"Of course, we don't think it's a very good thing to have junior high school children running around having sex. Tokyo wants to make sure it gives them every chance to have a wholesome upbringing, but in the end, sex is a very private matter and, despite our responsibilities, it's not really an area we should be encroaching on."He has a point. I would be more interested in how, exactly, you would prosecute.
Teenagers at junior high and high school in Tokyo have been responsible for rapidly escalating rates of abortion and sexually transmitted diseases in recent years.Well, this is bad. But I'm not sure that writing "teen sex is prohibited" on a piece of paper would really help. If the government wants to do something, maybe they could, for example, put pressure on the makers of television shows not to depict junior high school students in love relationships that go beyond simple "like".
Of course, fundamentally, I'm against even that. It's not the TV's job to raise kids, just like it's not the police's, or the government's. What people should really be looking at is how to enable parents to better do their jobs, rather than taking the responsibility away from the parents. Maybe this would be by enforcing a shorter work week, to allow parents to be home more. Or by working to provide housing closer to the businesses where people work--those two and three hour train commutes are no good for families. While a law prohibiting teen sex would probably shame Japanese parents into keeping an eye out, ultimately they can't really do anything if they don't have the time to do so.
Essentially, I think laws like this are far too simplistic. There are reasons for why problems crop up, and those reasons should be looked into. This goes for any problem, anywhere in the world. You can't outlaw the effect, ignore the cause and expect to see results.
[Note: I don't know if the first paragraph of the article is in error, or if Governor Ishihara misread the law.]
4 comments:
I'll just make a simple disclaimer before I get into the meat of my post. I agree with you about not making laws on teenage sexual behavior, and I agree with you that responsibility is in the hands of the parents. What follows is a bit of a rant that just came to me when reading your post. I'm not really disputing you in it, I figured I'd say. I'm agreeing and throwing in my own two cents. See, I think the "blame the parents" conclusion -- while it IS merited -- omits one facet of raising our kids that is pretty damn important.
Sorry it's real long. You just got my mind working. ;>
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The debate of parents vs. government in raising our children has been going on for some time now. The more conservative opinions state that it's the parents responsible for their children, where the more liberal viewpoint includes all these smaller clauses such as: "What if our rich-loving tax cuts have made it too difficult for the people to take care of their children?"
I don't believe that there's many people out there that want the government to take care of others' kids -- nor do I believe that there are that many snooty leftists that just think they know better than parents. I think that most of the government involvement has been instigated by these lawmakers worrying over the people at the bottom of the ladder.
Unfortunately, offering aid for one thing often leads to aid for another. First offering welfare in such a way that (and you can't really deny this -- if you haven't, someone you know has met someone that used welfare to be able to do jack shit and live for free) it can become a great cushion for our lazier tendencies, and then noting that a large part of welfare recipients don't have health care -- and so now we need to give them that. This doesn't work well.
In a sense, the government has been "raising" our ADULTS for some time now. Or trying to. Only makes sense that they'd try to take care of the kids too. Important thing to note is that this shit's all done with good intentions. But that doesn't mean it's a wise choice.
However, there's also problems with the more conservative viewpoint -- get a job, get one with healthcare, raise your kids yourself, and be held accountable if you or yours fuck up.
I don't know that any of us posting here are so far removed from the teenage years that we can completely forget what it's like. Parents simply cannot be there with you 100% of the time. And if you have a desire to play doctor or to make out or to watch a gross-out movie or play a monstrous video game or take out a Ouija board and see if it really works or sneak out in the middle of the night to play hide and seek in the graveyard down the street -- you can typically use that mind in your head to figure out how to get it done.
Likewise, if you want to have sex, if you want to experiment with cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs -- there are ways to do it.
But this isn't a new thing. This has been going on much longer than people have been paying attention to it. Ask an older relative who smokes when he/she got started. Ask a good female/male friend when they lost their virginity.
They used to try to paint the picture that people breaking from the "stay safe, sex-free, alcohol-free" teenage tradition were the rare oddities. But the fact is, it's the people that actually don't do these things that are the oddities. We all experiment. We all try things that certainly wouldn't be up on the list of parental recommendations.
The point is, even though shrinking down work schedules and making it easier and faster to get home from work might help put the parent and the child together more frequently, the kid is still going to have time by himself -- and those are the times that matter the most.
There's another long-standing war out there: between church and state. They're supposed to be separate entities. That's fair. But the church is an institution that guides children with good morals (whether you believe everything that religion has to offer or not, and whether you think of Christian kids as "Churchies" that are blinded by mythology or not, it has been proven to keep Churchies from doing things they might otherwise be tempted to do). The church doesn't make things LEGALLY "illegal", and the church forgives without throwing you in jail -- it's more of a parent than government ever could be. That's why it worked. Why it works.
A teen group in a church is like a support group for those teens that are all going through the same things. You meet people like you and you grow with them -- they may not turn out to be your best friends, but at least you are seeing that there are kids that DON'T say "okay" to new temptations. It makes it easier for those other kids to say no.
I'm not saying that church keeps all kids in line. Like I said, it doesn't actually ever punish. No jail, no fines. And some kids can't get into the ideas of a church. Some turn away over time. But pound for pound, I'd say that churches contribute a large percentage into keeping kids from doing things they might not be old enough to make good decisions about.
But I'm not saying church is necessarily the answer for kids today. What I'm saying is that the loss of church in a lot of homes (more and more parents are not participating in religion with their children) has an impact on the children being raised.
And it isn't church specifically, it's a greater sense of what is right -- what is good -- what is moral. No, TV isn't to blame, but TV does not preach good morals. No, the Internet isn't to blame, but the greater portion of the Internet does not preach good morals. No, video games aren't to blame, but when's the last time you met someone that would rather play "Let's Pray!" than try to figure out how to disable the blur on nudity in The Sims?
It isn't that media is the reason our kids are thinking the way they are, but it doesn't "help". More and more parents today are swearing off the religion they were raised with, without considering that the very same religion they grew up with is why they kept from doing certain things.
They don't understand that when they were kids, they heard of what to do and what not to every Sunday from a preacher -- not just from their parents -- and they aren't preaching in that guy's place every Sunday to their own kids. Like I said, it isn't "religion" that I'm touting -- it's the process of droning on and on about what is good and what is wrong.
Thinking that everything you do can be seen by a greater power -- and that depending on what you choose, you could spend eternity - ETERNITY - in bliss or in incredible pain doesn't hurt either. Younger kids are more impressionable -- more willing to believe things that aren't exactly palpable. And so religion does a great service to those kids by keeping them out of trouble.
But parents aren't compensating for the lack of religion -- parents are raising their kids the way parents always raised their children. We change things that our parents did to do the job more effectively, but rarely are we adding speeches about morality and goodness.
Religion is ages old and has been a staple in the lives of many. Religion does not raise our children -- parents do -- but consider the effects of religion as a tool (if you want to call it that) to parents. Parents teach you how to drive -- how to catch the ball -- how to write and read -- how to treat other people. But religion is a prepackaged box of morality, forever staying true to the course of good, and parents without it have a lot more work to do than parents with it.
It's my belief that whether you use religion or some other form of moral code is irrelevant -- so long as you have something. So that you can get inside your kids' heads and teach them what is good and what is right and just keep telling them over and over and over like that sermon that always lasts ten minutes too long. We may not have enjoyed hearing it. But we HEARD it.
No, we don't need governments to tell us what kids have to do. We don't need TV, games, etc., to be changed to teach our children. And in the end, it IS the parents' responsibility to raise their children.
But the big question is what happens when kids can get away from their parents to experiment and try things out. They need to get out and they need to experiment -- they need to finally join in the world around them. And how they react in those situations -- what they do in those situations -- isn't going to just be based on what we observed Mom and Dad doing. It's going to be based in a large part on subconscious tendencies made up largely by what we were forced to believe while growing up.
Again, I'm not saying that we all have to attend church, but if you aren't going that route as a parent, you'd better have a backup to make up for all that morality those kids miss by being kept from it.
-AJ
You make some really good points. One of the main reasons I think education is failing in the US, as I've mentioned before, is that the sense of community has decayed. Families are islands unto themselves.
Churches, mosques, temples, whatever, those kinds of places offer that community. They're really the best thing we have at this point. It would be nice if many of them didn't come prepackaged with intolerance for other viewpoints, but it's an imperfect world.
I'd like it if college campuses and the workplace were similarly powerful as communities, because those are directly relevant to our minds and our lives, but there too we have the intolerance factor. College campuses are especially unforgiving of a conservative viewpoint.
There really isn't an ideal scenario. Anywhere you have a group of humans, you will have an "us" group that thinks of everyone else as "them".
So I'm not really sure what a true solution would be.
Your post inspired me to write a dissertation about losing my Christianity, which I am making its own post. Feel free to comment.
Oh, and...
"sneak out in the middle of the night to play hide and seek in the graveyard down the street"
Dear lord, did you actually do that?
I actually believe the name of the game is "Ghost in the Graveyard"
http://www.gameskidsplay.net/frame_alphabetical_listing.htm
Think Escape and Evasion, but in a graveyard setting. Never did it myself, though I did plenty of sneaking out in the middle of the night there for awhile.
Where was there to go? Rock Fence Park or something? The bowling alley? o_o
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