> Part of the problem was that many of the girls groomed were 16-18 so it was very hard to prove rape and coercion.

Rape is usually hard to prove. Even if the victim is under the age of
consent, the "it wasn't rape" defense is easily changed to an "it
never happened at all" defense... and it's really hard to counter
that long after the fact.

There's also such a thing as being a giant cad and hurting people
without it actually being rape. You can't outlaw every callous
obnoxious thing somebody might do.

Nor can you outlaw one thing to get at another.

I don't see how you can avoid picking an age, but you have to have to
respect the limitations of what you can achieve. Age is at best a weak
proxy for abuse, and it gets weaker fast as you go higher. And the "we
can't prove what went on" thing is very dangerous indeed as an
excuse for criminalizing people.

Your argument for going from 16 to 18 could as easily be used to go
from 18 to 25, or maybe 25 to 30.

As for prevalence, generalizing from a couple of girls you know is
really beyond the pale. I don't deny that stories like yours happen,
but you're not in a position to treat them as the paradigm.

Even if you have a bunch of headlines and police reports and gossip as
well, they're still anecdotes. They stay anecdotes even if you count
them; the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Even a small rate of
anything in a large population will generate tens or hundreds of
thousands of cases, and you're much more likely to actually count a
case where there's a problem than a case where there's none.

Anecdotes are all that anybody, including self-proclaimed "experts",
really has.

If we're trading anecdotes, I never knew anybody who related the
experience you describe, but I knew lots of people who had positive,
obviously consensual sexual experiences at 16 or 17. Along with a
certain amount of hurting each other by being young and dumb, but even
that was generally not, you know, rape.

A few I know well, including me at 16, had positive, obviously
consensual sexual experiences with people in their thirties or
forties. Mine and at least a couple of other cases I know of
absolutely cannot be made to fit your template, just based on the
sequence of actual events, even if you falsely assume we weren't
able to notice if we were being manipulated.

I've seen a little pressure to retcon that experience as "abuse". Not
nearly as much pressure as some people get, but a bit. I'm not that
easily manipulated, thanks. I wasn't that easily manipulated at 16,
either.

If you're picking an age, 16 is probably after the knee of the curve
in terms of being easily bamboozled... and it's also after the knee of
the curve in terms of actually wanting and deserving sexual
experiences. Yes, that is a valuable thing, and you can't just
sacrifice it for (mostly illusory) ease of punishing people.

Nor does the threat of punishment necessarily help. When and where I
grew up, the age of consent was 18. There was no close-in-age
exception, either. Yet I still have those stories and experiences, and
even according to what they would actually admit on surveys, most
people weren't, and still aren't, virgins on their 18th birthdays.

That's pretty much the definition of an ineffective law. Making ineffective
laws is always a bad idea.

> Not going to lie I probably would have punched you in the face had you said this to me IRL though.

... and of course I can't forget

> "migrants"

You're still not painting a picture of yourself as the kind of person
who should be listened to about laws. Hurting people you don't like
isn't a good basis for public policy.