[nietzreznor]

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In fact, regardless of government, I was only addressing the justification of the aggression...and despite Tom's appeal to the majority that the father would be justified for employing violence...I'd disagree.

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You would disagree with what? That the majority would rule in favor of the father, or that they would be right to do so?

Honestly, I don't think the case of children has any easy answers, no matter what type of political system you have (fwiw, the US system blows since there are clearly plenty of moral agents that are <18 yrs of age).

In your scenario, if there was no more information other than the girl was a moral agent, then I would agree that she has every right to leave and run off with creepy 40 year old guy. But in real life I don't think most scenarios would be so cut and dry, since most courts would be hard-pressed, I think, to find cases where a) a 13 yr old kid lives with parents and is fully supported by them, yet b) this 13 year old kid is clearly a fully functional moral agent. Not impossible, but I agree with Tom that most reasonable people here would probably side with the father. (I don't necessarily agree with this decision, either).

In any case, I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. If the girl is a moral agent, she clearly has the right to go out on her own, against her father's wishes. The complexities of this particular type of case though (complexities that don't exist in the slavery examples) make it so that decisions in such cases would vary greatly based on particular facts, and I would imagine different communities would handle such issues in different (possibly radically so) ways.