Comment by soupy-soup

Reading through those quotes, I get the impression that Stallman doesn't understand why underaged people can't give consent to people considered adults by the legal system. It falls in line with his other misunderstandings or lack of awareness on social issues.

He's right that young people have agency and can make informed decisions about themselves, but fails to recognize the social pressures that means that young people often aren't in a position to say no, or even understand that they can can say no. There are financial, social, and even legal power imbalances between minors and non-minors that make it impossible to assert that certain interactions are consentual, even if they aren't of a sexual nature. It's these power imbalances that are the issue, not whether or not a young person has enough factually to understand what they are consenting to. Interactions like this are abuses of the power that adults have over children, and that's a big part of what makes them so disturbing.