I am currently writing my first Christmas story of the year (one that I never posted but wrote a while ago) and had a question.
The main character in the story is a 16yo transsexual and there seems to be a lot of sexual content in the middle of the story. Unfortunately the fact that the character is 16 is vital to the plot line or the easy thing to do would be to make him/her 18. Now I know in the real world sex with a minor is illegal, but in story form you see it often. My question is, would this be appropriate to put up on BC/TS
Comments
16 can be legal
Hi
Depending where it is, but 16 can be legal for sex. For instance 16 is the legal age in UK. In some countries it can be lower but not if someone over 18 is involved. In USA it varies state by state.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_North_America
Remeber children sometimes do break this law, so your story might just be reflecting reality.
Karen
Erin?
If a story portrayed sex with a minor could that be construed as child porn/erotica? I'd hope that in legal terms it could/would not and the implications it would have for this story site.
Not in the US
Purely text depictions of any sex act are not considered porn in the US. Photos are a different matter and any photo of sex with sixteen-year-olds would run afoul of federal law. For illustrations, it gets stickier to figure out.
Canada and Germany are different and some text descriptions of sex with minors would be pornographic in those places but not sixteen year olds in Canada where that is the age of consent and in Germany, the age of consent can be as low as fourteen.
Age of consent is a tricky legal subject, though.
The UK and the rest of the EU are less restrictive than Germany, except the age of consent is mostly 14, 15 or 16. It's 17 in Ireland, 18 in Malta and Turkey and 13 in Spain.
Australia and New Zealand are much like the UK except a couple of AU states have an age of consent of 17 with exceptions if partners are close in age.
US federal territories, if self-governing have age of consent at 16, almost all of them. Non-self governing territories have a federal age of consent which is 16 with exceptions for people who are close in age. The federal age of consent applies to US citizens outside the US, BTW. So a 20 year old US citizen who went to Spain and had sex with a local 14 year old could be prosecuted under US law if not Spanish law. The UK's law and the EU's general law are also extra-territorial.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Germany has some pretty
Germany has some pretty strict laws on child and youth pornography. The law says writing "scriptures" (I think it would translate as media) can get you into prison for two years. I think it is mostly meant to protect teenagers from pornography, but the wording makes it a very stretchable law.
They actually want to punish reading and seing that stuff, so I wouldn't want to be caught with anything that contains sex with children at all. It would be nice if you could put a warning on your story since it is really dangerous for germans to have something like that on our PC's...
It's just that child pornogrpahy is a godsend for conservaties. They can push security-laws with child pornography as a smokescreen. Last thing that happened here was they wanted to censor the whole net to "block" child porn sites... Didn't work as it was too obvious.
That means the remaining laws tend to be a bid too wide in their wording.
About Germany
The German law concerns children under 14 in most cases. Although, children under 18 are off limits for sex with caretakers or people in authority over them.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
No, it concerns everyone
No, it concerns everyone under 18 thanks to a law that was passed 2008 due to an EU directive.
http://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/184c.html <- it's in german
It does only affect pornography, but on the other hand german courts have been quite finical about what to define as pornography...
The problem is it stretches that far, that media with people who might be interpreted as under 18 are still illegal. That's what I meant with being ridiculous.
ages of consent in the EU or
ages of consent in the EU or Europe in general is also depended on if it's straig or lesbian or gay sex ...
I wouldn't worry about it.
Canadian law on child porn is an interesting subject. Technically any written form of sex depicted between or with minors is considered illegal. However, since the introduction of that law no person has been convicted of reading, writing, or distributing child porn in the form of written material without having also been charged with distributing or making child porn involving real children.
What it boils down to is that law was designed to only add extra charges to a pedophile who was involved with harming real children. Reading something that is "technically illegal" will more than likely never get a person in trouble. It just would not be cost efficient to prosecute someone on those grounds.
That being said, sex depicted between or with minors (in written form) would only be considered illegal if the work was intended to be pornographic in nature. There have been quite a few movies (mostly from Quebec) depicting sex or things of a sexual nature involving children. None of them were classified as "child porn" because they depicted the normal sexual nature of puberty.
legally speaking
sex between a 16yo and a similar or older partner is legal. 16 is the age of consent in Canada/USA in some states its 14yo.
ettiquite wise... its better to say they have sex than to describe how they have sex.
Dayna.
Fantasy
I would not be offended as this is all Fantasy and I take as such , nothing about most all of these stories is real -- That's my 2 cents --RICHIE2
Child Pornography
The whole point of the child porn laws is to protect children.
There are very few limits to the First Amendment. The most obvious are 'clear and present danger' (yelling "fire" in a crowded theater,) and libel and slander. Even hate speech is protected. Pornography is protected. There are limits to what you can give to a kid, but adults can get all the perversion they want. If you want to buy The Anarchist's Handbook, or a treatise on Satanic spells, or the instructions for taking over the world or building an atom bomb, nobody can stop you.
Child pornography is illegal because you have to abuse real children to produce it.
If you want to draw pictures of kids doing the nasty, I can't see how the government can stop you without running afoul of the First Amendment. Of course, IANAL. Also, people will want to prosecute you, and you really don't want to have to pay a lawyer to represent you all the way up to the Supreme Court (though the ACLU would probably help you out.)
I have seen quite a bit of literature on FM, the Whateley web site, and other places that depicts underage sex. Of course, I have also seen literature that depicts murder, torture, rape, and any manner of illegal activity.
As someone pointed out, it would be nice to keep it less explicit because that is generally the way it is done here, and people who want to read genuine erotica have plenty of places to go. Still, I won't presume to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't write.
Of course, the above only really applies to America. Other countries have laws that would never pass the test of constitutionality in America.
World Wide Web
Your last paragraph tells it all, "other countries have laws..." Since the internet is available in other countries, what is legal in the US, may not be elsewhere.