I haven't posted in a while, this place sure seems pretty empty.
I'd recently thought of a few things that seemed profound. I wondered what others thought. The last piece I thought of just today.

The old endless argument was whether or not children can give valid consent to sexual activities with adults. What exactly counted as valid consent seemed impossible to define. I think I managed to come up with a good definition by defining invalid consent. Then you just have to make sure invalid consent is not present.

So I recently considered that consent is invalid if meaningful dissent can not be given. So if a child feels they're in a situation where they can't say no then it's invalid if they say yes. I was stuck on that thought for a while. I wondered how someone could determine if a child couldn't say no.

Today I considered that one could first ask a child to consent to something that you don't really want and they would almost certainly be opposed to. So you could test them by saying "I'd like it if you gave me all your candy." Or money or similar. If they're ok with saying no to this, then that proves they feel they can dissent to your proposals. Which means they can give valid consent. If they do say yes to the test you can give an excuse that leaves the door open like "I don't need it right now after all."

A problem with this is that a clever child might realize this is a test or that you always follow up their dissent with a sexual proposition. If they are trying to please you then they might learn you want them to say no to the test. I haven't come up with a solution to that yet.

Does anyone know of anyone doing anything like this? Maybe I'm just late to think of it.