Man, mild learning disability and "an IQ of 48" sound very different to me. Not that I have a real sense of the rights or wrongs here, but the story's badly written.
When I worked in a hospital for the mentally disabled [I've no idea what the correct term to use is here, it used to be called S/cottish N/ ational Institution for the Education of I/ mbecile Children] there was a LOT of sex going on. However, the approach (as far as I could tell) was to hand-out contraceptives and try to mitigate any of the more serious consequences, rather than to make any attempt to stop it.
3. That sex between a man and a woman may result in the woman becoming pregnant
It's not clear to me that the majority of humans clears this bar.
3: It's funny, sex between two intellectually disabled people seems to me to be much less questionable than sex between two people only one of whom is disabled, but it seems hard to state that in a principled way.
6: Similar to why sex between 2 teenagers is less questionable than sex between an adult and a teenager -- less chance of exploitation when there is less inequality.
In addition to the sensible reason explained in 7, I think there's also a less rational gut reaction. I find I have a weird gut reaction to a couple where one is a little person and one is not, which I wouldn't have to two little people. Of course, there's nothing correct or rational about that inclination, but it makes it harder to suss out whether the reaction in 6 is correct or not.
couple where one is a little person and one is not
I wish we'd get a ruling like this in the US; it seems like it would encourage sane sex education policies.
Oh, wait, I forgot, rationality doesn't apply to public policy here.
2: I had the same question, but I don't think you can blame the story. If you look to the opinion in the link, that is where the confusion start. It says "mildly" learning disabled, IQ = 48, and that an IQ of 50 puts you at the .05 percentile (i.e. lower IQ than 1 out of 200).
Needless to say, all of these things cannot all be true and that I'd guess that the last two are correct because they sort of fit together. IQ is usually scaled so that mean = 100, SD = 15. The .05 percentile doesn't fit with that exactly, but an IQ of 48 does put you in the bottom percent in the scales I've seen used.
IQ is usually scaled so that mean = 100, SD = 15
Really? IQ is even more useless than I thought it was; I'm nowhere near as smart as my IQ would imply. What's the cutoff for LD?
I don't know the terminology in any solid way, but I thought that 'learning disability' was generally used to refer to some condition affecting learning narrowly, such that it wouldn't be reflected in IQ; like dyslexia, for example.
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Hey London Mineshaft:
I'm going to be in town briefly in a couple weeks. Anyone interested in meeting up? My likely only available time is on Monday the 28th in the dinner/evening timeframe. Love to get some pints and maybe some curry.
If no, I'll be back in early April, but I'm not clear on whether I'll have any free time.
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12: IQ is useless for many things and useful for others. None of that has anything to do with the mean and standard deviation. People just standardized the scores for simplicity. The cutoff for learning disabled varies, but being the bottom 1 out of 200, if that is accurate, isn't a close call. An IQ of 50 is what you see with Down's Syndrome and things like that.
For reference, Forrest Gump's IQ was 76.
What's bothering me about this case is that I probably agree that there are people who shouldn't be considered capable of consent to sex by reason of mental disability, but I've got no idea if I'd think of this guy as falling within that category, and the fact that he was involved in a long-term relationship with someone makes me lean toward the idea that he was competent to consent. But I honestly don't have enough information to really have an opinion.
Hmm. Creates kind of a interesting situation. I'd agree that a person with normal intelligence sleeping with someone who has an IQ of 48 is, you know, wrong, and probably should be prosecuted -- seems like there's an inherent imbalance of power that you can't really get around, and that would have an impact on consent, regardless of the whole competence thing -- but then what about the situation ttaM describes, where you have lots of people with low IQs having sex with other people with low IQs? What are you gonna do, arrest them for raping each other?
13: Yeah, I was sort of reading that as "super low IQ along with mild dyslexia" or something.
Well, you could take measures to stop them without prosecuting incompetent people. I have an intellectually disabled family member who I'd say isn't competent to consent to sex -- he functions at about (in lay, entirely non-expert terms) a three-year old level. If he were institutionalized, I'd think that the institution should probably prevent other clients from performing sexual acts with/on him, regardless of whether they were competent enough to be responsible for their own actions.
20: Ideally, yes. I was just more thinking about how enforceable this really is. And is the institution then liable if they fail to prevent sexual activity? What would that do to insurance premiums / the cost of institutionalization? Seems like a big giant mess (that I'm sure other people have sorted out to a greater extent already).
But there's a line, of course. There are probably other intellectually disabled people for whom the institution that ttaM worked in was taking the right approach.
I really don't know why I'm talking about this one, though. The potential for saying casually stupid stuff seems huge.
Honestly, this must come up. I'm thinking of female patients who aren't considered competent to give consent, are institutionalized, and turn up pregnant by another patient. (If it were by a staff member, that seems rather straight forward.)
22.2: I know! This is the thrill? I've consigned myself to being horrendously stupid on occasion. I mean, I try not to be. But it happens.
Another interesting decision, from a link at the article above:
In the first case of its kind, the court was asked to consider whether a young married woman lacks capacity to decide whether to use contraception, and whether it would be in her interests to be required to receive it.
For god's sake, if I wanted to read and talk about British news I already *have* places. This is my weird foreign place goddamnit!!!
Bollocks Chopper, would love to meet up but I'm supposed to be working Monday 28th evening, having had it rearranged from Tuesday 1st. If other people can make it I can probably change it to Sunday or something.
Bollocks Chopper
So much more threatening than "Armsmasher".
The criminal side of this sort of thing is loaded with shenanigans and makes me suspicious of arguments that trot out someone's IQ.
When I initially heard of the Atkins_v._Virginia decision I went to read the case thinking it was going to be something like "Lenny has a freak out in the barn and accidentally shakes a bitch to death", not "Lenny kidnaps a guy at gunpoint and takes him to the ATM to withdraw money before taking him into the woods to shoot him".
IQ is usually scaled so that mean = 100, SD = 15. The .05 percentile doesn't fit with that exactly, but an IQ of 48 does put you in the bottom percent in the scales I've seen used.
I calculate .026% as the percentile translation of IQ of 48 given SD of 15.
In other words, 1 in about 4000. On the one hand, I feel like "hmm, I went to high school with 2000 people, and I wouldn't be comfortable saying any of them couldn't consent to sex"; on the other, I don't have good intuition for what a "typical" sample of 4000 adults is like and whether some of them could not consent to sex.
30: You have sample bias already in a high school population.
"hmm, I went to high school with 2000 people, and I wouldn't be comfortable saying any of them couldn't consent to sex"
You went to high school with a population of kids that had anyone who really couldn't function academically screened out, wouldn't you think?
29: Go people more willing to do math than I am. But, obviously, I should have given .05 percentile as 1 out of 2,000 not 200.
I went to high school with 2000 people
Yes, but how many of them did you sleep with?
re: 14
I might just be able to make it, but it'd be late, I teach my kickboxing thing on Monday evenings. But if people are still planning to be out getting towards pub closing time, I might be able to join up for a while.
34: Because sleeping with him is a reliable indicator of mental weakness?
re: 22
I was only a domestic; so my job was serving food and cleaning and basically acting like the ward 'mother' [in the non-pastoral/parental senses]. So I can only go on what the nurses told me, and ward gossip, and stuff my Dad says [he used to be a mental handicap nurse]. But certainly the impression I had from all of that was that it was effectively impossible to stop it happening if people wanted to do it; it wasn't a prison. So amelioration of the worst effects was about the best they could do. In the locked wards [where I also worked] there was more supervision, and care taken over that sort of thing, but that was because rape was a much more real possibility.
but that was because rape was a much more real possibility.
FWIW, real enough that *I* was moved out of one ward because the staff became fairly sure that I had been singled out for just that.
One of the more interesting parts of the opinion is how the judge specifically rejects the idea that "Alan" may be competent to consent to sex with one person (perhaps another disabled individual) but not with another (even if the intellect differential introduces an almost inescapable power imbalance).
38: mmmm
W.
T.
F.
Perhaps, but probably not, related: a once good friend of mine was a counselor at a camp for emotionally disturbed kids. Two things converged one summer to traumatize her for life: they were short staffed, and had changed management, so everything was run stupidly; and kids can't get diagnoses of "antisocial personality"/sociopath. So that one girl lured her out to a cliff and tried to push her off. (Rural area. Obviously.)
a weird gut reaction to a couple where one is a little person and one is not, which I wouldn't have to two little people.
Yeah I totally have a weird gut reaction to a couple where one is black and one is white, which I wouldn't have to two black people.
6
It's funny, sex between two intellectually disabled people seems to me to be much less questionable than sex between two people only one of whom is disabled, but it seems hard to state that in a principled way
Two monkeys having sex is natural. A human having sex with a monkey is unnatural.
Two monkeys having sex is natural. A human having sex with a monkey is unnatural.
I thought homo sapiens kinda sorta famously mated with neanderthals. Er, I guess you mean now? But was that previous sex "unnatural"?
I'm trying really hard to find a reading of 42 that doesn't make it appalling.
Huh. Under this frame: "Person X cannot give consent, therefore people are legally prohibited from having sex with X." it seems obviously correct.
But under this frame: "Person X cannot give consent, therefore X is legally prohibited from having sex regardless of their desire." it seems much less so. Even though, so far as I can tell, they are equivalent.
45. Yes, if you want to have sex with X, you have to fuck their legal guardian instead. By law.
44. I like to think James wrote it in order to remind us of the wisdom of the analogy ban.
One of the more interesting parts of the opinion is how the judge specifically rejects the idea that "Alan" may be competent to consent to sex with one person (perhaps another disabled individual) but not with another (even if the intellect differential introduces an almost inescapable power imbalance).
I agree that it's interesting; it also seems wrong.
re: 40
There were a few patients on the ward with violent histories involving sexual violence. One of them started following me around, stroking my hair, that sort of thing. I was just ignoring it and getting on with my work [that sort of thing had happened in other wards and I had very long hair]; but one of the senior nurses spoke to my supervisor and had me moved off the ward after 4 days, as he was pretty sure I was at risk, and since I was a skinny teenager at the time I wouldn't have been able to protect myself. The only women who ever worked on that ward were a couple of battle-axes in their 50s that the 'boys' were all scared of. Otherwise, all the nurses were big and male.
I'm told, though I have no experience of this, that a lot of my company's developmentally disabled clients have partners with whom they are sexually active. Of course, "developmentally disabled" for the purposes of receiving state services is a broad category. Cerebral palsy counts.
Plenty of our mental health clients do--even ones who have guardians. So, people who are deemed incompetent to enter into a binding contract and may (depending on type of guardianship) have decisions about what anti0-psychotics they can take made for them, are still considered capable of consenting to sex. I think it's considered a human right, and even the people who have lists of drugs which have to be approved by judges always have the right to refuse.
Cerebral palsy counts.
You mean everybody with CP is counted as developmentally disabled? I have CP and I also have reason to believe that my IQ is > 2 standard deviations above the mean. I'm thinking this is a system I could game ruthlessly if I were inclined to.
I don't see any reason why the great majority of people with mental illnesses as currently defined shouldn't be sexually active. Except in a tiny minority of cases I don't think it should even be taken into consideration. (A few people who have suffered from long term depression have told me that working on getting their libido back was extremely helpful, if not always easy.)
I think it's considered a human right
Damn it where is my state provided sex partner?
Is there a legal definition of consent? I'm gonna go ahead and guess "no," if only bc no one in their right mind would want to get in front of that. And also we probably wouldn't have cause to discuss much of this if there were.
Also, WHOA 42 WTF?
And 52 was my next thought, after "WHOA 42 WTF" (which, really, I think should be reiterated). I shudder to think what will happen when the Japanese finally perfect lifelike yet economical robots.
If the Japanese get robots like that, I'm sure you'll be able to order them in human and monkey.
54. It won't be robots. Whole body suit interfaces for cybersex.
Given that my present interface is fill of crumbs from sandwiches, I foresee problems.
Do you normally eat crumbly sandwiches during sex?
Also
http://hijinksensue.com/2008/04/25/later-he-changed-the-name-to-holodeck/
That was a productive use of my time, no?
58: No, but I'mpointing that human-computer interfaces tend to collect detritus. This would be a much bigger problem for a whole body interface than a ten finger one.
For some reason that video really is horrific.
61: ten finger [interface].
And to think some people can't even get The Shocker right .
53
Is there a legal definition of consent? ...
Of course there is, it comes up in rape cases all the time.
64. Is there a legal definition of consent which doesn't involve the concept of the 'reasonable person'? If not, then for practical purposes there may as well be no such definition.
65, 66: Let's not get too phenomenological. By that standard, there is no definition for murder (as opposed to homicide), harassment, and teh creepy.
I like to think James wrote it in order to remind us of the wisdom of the analogy ban.
Or to undercut add nuance to 41* by pointing out how much worse 8 could have been.
* 41 is a lot more nuanced than I would have been. Let's perhaps agree that height does not influence capacity for consent, and that gut feelings to the contrary are to be regarded as loathsome prejudice.
In retrospect, it seems odd than nobody used "phenomenological" in the thread on epistimology. Or, if they did use it, they spelled it wrong. Or I can't spell it.
Scrolling up and reading everything more carefully (and some comments for the first time! encouraging!) I can say, with confidence: LB's 22.2 for the win, on all sides.
While I agree with 68, isn't it making the same point as 8? I read 8 as confessing to an admittedly wrong and irrational gut prejudice in a situation where there was absolutely no question about whether there might be valid considerations of consent leading to the same conclusions that the irrational prejudice leads toward (that is, there's nothing reasonable to be said in support of finding couples with one partner who is a little person disturbing), and then using that to argue that opposition to couples with only one partner who is mentally disabled, while there may be valid considerations in support of that opposition, might also be partially based in similarly irrational prejudice.
Obviously, better that Pause Endlessly should lack irrational prejudices, but identifying such a prejudice as irrational and wrong, and using it to make a good point about other kinds of prejudice, seems fairly unobjectionable.
71: That's fair, and I had meant to include something in my comment acknowledging this. I guess where I get hung up is a) the implied analogy, and b) the nagging feeling that saying this impulse wasn't "correct or rational" doesn't entirely cut it.
As chris y and Bostonian Girl pointed out, there's a tendency to throw all disabilities into a conceptual pile, exacerbated by the tendency of otherwise smart but situationally ignorant people to think that things like speech disabilities associated with something like CP reflect lower intelligence. It's worth being explicit when this comes up.
48: I'd think that it would introduce much more state interference with Alan's sexuality if his capacity to consent were relative to his sexual partner's intelligence, such that each new partner had to be assessed separately.
With age disparities, they get around this with Romeo and Juliet exceptions, but the idea that Alan's guardians have to channel his sexual impulses only toward similarly disabled persons is kind of gross. I can understand the impulse to not want to enforce the IQ equivalent of anti-miscegenation laws. Presumably there are other laws or regulations preventing persons in a position of authority over Alan (i.e. nurses, social workers) from taking advantage of Alan sexually.
Interesting that the announcement was apparently made by Suleiman. Is he hoping to be the last one standing?
This thread is old now, but this story about a couple with various cognitive delays was the one the local paper decided to feature for Valentine's Day.