Funny you equate your relationship with your dw/p and your home together.. to your relationship with your son?
No. I was un-equating them. I don't regard owning a property as giving me moral rights over it's inhabitants as in "my house my rules"
I'm with you both Colditz there are risks, both legal and to health. That's why a I favour close engagement with the problem over getting in the way.
Forgive me but when I hear "very real health risks" I hear a different agenda. That phrase is excessively used by the madder end of pro life zealots.
The medical risks of occasional sex are quite disproportionately higher than for regular relationship based sex. My goal is to minimise them.
Look at the stats for teenage pregnancy. My view is that a girl who knows in advance when she's going to have sex can prepare, as can a boy. Teenagers who grab what they can when they can don't make good decisions about anything, including and especially sex.
Thus a valid goal is to maker the whole process a bit more reliable.
As for the risks to me, I'd see them as irrelevant. Very small chance, and if push comes to shove I can take being on the SOR. Would be inconvenient of course, stop me doing any more work for HMG since I doubt I could persuade any Catholic ministers of state to grant me an exemption. Maybe they'd ceremonially delete my user ID :) They did that once before...
Yes, there is an element of "conceding" in my position. Those who've met me in the flesh regard me as excessively unwilling to give ground.
But, I know when I'm beat and when fighting my position I'm conscious that it's my position, thus it only hurts me. I have a different level of bloody mindedness when others bear the cost.
All fights have a cost. Against something bad that I felt a good chance of stopping, I can, and have fought multi year battles against heavy odds. Thus if DS was doing drugs, or wanted a motorbike I'd be implacable even if he were 25.
But at 16 sex is going to happen, probably has already.
(I've lost a number of friends to bike accidents, and seen terrible injuries. so to me they're worse, your view may not be the same.)
Thus if my kid wanted a motorbike, I'd try very hard through reason, coercion and the infamous Connor stubbornness to stop them. If pressed I’d try to get them to use a car which although risky for a 17 yo boy is better than a motorbike, and if I failed completely would at least buy them a very good crash helmet and pay for decent lessons. Same logic as for their sex life, stop bad things when I can, but mitigate when I can’t.
As for the “who benefits” issue…
If you genuinely think you can stop them having sex, then you may be doing them some good. I personally would recognise my own limits and short of never letting them out of my sight, feel the enterprise as doomed.
If one could press a button and stop a 16 yo sleeping with a 15 yo, then I’d press the button, but I don’t see one on this laptop.
But if you take the view that you’re not stopping them, merely moving out of your house to do it, it does beg the question of who benefits ?
I can’t see anything in the “my house my rules” view that is anything than making another person’s life harder so that I don’t have to see it. That’s reducing someone else’s quality of life to improve your own.
The middle case of fighting a battle merely to show disapproval strikes me as either doomed to utter failure, or a Pyrrhic victory, or more likely a sequence of Pyrrhic victories followed by utter defeat. At 16 you’ve lost control of a young adult, to me the question is how much influence you want to retain.