The strange reaction to the death of a child rapist drag queen

Please provide evidence of men being convicted of consensual sex with other adults.

@NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision It was still happening until the law was changed. Those three men won at the European Court but it still was not enacted. A "compromise" of 18 instead of 21 was passed. So even then it was not an equal age of consent.

Adults get away with it a surprising amount. Sometimes their victims are still too much in the groomer's thrall to be witnesses (it's not very useful to the prosecution if the witness is in love with her or his much older abuser, and willing to deny and minimise what physical contact happens).

Other times, they're not the kind of witness the jury likes to believe, or they break down under questioning, or the defence convinces the court that the child victim was no angel.

Or the local prosecutions decide there is simply no way a prosecution will succeed and there is no point in taking it to court.

Weirdly, none of that applied in this case, and apparently a 14 year old boy ended up successfully prosecuted for willing activity with a close-in-age peer.

There is a man I know of who was convicted of rape of a boy when he was 12. Before any of you get excited about homophobia and make up a story about homophobically-motivated prosecution, the victim was 5. That's why he's on the sex offender's register.

Frankly, you are a sterling example of what I said before- that people were conflating different historical periods together.

Read your own post: 1991! We are talking about 1999. The bill to equalise it got all the say through the House of Commons in summer of 1998. The political climate changed markedly between 1991 and 1999. Recall that in 1993, three gay men went all the way to the European Court of Human Rights regarding the UK's different age of consent, and won. That led to the UK dropping the age to 18, and the initial proposal in 1994 was 16.

You call me naive. So what, in your head, do you think the process of events would have been that allowed a 14 year old to be prosecuted for willing activity with another child. In your answer, remember it is 1999. Not 1964, not 1973, not 1991. But 1999.

Which is what happens when 14 year olds rape, whether they are raping boys or raping girls, the act is the same, the trauma is the same. Age of consent has nothing to do with it.

Adults have always - and still are thankfully - been prosecuted for having sex with children.

If you're arguing that children can give meaningful consent to sex with an adult, you're in the wrong board.

Two underage boys of a similar age would both be prosecuted tho, or neither.

It’s the non consensual aspect that matters when neither the perp nor victim are adults.

I'm not.

I have already said it was in response to some specific comments.
Why are you hounding me about this?

But what has that got to do with the thread?

I am saying that men were prosecuted for consensual sex before the age of consent was equalised. And to state that never happened is simply wrong. There were prosecutions right up till the equalisation at 16.

So what's your point @DessertsForAll? Because it has nothing to do with this thread. Unless you're implying that all gay men are paedophiles which I hope you're not.

So what’s your alternative suggestion?

I specifically said I was not commenting on this case as I know nothing about it. I was replying to some of the other comments on this thread claiming that no one was prosecuted or jailed under unequal age of consent laws more recently. That is not true.

And he was prosecuted in 1999 - the year before the age of consent was equalised.

What @NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision posted is 100% correct. I was there. I knew Mark Ashton in the 1980s.

@DessertsForAll he wasn't an adult who was prosecuted for having sex with a child. He was a 14 year old boy who was given a 3 year sentence for raping a child.

In 1991, 169 men who’d had sex with another man were convicted of underage sex in England and Wales, and 13 of them sent to prison. In 1994, the age of consent for men who have sex with men was reduced to 18 - before that it was 21. An equal age of consent was finally secured in 2001.

During the campaign for equalisation of sexual consent ages cases were highlighted of young men who were partners but one was prosecuted for sex with a child. They were close in age.

It is what I hate about MN. Loads of people pronouncing as fact things they know nothing about.

This is so abhorrent. My love is for the victims and their families. This is such a crude and cruel denial of reality. How dare the authorities collude with the abusive gaslighting of child rape victims.

I have no idea about the case in this post, but what you post is simply not true and incredibly naive.

He was involved with Stuart. Stuart was not a nice man and seen as a total arsehole. If he had been straight he would have been wolf whistling schoolgirls in school uniform.
Not all characters in dramas have to be right on you know, some are allowed to be arseholes.

Unless you have the ability to put it in flashing neon writing I don't see how you could have?

Russell T. Davies’ television series Queer As Folk (1999-2000) had a 15 year old boy as one of the characters on the Manchester gay scene who was sexually involved with adult men. Can’t remember if there was any suggestion in the show or the press that this should be a police matter.

NeighbourhoodWatchPotholeDivision · Today 17:05
There is just no way that in 1999, in a political climate that was trying to equalise the age of consent (a law finally passed in 2000), that a boy under 16 would have been successfully prosecuted for underage sex with another willing close-in-age child.

You'd need the parents of the other boy to coerce the child to testifying against him, you'd need a police surgeon to conduct a physical examination of an unwilling child. This is the feminism board, right? Where we know how invasive a rape kit examination is?
you'd need the regional division of the crown prosecution service to decide the case was in the public interest and had a chance of succeeding. Remember, the primary witness is allegedly the defendant's willing boyfriend.
you'd need to coerce a willing teenage boy into lying about having a relationship so successfully that he didn't break down when the defence for Sewell challenged him on the lie. Remember, in our adversarial process, genuine rape victims frequently fail to convince a jury that they were raped when subjected to a hostile cross-examination by their rapist's barrister. Can we believe a child coached into a lie kept it up?
you'd need teenage Sewell to have the most inept criminal defence lawyer in the history of the UK.

Thank you for explaining all that so well.