Quote Originally Posted by Ozme52 View Post
But wait!! Please define child-molester. Are all our British friends going to hell? They use a different age than we use in the USA. I'm not actually asking you to define it... Ancient Jews consider 13 to be the age of assent. And in many cultures girls became marriable upon menstruation.
A long time ago I posted somewhere about this very idea. ( I think it was here when Rabbit took over and changed some rules about posting stories containing underage characters.) I'm not going to do the research again, but my recollection is that here in the US there was a very large variation between states regarding age for marriage. In at least one state, I believe, a girl of 14 could marry without her parents consent, and in many states she could marry with their consent. In other states women under 21 had to have their parents consent. There was even one country, as I recall, which allowed girls as young as 9 years old to be given away in marriage (I'm not certain, but I think it was Afghanistan under the Taliban.)