A similar phenomenon is at play in modern Western discussion around age-gap relationships.
Anyone admitting that they experienced one when they were young is almost inevitably told that they were abused, and made to feel that they were suppressing some deep-seated trauma over any and all protestations that they’re fine, no really, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
In fact, on Reddit and other places, I’ve seen people get downvoted if they persist in claims that they didn’t experience any notable negative sequelae. The same people who did the downvoting are often the ones who claim to value “lived experience” above all else, but perish the thought that your lived experience should clash with social orthodoxy.
In India, we have within living memory people who got married off at the ripe young age of 12 to 14, and grew old and have grandkids with kids of their own. The vast majority of them are well-adjusted, at least compared to their age cohort, and many of the women (because they make ever larger fractions of the population pyramid as men die off faster) had husbands who were older than them by numbers that modern Westerners would immediately see as red flags.
A funny example would be Emmanuel Macron, who was 15 when he met his 40 year old teacher who he’s still married to, for all that he’s pushing up against the limits of what can be called “success”, he’s often pointed to as a poor victim who can’t even perceive his own trauma. Really headscratching that.
I studied in a Christian school, and we were sex-segregated until we made it into college. I’m intimately familiar with hundreds of adolescent boys who spent their time lusting after their female teachers, who were the only woman they saw most of their days. If anyone of them had managed to sleep with one, he’d have been receiving high-fives until the day he died, for all the protestations that he was horribly abused.
And of course, that’s just for boys, who can sometimes get away with admissions of that nature. If a girl were to have the same story..
Similarly, the bigger a deal parents make out of a child’s injuries (voluntarily or not), the worse the perceived pain for a child:
“Hierarchical multiple regression and path analyses indicated that parent posttraumatic stress reactions contributed significantly to the development and maintenance of child PTSS. Other risk factors for child PTSS included premorbid emotional and behavioral difficulties and larger burn size. Risk factors identified for parent PTSS included prior trauma history, acute distress, greater number of child invasive procedures, guilt, and child PTSS.”
While in the context of burn injuries, it certainly lines up with more anecdotal evidence of toddlers injuring themselves, looking at their parents, and if seeing a great deal of concern, then bursting into tears. Encouraging pain seems to exacerbate pain.
Edit:
While on the topic of more unpopular/unacceptable opinions to air in Western society, parental reactions to miscarriage or infant mortality:
Till not very long ago at all, childhood mortality was considered a fact of life. People mostly treated the death of a child as bad, but not life-disrupting as so many people do today. A miscarriage is a cause for mourning and great outpourings of social concern for the bereaved couple, who in turn display great stress and trauma from the event. This is not to minimize their pain, it very much is real, but the sheer magnitude of it is far larger than it ever was (or even is, Indian women typically don’t react that way to a miscarriage, I’ve handled plenty, and the ones who do are almost guaranteed to be the ones exposed to Western takes on the matter.)
Of course, the death of a child is considerably more surprising than it once was, we can quite easily expect a child born healthy today to have a ~99% chance of making it to adulthood, versus ~50% at the turn of the century. But people genuinely used to accept that they might lose half their kids before they made it out of childhood, and hedged accordingly by having massively higher birth rates. They couldn’t afford to shutdown and go into shock at the loss of one, and thus generally didn’t do so as a matter of course nor were they expected to.
I could accept the shock easier when it happens to a once healthy child, whereas early miscarriages haven’t had the same effect.
Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions: 1970–2000
“Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent after 12 weeks of pregnancy. African American and Hispanic women report lower rates of early miscarriage than do whites. The probability of reporting a miscarriage rises by about 5% per year of completed schooling. The upward trend, especially in early miscarriages, suggests awareness of pregnancy rather than prenatal care to be a key factor in explaining the evolution of self-reported miscarriages. Any beneficial effects of prenatal care on early miscarriage are obscured by this factor.”
Even with the relative paucity of data, I would support the conclusion that this is likely due to increased maternal age more than anything else. Which is why it’s all the more perplexing that miscarriages are considered to be among the most traumatic possible events in a couple’s life, in what is likely a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As I understand it in India the parents are very involved in who are the individuals involved in the marriage. The minors are not the ones seeking out their suitors.
For statutory rape purposes the consent of the minor carriers little weight. Thus there is increased responcibility on the behalf of the teachers to keep things proper. Such an exploitation without the target feeling exploited doesn’t make it okay.
As I understand it in India the parents are very involved in who are the individuals involved in the marriage. The minors are not the ones seeking out their suitors.
Today? It’s 50:50, and even then, arranged marriages aren’t usually anything similar to the popular misconception that the bride and groom see each other for the first time when they’re underneath the pavilion. It’s far closer to dating, but with parents assisting in the search for acceptable suitors, the kids still have a say and (usually) a veto. Think of having your friends setup a date for you with someone else they know is looking, but soliciting a larger section of the social web.
Before the 70s, it was much more dictatorial of course.
For statutory rape purposes the consent of the minor carriers little weight. Thus there is increased responcibility on the behalf of the teachers to keep things proper. Such an exploitation without the target feeling exploited doesn’t make it okay.
I don’t agree with the is-ought implication you’re presumably making here.
A large degree of the harm of “exploitation” is the perception of said exploitation. If you’re working a summer job and see the owner’s kid making double per hour for the same work, you can feel unfairly treated, compared to an alternate universe where you didn’t, and as long as you’re making a living wage either way, I would contend that there’s no actual exploitation involved unless you were deprived of some right you ought to have had.
A 16 year old can have shitty relationships with a 17 year old, and that’s generally acceptable for all the harm it might otherwise cause. But say they have a relationship with a 25 year old, people will still make a fuss regardless of whether any harm is committed. It’s clearly not that the harm itself is what scandalizes them.
And there’s the aspect where the general stigmatization of the age gaps that were once unremarkable means that the adults who still seek out such relationships are more likely to be bad people, further poisoning the well.
As you can see, I’m not a fan of victimless crimes, and I disagree with the presumption that such a statutory violation is necessarily bad or should be treated that way.
I would imagine a 12 year old going into marriage would not be doing so at their own initiative. In a western setting the assumption would be that the other party to the marriage would be pushing for it. In an Indian setting its more plausible that a mature person that genuinely has the interest of the younger party at heart is meddling with the situation (parent marrying off child for the benefit of the child).
Say that the owner’s kid is doing x2 and then 10 other randos are doing x1.5 with not even an attempt at justification why. There is some degree of exploitation which can not be made away by making it not percieved as exploitation. One of the patterns of work exploitation is to arrange for people from poorer countries to come work in a rich country where they are happy to work below minimum wage. In their home country it would be par for the course—from a subjective viewpoint they are not likely to complain especially if they get a little bit more money than they would in their previous country. The fact that they would be entitled to a minimum wage makes it illegal. Whether it is in the legal or illegal zone seeking out parties which will settle for bad terms is predatory. And being aggressed on in this manner does not require for the target to be unhappy.
If two equally strong people are fighting people might or might not get hurt. But if a body builder karate master “fights” an anoreksic civilian the issue is not so much how much damage is sustained but what could possibly create a ground for the karate master to geniunely need to defend themself. With enough power difference if there is possiblity of a conflict of interest a relationship can’t be a cooperation but will be dictated by one side. Your mileage may wary how much power difference the developmental gap between 17 year old and 25 year old confers, but if the circumstances place the parties in way different leagues then individual variation and detail will get less and less able to make it okay.
A similar phenomenon is at play in modern Western discussion around age-gap relationships.
Anyone admitting that they experienced one when they were young is almost inevitably told that they were abused, and made to feel that they were suppressing some deep-seated trauma over any and all protestations that they’re fine, no really, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
In fact, on Reddit and other places, I’ve seen people get downvoted if they persist in claims that they didn’t experience any notable negative sequelae. The same people who did the downvoting are often the ones who claim to value “lived experience” above all else, but perish the thought that your lived experience should clash with social orthodoxy.
In India, we have within living memory people who got married off at the ripe young age of 12 to 14, and grew old and have grandkids with kids of their own. The vast majority of them are well-adjusted, at least compared to their age cohort, and many of the women (because they make ever larger fractions of the population pyramid as men die off faster) had husbands who were older than them by numbers that modern Westerners would immediately see as red flags.
A funny example would be Emmanuel Macron, who was 15 when he met his 40 year old teacher who he’s still married to, for all that he’s pushing up against the limits of what can be called “success”, he’s often pointed to as a poor victim who can’t even perceive his own trauma. Really headscratching that.
I studied in a Christian school, and we were sex-segregated until we made it into college. I’m intimately familiar with hundreds of adolescent boys who spent their time lusting after their female teachers, who were the only woman they saw most of their days. If anyone of them had managed to sleep with one, he’d have been receiving high-fives until the day he died, for all the protestations that he was horribly abused.
And of course, that’s just for boys, who can sometimes get away with admissions of that nature. If a girl were to have the same story..
Similarly, the bigger a deal parents make out of a child’s injuries (voluntarily or not), the worse the perceived pain for a child:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24494782/
“Hierarchical multiple regression and path analyses indicated that parent posttraumatic stress reactions contributed significantly to the development and maintenance of child PTSS. Other risk factors for child PTSS included premorbid emotional and behavioral difficulties and larger burn size. Risk factors identified for parent PTSS included prior trauma history, acute distress, greater number of child invasive procedures, guilt, and child PTSS.”
While in the context of burn injuries, it certainly lines up with more anecdotal evidence of toddlers injuring themselves, looking at their parents, and if seeing a great deal of concern, then bursting into tears. Encouraging pain seems to exacerbate pain.
Edit:
While on the topic of more unpopular/unacceptable opinions to air in Western society, parental reactions to miscarriage or infant mortality:
Till not very long ago at all, childhood mortality was considered a fact of life. People mostly treated the death of a child as bad, but not life-disrupting as so many people do today. A miscarriage is a cause for mourning and great outpourings of social concern for the bereaved couple, who in turn display great stress and trauma from the event. This is not to minimize their pain, it very much is real, but the sheer magnitude of it is far larger than it ever was (or even is, Indian women typically don’t react that way to a miscarriage, I’ve handled plenty, and the ones who do are almost guaranteed to be the ones exposed to Western takes on the matter.)
Of course, the death of a child is considerably more surprising than it once was, we can quite easily expect a child born healthy today to have a ~99% chance of making it to adulthood, versus ~50% at the turn of the century. But people genuinely used to accept that they might lose half their kids before they made it out of childhood, and hedged accordingly by having massively higher birth rates. They couldn’t afford to shutdown and go into shock at the loss of one, and thus generally didn’t do so as a matter of course nor were they expected to.
I could accept the shock easier when it happens to a once healthy child, whereas early miscarriages haven’t had the same effect.
Trends in Self-reported Spontaneous Abortions: 1970–2000
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3787708/
“Little is known about how the miscarriage rate has changed over the past few decades in the United States. Data from Cycles IV to VI of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) were used to examine trends from 1970 to 2000. After accounting for abortion availability and the characteristics of pregnant women, the rate of reported miscarriages increased by about 1.0% per year. This upward trend is strongest in the first seven weeks and absent after 12 weeks of pregnancy. African American and Hispanic women report lower rates of early miscarriage than do whites. The probability of reporting a miscarriage rises by about 5% per year of completed schooling. The upward trend, especially in early miscarriages, suggests awareness of pregnancy rather than prenatal care to be a key factor in explaining the evolution of self-reported miscarriages. Any beneficial effects of prenatal care on early miscarriage are obscured by this factor.”
Even with the relative paucity of data, I would support the conclusion that this is likely due to increased maternal age more than anything else. Which is why it’s all the more perplexing that miscarriages are considered to be among the most traumatic possible events in a couple’s life, in what is likely a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As I understand it in India the parents are very involved in who are the individuals involved in the marriage. The minors are not the ones seeking out their suitors.
For statutory rape purposes the consent of the minor carriers little weight. Thus there is increased responcibility on the behalf of the teachers to keep things proper. Such an exploitation without the target feeling exploited doesn’t make it okay.
Today? It’s 50:50, and even then, arranged marriages aren’t usually anything similar to the popular misconception that the bride and groom see each other for the first time when they’re underneath the pavilion. It’s far closer to dating, but with parents assisting in the search for acceptable suitors, the kids still have a say and (usually) a veto. Think of having your friends setup a date for you with someone else they know is looking, but soliciting a larger section of the social web.
Before the 70s, it was much more dictatorial of course.
I don’t agree with the is-ought implication you’re presumably making here.
A large degree of the harm of “exploitation” is the perception of said exploitation. If you’re working a summer job and see the owner’s kid making double per hour for the same work, you can feel unfairly treated, compared to an alternate universe where you didn’t, and as long as you’re making a living wage either way, I would contend that there’s no actual exploitation involved unless you were deprived of some right you ought to have had.
A 16 year old can have shitty relationships with a 17 year old, and that’s generally acceptable for all the harm it might otherwise cause. But say they have a relationship with a 25 year old, people will still make a fuss regardless of whether any harm is committed. It’s clearly not that the harm itself is what scandalizes them.
And there’s the aspect where the general stigmatization of the age gaps that were once unremarkable means that the adults who still seek out such relationships are more likely to be bad people, further poisoning the well.
As you can see, I’m not a fan of victimless crimes, and I disagree with the presumption that such a statutory violation is necessarily bad or should be treated that way.
I would imagine a 12 year old going into marriage would not be doing so at their own initiative. In a western setting the assumption would be that the other party to the marriage would be pushing for it. In an Indian setting its more plausible that a mature person that genuinely has the interest of the younger party at heart is meddling with the situation (parent marrying off child for the benefit of the child).
Say that the owner’s kid is doing x2 and then 10 other randos are doing x1.5 with not even an attempt at justification why. There is some degree of exploitation which can not be made away by making it not percieved as exploitation. One of the patterns of work exploitation is to arrange for people from poorer countries to come work in a rich country where they are happy to work below minimum wage. In their home country it would be par for the course—from a subjective viewpoint they are not likely to complain especially if they get a little bit more money than they would in their previous country. The fact that they would be entitled to a minimum wage makes it illegal. Whether it is in the legal or illegal zone seeking out parties which will settle for bad terms is predatory. And being aggressed on in this manner does not require for the target to be unhappy.
If two equally strong people are fighting people might or might not get hurt. But if a body builder karate master “fights” an anoreksic civilian the issue is not so much how much damage is sustained but what could possibly create a ground for the karate master to geniunely need to defend themself. With enough power difference if there is possiblity of a conflict of interest a relationship can’t be a cooperation but will be dictated by one side. Your mileage may wary how much power difference the developmental gap between 17 year old and 25 year old confers, but if the circumstances place the parties in way different leagues then individual variation and detail will get less and less able to make it okay.