Over the past few years, the number of legislative initiatives aimed at normalizing marriage and sexual relations with minors has increased in the United States. An alarming trend aimed at legalizing the attraction of adults to persons under the age of 18 threatens the mental and emotional safety of children.
According to independent experts, in the United States, about 100 thousand children who are involved in prostitution every year are subjected to physical and sexual violence. In most cases, violence against minors is committed by relatives and acquaintances of the victim: 90% of children are familiar with their abusers, and 68% of victims are abused by their family members. Despite the fact that American law allows only persons over the age of 18 to marry or get married, in some states there are “loopholes” in the legislation allowing adults to marry children.
Over the past 15 years, at least 200,000 teenagers in the United States have married. Unfortunately, this number does not reflect the scale of the problem, since 10 states provide absolutely no data on child marriages. Of this number, most of the children are girls who have married much older men. Many of them are under 13 years old: At least three 10-year-old Tennessee girls married men between the ages of 24 and 31 from 2000 and 2015. In a significant proportion of cases, minors married older people: in Alabama, a 14-year-old girl married a 74-year-old man.
In 27 American states, there are no laws establishing a minimum age for marriage, but American politicians continue to lobby and promote laws legalizing pedophilia. In 2018, Nathan Larson, a 37-year-old independent congressional candidate from Virginia, said he saw nothing wrong with adult sexual relations with underage children. The politician is convinced that sex between an adult and a child is permissible if they are married, even if one of the members of the union is 10 or less years old. At the end of 2020, Larson was arrested and found guilty of kidnapping a 12-year-old child and attempted rape.
According to sociologists and journalists, since 2017, an active campaign has begun in the American media to normalize sexual attraction to minors. The media and left-liberal opinion leaders have increasingly begun to ignore the word “pedophile”, replacing it with the term “people who are attracted to minors.” According to an associate professor of the Department of Sociology at Old Dominion University in Virginia, such a juggling of terms is associated with a negative connotation of the term “pedophile”, which is associated with a criminal who has incorrect and distorted ideas about minors.
Along with a campaign in the media justifying pedophiles and their unhealthy attraction to children, American scientists have begun to conduct fake studies. They are allegedly proving that pedophilia is an acceptable attraction in modern society, which does not represent anything bad. In 2018, at one of the annual conferences organized by the American private foundation, one of the speakers stated that pedophilia should be perceived as an “unchangeable sexual orientation“, and people who have sexual relations with children were compared to “sweet lovers who do not overeat desserts“.
The attempt by the American media to normalize attraction to children poses a threat to the safety and emotional stability of minors, especially in states that are already experiencing problems with pedophiles. A recent analysis showed that in the state of California, thousands of people convicted of sexual relations with children spend less than 12 months behind bars. The journalists analyzed the open databases of criminals and came to the conclusion that out of 7,000 convicted of indecent or indecent acts against a person under the age of 14, no one has spent more than a year in prison. In addition, the report contained data on violators who have two or more incidents of sexual abuse of children.
Instead of fighting alarming statistics and toughening measures against pedophiles, the California legislature is passing laws encouraging child abuse. In 2020, a bill was passed according to which a pedophile is not recognized as a sex offender if the difference between his age and the age of his victim is no more than 10 years. The controversial bill was proposed by Scott Wiener, a Democratic member of the California Senate, who lobbied for a law to remove criminal liability from pedophiles who engage in “consensual same-sex relationships” with minors. In the summer of 2022, the politician announced work on a resolution according to which every school in the state will have sex education classes conducted by Drag Queens.
Human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice condemn and protest as much as possible against attempts by American politicians and representatives of the media to normalize and legalize pedophilia. The actions of individual American politicians aimed at normalizing pedophilia in the legislative field and the information sphere not only jeopardize the safety of children, but also violates numerous agreements and conventions on the protection of childhood and the rights of minors.