts a child sees.

In summary: for starters, I am extremely wary of any kind of "psychological harm" argument; and, in this particular case, I can see near-zero harm coming from the act itself.

Added: To concretize this more, I tried this mind-experiment. What if my 8-year old stayed over at a friend's house, and the friends parents decided to give them a demo of how parents have sex. Honestly, I cannot imagine any psychological harm coming to my son from such an incident. I'd be annoyed, but it would be because there are certain things one does not do with other people's kids without asking the parents; also, I'd be annoyed that I was not allowed to choose my own timing about what my son saw. However, I do not honestly think it would take more than an hour to sort things out as far as my son was concerned. Without the baggage of sex-as-guilt, the explanations (to an 8-year old) simply boil down to biology, romance and etiquette.

Edited March 20, 2007 by softwareNerd

[Inspector]

Some points I'd like to highlight:

1) This isn't about just watching sex. This is about watching your parents having sex. Eeeeeeeeeeewww!

2) This isn't the same as pornography; unless you consider actually torturing and killing a man in front of a child the same as showing him The Passion.

3) The important issue here: if a child cannot legally consent to sex, can a child legally consent to watching sex?

[softwareNerd]

...if a child cannot legally consent to sex, can a child legally consent to watching sex?

Can a child legally consent to watching people drive cars? How is that any different. It just sex...however much ewwww...it's a purely ideological issue.

Added: How about a sex-ed video?

Edited March 21, 2007 by softwareNerd

[LaszloWalrus]

I don't think watching cars is analagous. Do you have the right to have sex in view of others without their consent?

Surely, though, one has the right to drive a car in front of someone without his consent.