Youth, Sex, Morality & Why We No Longer Oppose the Age of Consent

In this decaying society, no one is feeling the ground erode under their feet quite as quickly as youth. And as their futures grow bleaker, they struggle to become independent and their reliance on adults increases. This anxiety expresses itself most acutely on the terrain of sex. Every child abuse scandal that goes viral only solidifies this feeling further. However, this legitimate fear is being successfully channeled by the ruling class to fuel its reactionary political aims. This is best exemplified by the far-right QAnon conspiracy movement and its growing influence on right-wing politics, where accusations of grooming and pedophilia become a potent weapon with which to attack anyone to the left of MAGA (“Make America Great Again”).

To fight against the abuse of children, we must untangle the right’s aggressive moral offensive from the crimes committed against youth. Both wings of the ruling class weaponize accusations of child abuse and pedophilia to ram through bans on porn, phones and puberty blockers, or attacks against immigrants—all with the consent of large layers of the population. But the only effective way to combat child abuse is to attack its social roots. This means fighting for youth to be more integrated into society and defending their right to make decisions about their own lives and bodies.

In addressing these important questions, this article also corrects our previous approach to issues of sex and morality. In the name of opposing the encroaching forces of reaction, we opposed age of consent laws on principle. This approach was based on a blanket opposition to state intervention in the bedroom, without taking into account the social reality in which these laws are being applied. Crucially, this position offered no way to deal with the real abuse of young people and advocated stripping a protective measure that gives them a legal means to fight back. Such a strategy only enflames the legitimate fears of youth and reinforces conservative impulses.

Ruling Class Hypocrisy and “Protecting Children”

Internationally, the bourgeoisie is faced with a rapidly deteriorating world situation that increasingly compels them to resort to force to push through their interests. But coercion alone is not enough. They must also legitimize their class interests by invoking “universal values,” and so they rely on moral campaigns, drawing from the reservoir of conservatism in society to build a durable base of social support. Behind the lofty moral claims of the ruling class is always plain self-interest looking for camouflage.

One of the main flashpoints in the bourgeoisie’s moral offensive is the protection of children. Children are the most vulnerable members of any society and their growth into functioning adults is essential for society’s survival. Thus it is universally recognized as the most morally repugnant crime to hurt children and especially to misuse one’s authority over a child to hurt them. The reality of child abuse makes it easier for the ruling class to justify direct and coercive interventions by invoking the protection of children. This is particularly useful when pursuing its interests requires forceful measures.

The same ruling elite that facilitates the genocide in Gaza or bombs girls’ schools in Iran cloaks its repression at home in the rhetoric of “protecting our children” to enforce unquestioning compliance. Meanwhile, they attack what remains of the social safety net so that children grow up in a time when medical care, education, or simply paying rent becomes a one-way ticket to a lifetime of debt. They ban youth from having access to their phones or social media, further increasing young people’s isolation from society and each other. They push society toward crisis and war and turn youth into cannon fodder before they’re even old enough to drink. Meanwhile, actual abusers are most likely to be the adults that children are taught never to oppose or resist because they “have your best interests at heart,” while children themselves are “too young to understand.”

What is the ruling class “protecting” children from? Not poverty, depression, or war. And not from adults who take advantage of the ruling class’s own logic that youth need a firm hand to control them in the name of protecting them. The bourgeoisie may cloak themselves in moral absolutes, but they “protect” children only insofar as it aligns with their interests.

Youth Oppression and Abuse

The social climate is marked by heightened awareness of child sexual abuse, reinforced by constant scandals. Insofar as this sentiment is directed against the conditions that maintain youth oppression, it can become a powerful lever to draw youth into the revolutionary movement. However, as the situation currently stands, this sentiment is being mobilized by the bourgeoisie to deepen the dependence and vulnerability of children.

To understand how to fight this, we need to first understand where child abuse comes from. When the ruling class invokes it, it does so by pushing a very specific myth of what abuse looks like, construing it as a sudden and random event committed by a stranger and preventable with sufficient vigilance. But in reality, most abuse is committed by someone the child knows and trusts, in private, and involves coercion and dependence, not just sudden violence. Increasing the control of parents and the state over the lives of children as a way to “protect” them maintains the social conditions out of which abuse grows.

So long as our society is defined by oppression and exploitation, there will be violence, both open and hidden, against youth. The more vulnerable youth are, the more powerless they are in the face of abusers. It is no coincidence that abuse is most common in cases where the power imbalance is very high. Just look at the Epstein case (see page 32), the epidemic of sexual abuse in the Catholic church or the high number of such occurrences within families.

Abuse happens precisely because of the isolation and dependence of youth. It is not hard to figure out how such abuse remains secret when a parent, teacher, or priest (not to mention a cop), the very people children are taught never to question or disobey, mistreats them. Most abuse happens within the family, where children are completely dependent on parents and elders for even developing their sense of what “normal” is. Most children are severely unequipped to even register abuse because they have limited social awareness of boundaries or won’t assert them for fear of being punished for disobedience or resisting authority. If a child realizes that something about their relationship with a particular adult doesn’t match up with their relationship with others, their only recourse is often to appeal to other authority figures. Abuse must be understood as a consequence of patriarchal social relations.

The most effective methods for fighting abuse are those that empower youth by giving them the means to exercise their bodily autonomy. Reducing their dependence on one or two overburdened caregivers would ensure they have places to go beyond home or school and access to a support system outside of their immediate family. Often, access to society outside the home is how youth realize that something unhealthy is going on in their home life. Access to jobs allows them to become more financially independent, develop responsibility and become the social equals of adults for the first time in their lives. Available apartments and affordable rents would enable them to move out of abusive situations. Likewise, access to affordable transportation provides the freedom to leave and travel. Sex education, contraception and free abortion on demand would help reduce the likelihood of unwanted pregnancies that can ruin a young person’s life before they’ve even had the chance to live independently.

All these measures would give youth the material means to make decisions for themselves and develop the experience and confidence to live independently. However, such measures are tied to the level of economic and social development of society at large and show the strong relationship between youth freedom and the conditions of the working masses. For revolutionaries, protecting young people thus means fighting to achieve these measures by tying the fate of youth to that of the working class in the struggle against capitalist decay.

Youth, Bodily Autonomy and Consent

The ruling class has been able to successfully target and roll back the rights of youth in the name of “fighting abuse.” Many young people and their parents also support restrictive measures out of a legitimate desire to ensure children and teens aren’t harmed and because they see no other way to protect them. However, taking the law as the basis of one’s moral compass and accepting that youth under 18 have no right to make decisions about their own bodies is a real concession to the arguments used to keep youth dependent and vulnerable. This is exactly why the right focuses its transphobic reaction on children, arguing that the state and parents need to step in and control them.

Marjorie Taylor Greene exploited exactly this conception to advocate banning gender-affirming care for minors: “Pass my Protect Children’s Innocence Act to stop communist groomers like this from using state government power to take children away from their parents to allow a for-profit medical industry to chop off these confused children’s genitals before they are even old enough to vote” (X.com, 22 November 2022).

Yet the ruling class’s own laws contradict the idea of a “universal” age when youth are ready to make decisions for themselves. In almost every country, minors can be exploited as workers before they can participate in the democratic process. In the U.S., youth can legally get blown up fighting in defense of the petrodollar before they can have a drink or smoke something to take the edge off. This inconsistency applies especially to questions of sex and consent. Although most countries restrict sex based on age, they cannot agree on what age youth are ready to have sex. In Kuwait, all sex outside marriage is criminalized. In California, someone under 18 cannot legally consent to sex but can get married with court approval, i.e., they can only give consent within the framework of marriage. Meanwhile, just next door in Nevada, the age of consent is 16. How can a relationship be consensual in one state and then criminal just across the border? Such an approach, based on arbitrary legal ages set by 80-year-old politicians, cannot determine when each individual is ready to take that step.

But if the law doesn’t provide a clear basis to judge when young people have made a genuine decision for themselves, what does? The subject of youth and bodily autonomy is much more complex than the black-and-white premises of bourgeois morality. Youth is a natural period of development where there are lots of social changes, like becoming more independent and socially integrated, as well as biological changes such as puberty, during which one forms sexual capability. Youth go through a long period of socialization—the process by which they learn to navigate society—which is, in turn, conditioned by their social exposure. Their limited social experience and the oppressive nature of our society necessarily make youth sex rife with gray areas.

Yet there remains a fundamental line between consent and coercion. Coercion involves the use of pressure, threats, manipulation, intimidation, or abuse of power to obtain sex from someone who does not freely consent. Consent consists of the knowledge of what you are consenting to and the social meaning of that act. It also means understanding the constraints on your decisions. For a young person, this means being aware of the social taboo against a relationship between themselves and an older person. It also means being aware of their own limitations in a given situation, such as whether they can revoke consent at any time, leave, or resist. For instance, a young child may be curious about the human body but have no understanding of what sex is and how an older, more socially aware person is using them. This is very different from a teenager with a crush on their teacher, fully aware of the power dynamic between them and the taboo their teacher would be breaking if they were to respond.

When disentangling the complicated knot of consent and coercion in the lives of young people, we should make no concessions to the hysterics of capitalist politicians. However, the dominant ideas among young people do often reflect the moral campaigns of the ruling class. Youth often invoke the law as a moral absolute to justify restrictions on minors and some even support bans on social media in the name of “protecting mental health” and “fighting groomers.” Young people who want to fight abuse cannot do so based on acquiescing to the ruling class’s morality. The bourgeoisie seeks to raise the next generation as automatons who know nothing but isolation and obedience and whom they can deploy as soldiers or minimum-wage workers to keep their crumbling system running. We must reject not only their political attacks but their whole moral framework in order to fight back.

Why We No Longer Oppose Age of Consent Laws

Our own party has long had an un-Marxist approach to the question of youth sexuality. Beginning from opposition to the bourgeoisie’s hypocritical cries to “protect the children,” we proceeded directly from abstract principles against the capitalist state to a concrete policy of abolishing all age of consent laws. Why was this?

Our position did start from some correct premises, namely that the capitalist state isn’t benevolent or neutral but a tool of class oppression, and that we should be guided by the freely made decisions of young people, i.e., effective consent. So we argued that state intervention is unjustified in cases of “crimes without victims”—acts considered by law to be crimes but where neither party feels they have been harmed. That includes sex between consenting people that is criminalized purely due to an age difference. We focused on whether there was effective consent to determine if a particular encounter was consensual or rape, rather than an arbitrary age enshrined in law.

Our approach was a product of the radical sexual attitudes of the 1960s and ’70s. In a context of escalating class struggle, military defeats of imperialism and growing radicalism, it was possible to throw off the yoke of the repressive sexual and social practices of the ’50s. But following the defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Vietnam War, the American bourgeoisie embarked on aggressive moral campaigns to recover politically, such as supporting Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” crusade against gays.

To defend the left in a period where politics were moving to the right, Marxists needed to address the limitations of the sexual revolution. For example, its focus on social rebellion and changing cultural and social attitudes to sex, but without altering the social relations at the root of youth oppression, paved the way for a backlash. When the bourgeoisie seized on real sexual crimes to bolster its attacks, we became increasingly defensive and sought to uphold the values of a waning counterculture by defending a sexually libertarian perspective. Seeking to stand against the conservative climate and the bourgeoisie’s moral campaigns, we assumed the best of some individuals facing accusations, which led us to take flatly wrong and reprehensible positions on cases of sexual assault such as that of Roman Polanski (see page 29).

Our approach reflected an inability to deal with social reality. We did not merely point out the hypocrisy of age of consent laws, that they offer only limited means to protect against abuse, or that their invocation in cases of clear consensual sex should be opposed. The problem is that we began from an abstract principle against the state and took this directly to a blanket position for the immediate abolition of these laws under capitalism. This provokes a very defensive reaction from youth and frankly most people in society, who often hear about youth and sexuality primarily in the context of heinous abuse cases. This reaction reflects the prevalence of abuse and the enduring power dynamics between youth and adults under capitalism.

Our opposition to age of consent laws was based on opposing government intervention in cases where there was no clear-cut rape and neither partner involved claimed they had been a victim of abuse. However, it’s very difficult to apply the concept of effective consent to the lives of young people, since power dynamics and social taboos overlap with and are often the result of age. Most of the time, what an outsider would call abuse is the only thing a child has been exposed to in their short life. The power dynamic between people is not something you can opt out of; it is the result of a complicated mix of natural, social and even emotional factors that make determining consent between youth and adults a massive gray area.

Marxists start from the understanding that “right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines” (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875), meaning that laws reflect economic and cultural development, not the other way around. We could demand “government out of the bedroom,” but this will not change the social relations between adults and children (or men and women) which produce sexual abuse and in turn lead people to seek state intervention as an answer. It is idealist to begin from the premise that changing laws will allow youth to exercise real bodily autonomy while they remain dependent social beings. No one slogan can equip us to deal with the complex social reality surrounding youth sex.

Marxists and Morality

We believe the act of someone giving, refusing, or being unable to provide informed consent is the most important factor in determining whether sex is consensual or rape, not whether one’s parents or the government think an individual should be capable of giving consent. However, we do not oppose the rights of victimized children to use age of consent laws to eke out whatever justice they can get from the capitalist legal system.

Our job as Marxists is not to play God and claim that in the massive gray zone that is youth sex, we can determine what’s good or bad sex, what is or isn’t consent. Our job is to build a revolutionary party by putting forward clear political lines that advance the interests of the working class. We have a political attitude toward sex only insofar as it is relevant to advancing the class struggle—for example, when the ruling class uses it to foment reaction or when it’s necessary to oppose a witchhunt as part of defending the rights of the oppressed as a whole. Sometimes, questions of gender and sexuality are relevant, such as when the right weaponizes “grooming” slanders to embark on an all-sided offensive against trans people.

However, as revolutionaries, our morals and our program will necessarily be far from those of the majority of society. We should not unnecessarily aggravate this gap, particularly in a way that replaces polarization over politics and class with one over social attitudes. We will always lose in such situations. We can only combat these attitudes by showing how they hold back the struggles of youth and the working class, not by resorting to abstract principles.

For communists, our morality, which is our general outlook on society, is tied to our program—what we seek to fight against and what we fight for. However, morality and program are not the same thing. We oppose many things under capitalism because we recognize their role in maintaining the oppression and subservience of the masses: the capitalist state, the patriarchal family, religion and even the repression of youth. The question is how to fight these things.

At the same time that Marxists recognize religion as an instrument to defend exploitation, we argue against raising atheism as a central slogan of the revolutionary party, i.e., declaring war on religion, because this would only stimulate militant clericalism. Engels recognized that to really free the masses from religion requires drawing the widest layers of the working class into the class struggle. This would allow them to draw the conclusion from their own experience that religion holds their struggle back. This doesn’t mean that our political aim is no longer to combat religion. But this cannot be done by starting from abstract principles and preaching about how religion is reactionary. We can only eliminate religion by attacking its social roots, the degrading conditions that lead people to cling to salvation in the next life. Only by drawing the masses into a concrete, collective struggle against the capitalist class and its rule, which forms the basis of their daily hardship, can we render religion obsolete.

The question of age of consent laws is similar. Our job as Marxists is to draw youth into the working-class struggle against capitalism in order to target the social roots of their oppression and eventually render these laws obsolete. This will only be done by targeting those repressive laws and practices which are the most concentrated expression of youth oppression, and where there is actual sentiment to fight back. The position we are rejecting created additional and substantial obstacles to drawing youth into the class struggle by confronting them in an extremely rigid manner on the terrain of their highly personal social attitudes about sex. It is not uncommon for political opponents (both left and right) to resort to the moral toolkit of the bourgeoisie and smear revolutionaries with positions that run counter to the dominant morality as a way to divert attention from what is needed to advance a particular struggle. While this tactic needs to be exposed, we should not make their job any easier. Revolutionaries must stand firm on communist morality, but should also minimize drawing lines over secondary issues that are bound to lead to a backlash.

Today, youth generally do not view the age of consent as specifically oppressive. Declaring war on it is just as counterproductive as declaring war on religion. Abolishing the age of consent means stripping young people of a legal protection without providing any other means to fight against or remove themselves from abuse. How we fight against youth oppression matters. The problem is not merely the social attitudes we encounter; it is the way we deal with them and seek to provide answers.

The right is on a rampage, and this is enabled by the popular moral basis of their attacks. Those who seek to fight abuse and defend youth must draw two lessons from this experience.

1. Sharing the ruling class’s moral arguments, and even deploying them against the right, will only undermine efforts to enfranchise, educate and empower youth. The revolutionary youth movement is extremely marginal; to become a force to be reckoned with, it must construct its own morality based on understanding that the motor force of youth liberation is the class struggle.

2. Confronting the dominant morality with a counter-crusade will backfire. The rise of conservatism among all sectors of society is understandably frustrating for leftists, including leftist youth. This certainly reflects how far we have left to go. However, confronting social attitudes head-on and in isolation from their social roots will never play out in favor of revolutionaries. Stand unflinching in the face of the conservative morality of the ruling class and its reflection among the masses. Learn the rhythm of history. And prioritize the patient work of nurturing a class polarization, allowing the masses to learn through their experience which morality serves them best.