ohlerdy

I think coming out later would have been much better

I am not so sure. I came out very late in my teens and a few people didn't like it, not so much for the homosexuality, but for what could be termed "deception". I was, in their eyes, straight and then suddenly turned gay.

As a straight child you build up certain expectations in your parents. In countries where homosexuality is more accepted, coming out and saying "I like guys/girls" when everyone else is just picking up on the opposite sex allows for parents to never expect their child to be "straight".

Yes, there are shit, bigoted parents out there who will never accept homosexuality. But coming out at an age when parents can legally or effectively kick you out will always be harder.

The failure in the system is that parents have almost complete control over their children when they are under 18. Children are not full "legal persons". CPS only shifts the ownership of the child from the parent to the state.

This is good for some decisions, but the law seems to believe that power of guardianship extends to dictating the sexuality of your children. I blame groups who try to marginalize homosexuality into an "adult fetish", which "corrupts kids", for this situation.

Children are basically forced to act straight through lack of exposure to a supportive, gay peer group or role model. Or via the threat of bullying from their peers. The fear of children getting harmed by "homosexual paedophiles", whipped up by the conservatives who talk about a "gay agenda", is actually harming gay children by denying them access to support and by making them feel like perverts who ought to be hated on.

And that is exactly what those groups want.

Why can't any of the non-British Top Gear variants ever seem to reproduce the humor of the original British version without being just uncomfortable to watch?

They have closed courts for people <18 in my country. Rather they are not closed closed, but you must be approved to enter.

Just from a monetary POV it seems stupid. Had a guard not been lazy or had they put in decent separation they could have prevented hundreds of thousands of dollars - million even - spent on medical stuff.

Then again, a lot of people are bloodthirsty and imagine the rapes and assaults are part of the sentence.