Comment on What age gap is too big of an age gap if someone's in their early 30's?
DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 3 weeks agoI know what you were asking but your question reads as “So you don’t like waffles?”. No-one was saying anything about anyone under the age of 18, only what minimum age is appropriate for anyone who’s already a legal adult. I think 15-17 are fine dating amongst themselves but that’s an age where parental consent is concerned in a lot of places.
otp@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Oh, interesting! Is parental consent legally required for certain ages to date in some places?
DebatableRaccoon@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
This is where I can only speak broadly since every country (and state/province) has it’s own laws but from a legal standpoint, minors need parental consent to do a great many things. Dating in the broad term such as a young couple going to see a movie with each other would likely be seen as an innocuous activity and not worth a court’s time. Where laws get involved are when it comes to physical intimacy and they can be loose or draconian. Just in the US alone, there are laws that dictate minors of the same age are able to do as they please, some have the “Romeo & Juliet law” otherwise known as the close-in-age law, and others deem physical intimacy between minors as strictly illegal meaning if 2 minors of the same age had sex, they’d both be committing sexual assault against a minor. To put the power of parental consent into perspective though, in the UK it was possible for a couple wherein one or more of the two were 16 or 17 were legally able to marry with parental consent. This was true until as recently as 2023 due to child abuse issues but that’s incredibly recent for such a thing.