thanks blairbar,
i read Stephanie's doctoral extract and wondered which School of Anthropology would countenance such breathtaking ethnocentricity.

a quick search revealed the Department of Politics, The University of Adelaide.

the extract is junk science,
the use of a discipline unfamiliar to the author to evidence an agenda.

that's probably what departments of politics do best.

it works better the other way round,
where scholars familiar with a discipline contribute to politics.

once the ethnocentricity is removed the discussion becomes perfectly clear.

this discussion is about whether to apply violence to prevent anti-social behaviour or to apply violence to deal with the consequences of social-behaviour.

prevention or harm minimisation.

a couple of basics.

to remove a person from society to a gaol is an act of extreme violence.
Stephanie's proposal that 'in contemporary liberal democracies, violence is forbidden' is a nonsense.

secondly,
women are perfectly capable of inflicting violence upon themselves.
Stephanie presents no evidence of rape or sexual violence against women and their children.

A courageous article, Stephan Hagen, kudos.
I wonder what the average life expectancy of Aboriginals was, before the European invasion? For that matter, I doubt that European life expectancies would have been terribly high at that time, either. In a world where old age was around 40 years, 'childhood' must also have been an abbreviated state.
I seem to recall that Romeo and Juliette were considered to be only about 12, were they not?
I was I think about 17, when Gough dropped the voting age to 18. The justice of that move was that 18 year olds were being drafted, and couldn't vote against the draft. Now I have children of my own, I don't think they should be allowed to vote -or have children- until they are 25. At least.
In a world where the life expectancy is reaching 80, is an extended childhood such a bad thing?