"I'm still not really convinced that the AoC has no reason for existence. I think it ought to be proven that the AoC doesn't protect children from any exploitation or abuse before we do away with it."

It is easy forget, two generations after the Sexual Revolution, that the Age of Consent was traditionally low to allow the prosecution of children - and that those who were under the age of consent were not being protected from those who might have sexual relations with them, but from the legal authorities that might punish them or even kill them for the "crime" of sex. The age of consent was intended as an age of criminal responsibility for "sex crimes" which included every sexual act other than procreative sex within a marriage.

In one ancient Jewish law, girls up to the age of three would not be considered tarnished if they engaged in sexual relations - but we forget that this meant that girls aged three years and a day were treated as adults - and the law required them to be stoned to death if they did so.

In the late 1800s, when moral busybodies in Britain began their campaign to prevent the child prostitution that threatened middle class wives, they reframed the age of consent as a way to "protect" children - even as they used it to reduce children's options. Times were changing and the myth of childhood innocence had taken hold. The reformers knew they could not justify their changes to the law on traditional grounds of the inherent sinfulness of children and the age of reason at which children could be held responsible for their actions - so instead they turned the concept on its head and promoted a raised age of consent in order to protect children's "innocence".

When the Sexual Revolution rolled around, traditional beliefs were still strong - and though the revolutionaries began with the desire to liberate not only adults but also children, the traditionalists set barriers in the way - and invented reasons to "protect" the children from sex, until AIDS provided a real reason that the traditionalists could latch on to. The sexual revolutionaries sacrificed their children to the mood of the moment in order to salvage and eventually extend their own sexual liberation. The traditionalists gave up on one generation as lost and hoped that they could indoctrinate these children into their own world view - which temporarily succeeded, until the excesses of religious revival resulted in a generation whose close contact with religion made them largely resistant to its demands.

And so here we are now, and we are so removed from the culture which established these laws that almost everyone believes that the Age of Consent was invented in order to protect children when its true purpose was precisely the opposite.