Legislating Morality Through the Age of Consent: The Comparative Politics of Generation in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers recent Canadian parliamentary proceedings in 2007 on the age of consent, Bill C22, later encapsulated in Bill C25 amending the criminal code, in comparative perspective with similar legislation and debate in the US and the UK in order to understand to what extent the state is involved in moral regulation and by what means, as well as the impact it has on gender identity and equality. In Canada, evidence from parliamentary debates and briefs as well as media coverage, reveals a particularly conservative and gendered discourse. Unable to reverse the feminist gains already made, this evidence makes clear that the Conservative government in Canada has chosen an indirect route through which to regulate morality and reinforce gender norms in the regulation of minors. This tactic is evident in raising the general age of consent, recast as age of protection, to sixteen while leaving consent to anal sex at eighteen. Although the ostensible purpose is the protection of victims, evidence reveals the means by which moral regulation is accomplished: selective partnering in the policy community; politicizing of youth sexuality through the juxtaposition of sexuality and criminality; and, characterizing the child as in need of protection, including the reinforcing of sexual, gender and generational stereotypes that also privileges an idealized child and adult relationship. While the Canadian preoccupation with moral danger and youth, particularly in the characterization of the role of internet and child pornography, is found in all three cases, the comparison reveals differences in the framing of the issue of sexuality and youth and in particular the difference between Canada and the UK on the debate of equality of homosexuality and heterosexuality in setting the age of consent. One of the most important conclusions in all three cases of this comparative study is the reinforcement of gender, sexual and generational stereotypes through the politicized identity of the child and youth. In all three cases the reluctance to approach the subject of minors and sexuality gives the advantage to this conservative discourse and points to the need to open up the debate on minors and sexuality even though there is a political risk in doing so.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.041 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".