Posted on 04/21/2010 6:06:26 AM PDT by NYer
LONDON, April 20, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Mandy Smith, the former child-lover and later wife of Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman, believes that the age of consent should be raised to 18 in order to protect young girls, who are emotionally vulnerable when it comes to sexual relationships at that age. In an interview with the UK’s Daily Mail, Smith said that she had slept with the much older Wyman when she was 14 years old, beginning a relationship that stole away a childhood she “could never get back.”
Smith, 39, revealed to the Mail that she has come a long way from being the Wild Child on London’s celebrity scene in the 1980s to a woman who is now single, celibate, and living out a revived Catholic faith, mentoring young girls, and involving herself in charitable work.
But the experience of her child sexual relationship with Rolling Stone Wyman, 34 years her senior, taught her that teenage girls are not emotionally equipped for sex by the age of 16.
“It’s not about being physically mature. It’s emotional maturity that matters,” Smith told the Mail.
“I don’t think most 16-year-olds are ready. I think the age of consent should be raised to 18 at a minimum, and some girls aren’t even ready then,” she said. “People will find that odd coming from me. But I think I do know what I’m talking about here. You are still a child – even at 16.”
“You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could.”
Smith revealed that her father had been absent in her family’s life since she was three, and her mother was perennially ill around the time she met Wyman. The rocker had met her at a club where Smith and her sister Nicola, both teenagers, would party and try to dress and act twice their age.
Smith said she saw Wyman in part as filling the void of a father figure in her life. They began dating when she was 13, and revealed publicly for the first time to the Mail that Wyman had criminal intercourse with her when she was 14. When Smith reached the age of consent at 16, their relationship became public; by 18 she and Wyman married, and two years later the relationship ended in a bitter divorce.
Looking back on her past, she said that she believed Wyman never “would have made a move if my dad had been around.”
But her biggest concern is for teenage girls she sees today being caught up in a highly sexualized culture and its expectations.
“My concern is that everything – clothes, films, talk – is so sexualised. The girls I talk to are under pressure to be a certain way,” said Smith. “They think they should be having sex, living a certain life. I try to say to them: ‘Hold on. You don’t have to do this.’”
Smith is the mother of nine-year-old son, Max, from a brief relationship with model Ian Mosby. She says she rediscovered her faith in 2005 and tells the Mail that “God is the only man in my life now.”
“The great thing about the Church is that you can go back. It's never too late,” she said, adding that it was a note from one of the nuns who taught her in school that helped bring her back.
“She said that Jesus does not look at mistakes I had made, or the times I had ignored him. Until then, I'd felt a terrible guilt about the life I'd led,” added Smith. “I realised that there was another way.”
Parliament first established the age of consent in the UK at 13 years in 1875 in response to concerns that young girls were being exploited for prostitution. The age of consent was amended to 16 years in 1885 under the Criminal Amendment Act.
But in the United Kingdom recently the tendency has been to lower the age of consent. A furor erupted two years ago when Parliament passed a bill requiring Northern Ireland to lower its age of consent from 17 years to 16 years under the Sexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order 2008, to be in conformity with the rest of the kingdom.
Members of Northern Ireland's Legislative Assembly accused London of acting with "contempt for democracy" by pushing through the measure despite their opposition. MLAs warned that the change would encourage sexual predators from the Republic of Ireland, where the age of consent remains at 17, to go north in search of younger victims.
Belfast's Rape Crisis Centre also objected to the change, saying the new law would make it more difficult for them to protect vulnerable girls from sexual predators.
See related coverage by LifeSiteNews.com:
British Government Bill to Impose Lower Age of Consent in Northern Ireland
Great article. Will ping out later.
Right, some people break laws.
Get rid of all laws, then, since there will always be people who break them.
???
She dumb? She’s turned her life around! It’s a good news story. Why the heck do you say she’s dumb?
Her father was “absent”. No dad, sick mother, wild kid, society promoting sexuality younger and younger.
In most states, it's no, no, and no, and it's because the law recognizes that the "free will" presumed of normal adults, is limited by impediments to full judgment, including both mental handicap and immaturity.
The answers all turn to "yes, yes, and yes" when the subject turns 18.
I am not the one to argue that the cognitive functions are dramatically improved over the two years from 16 to 18. I do know there are significant differences between the physiological functioning and the intellectual competence of an adolescent and an adult.
I would argue that a line has to be drawn somewhere, however arbitrary the placement of that line might be. The only reasonable alternative would be to require extensive maturity testing on an individual basis, and from a "liberty" and "privacy" point of view that would be way, way too intrusive a requirment.
So we're stuck with an age limit on, for instance, sex. This is not a perfect solution, but one that, roughly and on average, works to the benefit of the young, who need protection. We're not talking about limiting the free will of consenting "adults."
"The law" should have been brought to bear to prevent bars from catering to middle-school girls and to prevent old horndogs from rogering 14-year-old Lolitas. But even absent any change in law and law enforcement, social pressure could deliver a lasting smackdown against those who sexualize minors.
If a few barkeeps and lechers get smacked down hard in the press and in public estimation because Mandy Smith has done her bit to influence social pressure in that direction, I say, more power to her.
How about legally raising the age of consent? Well, argue it back and forth and put it to a vote. But the question can't be dismissed as nannyism a priori.
Her remarks prove her EQ (emotional intelligence) is lacking.
Yes age is in fact a crutch used by statists to gather more power over young people. That is why those under age have NO RIGHTS in court. So it seems ones God given rights are only given at age 17 or 18 or whatever? That is a pretty odd idea isn’t it? Who knew God gave rights age dependent?
As for the particular issue, if you read and thought about my post you would know what I said was she gave away her childhood by deciding of her own to go to bars at age 13. Had she never met Wyman, had she never even ever had sex with anyone, her she threw away her childhood. That was her choice and not a call for yet another law.
We live in a society that encourages selfishness and greed. The family structure has disintegrated as more couples form artificial families through living arrangements. I had a neighbor who moved in with his young son, followed by a woman (not his spouse) and her young son. For all outside purposes, they looked and acted like a family. The boys went to school together, shot hoops in front of the house, rode their bikes and joined the school's soccer team. The adults purchased a camper trailer and took the kids camping, along with their dirt bikes and ski-doo. This went on for several years until last September. One of the boys ran away from home. The police tracked him down and returned him to his parent. A few weeks later, he had moved back to his other parent. Then the woman and other boy moved out. The man just rented the house and moved south, like nothing happened.
How much damage has been emotionally inflicted on those children?! Multiply that by the number of households where children are forced to live with people who are not their parents and have no legal guardianship of them. The result is mayhem, as I just witnessed with my neighbor. We need to restore the sanctity of marriage and the family unit.
Point number two is invalid.
The death of women in childbirth exceeded the male death rate.
“We need to restore the sanctity of marriage and the family unit.”
I’m afraid the cat is out of that bag. That is, we no longer have a society heterogeneous enough for marriage to be honored and *enforced* by society (I’ll explain), and the law will always be a pale imitation to the “social sanction.”
All societies in history have had a social sanction for their various rituals and taboos. It is an unwritten law that is enforced by “everyone”, as a cultural norm. Often they are relatively invisible to a society until one in particular is identified. (Importantly, political leaders are always on the lookout to identify new ones, so they can claim credit by putting them into the written law.)
For example, in the vast majority of the US, if an adult male who was not too imposing, put on a t-shirt that said “I molest children and I like it”, then tried to walk down a busy sidewalk, he would likely not get far before being shunned, cursed at, or even physically assaulted. It is not a crime to wear such a t-shirt, but the social sanction is very strong against it, as a taboo.
While the US used to have a social sanction protecting marriage, it has completely collapsed, for myriad reasons. And whether or not it *ever* affected the poor is in question.
For example, in the American frontier West, outside of the cities, females were few and far between. The demographics were vicious. The life expectancy was short, about 1 in 4 pregnancies resulted in maternal death, and often the way a girl would determine who she would marry was based on which suitor would win in a fight, or win in a fight with her father.
Conversely, because having children was essential to farm life, there were little or no prohibitions against premarital sex, as it demonstrated that the couple were fertile before getting married. An infertile woman was limited to being a school teacher, and the schools would not hire anyone else.
Only with the closing of the frontier was the “family unit” possible for anyone but the middle and upper classes.
Life in the South was even stranger, with wealthy young people having arranged marriages, some vestiges of which are still around today (for example, the “runaway bride” of several years ago). Prior to the Civil War, such young men would often also take on a quadroon or octoroon black mistress, and after having a male child with his wife, could have several children with his mistress.
For most of the poor in the South, marriage was almost a joke, and had little or no concern among their peers, especially with the advent of easy divorce. This is where the “common law marriage” concept made a big splash.
Oddly enough, marriage was taken more seriously by some immigrants than by those Americans raised here. But this was more a function of their ghettoization than anything else. Between the time of the Germanic 48’ers, with a strong marriage ritual, and the idealistic communes of northeastern Europeans in western New York State, the marriage social sanction went by the wayside.
Marriage that we think of today, had a big resurgence after WWII and the returning veterans, because they were very focused on having what they considered to be the perfect family, and that really raised the bar for marriage.
But without the social sanction to back it up, it also meant hasty marriage, easy divorce, and easy remarriage. And there is little that the written law can say or do to change that.
And so, most assuredly, has he.
≤}B^)
Who knew that drinking at bars and picking up sex partners was a 13-year-old's 'God-given' right?
I don't know why you shoehorned God into the argument, but since you have, let me say your 'god' is apparently an enabler of child abusers, and one whom I would kick in his divine rear end. And then turn him around and kick him again.
That young age of marriage is mostly a myth. While the average age for first marriage has gone back up in America in recent years, from the mid 20th century lows, it was fairly high in early America
So I guess your either are a non-native speaker of English or refuse to deal with the subject matter. A 48 year old adult is not a child in the eyes of the any juris diction I know of. She used her free will to go to bars at age 13. No one compelled her to go to bars. If you think going to bars is consistent with having your childhood, well you are even more confused than you sound in this thread. Again had she never met Wyman, had she never had sex in her life, SHE threw away her childhood going bar hopping at 13.
You don’t get it, do you? Do you really think a 14-year-old girl has the mental or emotional maturity to “give it away”? In her case, an older man (a 48-year-old rockstar!) took advantage of and seduced her. She herself says that her father was not around [to protect her]. That’s hardly a case of “giving it away”. I sure hope you’re not a father to girls, because you have no understanding whatsoever.
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Maybe some of the societal norms and restrictions from the "olden days" were actually very important - even necessary - for society (and therefore individuals in that society) to function well. Things like:
Chaperones for dating. Young girls not going to wild parties at all, especially without a responsible older person. Sex before marriage frowned upon. Dress codes at schools and social norms of respectability so girls did not dress like professional sluts. Children protected from "bad company" and too early sexualization. Parents being married (to each other) when they have children, and staying married.
One of the goals of feminism was and is to divorce sex from committed marriage and resultant children. "Marriage is slavery" and "Marriage is patriarchal" and "Men are evil dominators" they cried.
So what have they created? Sluts, misery, hordes of illegiimate children, millions of unborn babies murdered, countless broken homes and absent fathers, feral kids with no father to guide or protect.
That is feminism. Untold misery. Of course, irresponsible and predatory men like feminism, it means E-Z access free and meaningless sex without a pinch of care, love or responsibility, Just witness some of the comments on this thread!
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I read a very interesting history of the Middle Ages a few years ago, based on contemporaneous documents that had been found not long ago. This was about 10 years ago.
They found, at least in England, that the nobility married much younger than the poorer people; because the nobility could afford to. People married when they could afford it, and the middle or lower classes took longer to accumulate enough money or goods to set up a household. Nobility often married, both women and men, in the early to mid teens (girls younger, men a bit older than the girls, usually).
Also the myth of shorter life spans was shown to be a myth, which has been accepted for so long it’s hard to part with sometimes. Once people survived infancy, childhood diseases and the child bearing years, they stood a good chance to live to a ripe old age. (Avoiding plague years of course). So there were plenty of old people; it’s just that running the gauntlet of infancy, childhood and childbearing took a toll on the average age of life expectancy.
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