Olympic village has opened and Dutch beach volleyball player who raped a 12-year-old isn't in it

sure but that depends how obedient you are. a slightly sociopathic person especially at 19 might not be considerate of laws or fully aware of the potential consequences.

cable ties are my preference.

if you think im wrong, explain clearly with sound reasoning why. don't get mad because you dont like how the world works, that doesnt do any good at all.

I’m not outraged by what he did. It’s just a technical violation. The age of consent is an arbitrary marker of maturity anyway because we need some marker for law. Nothing changes from the night before to the morning after of that marker.

Let’s just laugh it off like we do when boys get willingly “raped” by pretty high school teachers.

I don’t care about those details. He is spineless and found a way to fly all the way there to do this. Not a good story or a good guy doing it

By law - yes he should.

That is the point of paying your debt to society. By most legal systems you are punished and rehabilitate and rejoin society.

You advocate for a social debtors prison and endless punishment. The same punishment could be done for anything wrong you have done in your life. Endless punishment.

You didn't provide any reasoning whatsoever but I'm supposed to do so? It is simply wrong that every male is biologically programmed to be sexually attracted to any female that has gone through puberty. That you're a coping pedophile won't change that.

There are some serious mental gymnastics going on this post.

This isn't a 19-year old marrying a 12 year-old in a country where that is normalized. The Netherlands is a Western country and (while more liberal than many) it is not okay to have sex with a twelve year old.

This also isn't a case where he was under the false impression that the girl was sixteen. While that initially was the case, he later discovered her age and still booked a plane ticket to go see her. That's about as premeditated as it gets with a lot of time for sober reflection.

Yes, people do dumb things while their brains aren't fully formed (and brains aren't fully formed by nineteen) and we should take that into account when punishing them. However, when a teenager acts this far outside social mores and legal boundaries, they still need to be held accountable.

This thread does raise two interesting points for me:

1) The athlete was punished for this offence. Should the privilege of attending the Olympics be solely based on athletic achievement or should previous immoral/criminal behaviour outside the sport be considered? Other athletes with criminal pasts have competed in the olympics before.

2) Discussions of sexual assault/rape always seem to leave people on two sides. On one side is a group who feel the perpetrator is an irredeemable monster. On the other side is a group who looks at what the perpetrator did and, if it doesn't fit with the classic description of a violent rape, feels that everyone is overreacting and it wasn't really all that wrong. This probably stems from the fact that we view sexual assault/rape as the most abhorrent thing that a person can do. Polls in the US show that about half of Americans view rape as worse than murder.

In recent years, more and more behaviours which used to be viewed as a "bad date" are being classified as sexual assault/rape. In some cases (e.g. colleges where any degree of intoxication leads to inability to consent) this classification is not even in keeping with legal standards. It's unsurprising that there is a strong backlash in these specific scenarios given the label of "rapist" still carries enormous weight.

12 is absurdly low for this arguement. Nobody in college is talking about how hot that 6th grader that their younger sister is friends with is. Tell me she is 15-17 and we can start talking about being sexually attractive and how it is still wron go to act on it.

Even the midevil people understood this where those child bride marriages weren’t consummated for several years..

Kids in middle school are sexually active. We do not know what the 12 year old victim looked like, but girls are hitting puberty much earlier. My kid is in middle school and some of the girls in his class look like they could be in high school. 19 year old boys are ready to have sex with anyone, anywhere at any time.

Van de Velde's case is not a good one in that he seemed to do some grooming and used alcohol. But it is a very difficult issue of drawing a line between the sexual debut of girls being consensual, but too soon and what should be considered rape or pedophilia. Making a girl who has become sexually active at too young an age a party to a criminal proceeding against a boy who she may very well have had a real romantic attraction to may be very damaging to the girl as opposed to just cutting off the relationship and getting the girl counseling. When the conduct is criminalized, you are basically telling young girls that the state controls when they can become sexually active and that anyone who is sexually attracted to them before they reach the age of consent is a rapist. That is a very difficult background to live with for a young girl who is trying to decide when she is ready to become sexually active.

I used to work with high school kids. I can say with certainty that the age of consent laws were no barrier to those kids having sex with each other. If age of consent laws were strictly enforced, a third of those kids would have criminal records. If we want kids to delay their sexual debut, we need to talk to kids openly about sex and why it is better to wait. Instead, we let kids be sexualized in the media (the Van de Velde victim was on social media) and pretend like they aren't going to want to have sex because Jesus told them to wait until they marry.

THIS was the first story from the Olympic Village you knuckleheads could come up with?

You need to see a shrink my man.

Biden showered with his daughter when she was 12.