Doing it at sixteen

Abstract

Finally 16-year-olds are on the national agenda on a host of issues - and the beauty of this debate is that we are at cahoots whether they should be getting more rights, other roles and further responsibilities. I must admit, this is music to my ears! In this article I will be focusing my reflections on whether the consent for sexual relationships should be pushed down to 16 years of age. If truth be told, many people still perceive young people as being the decadence and debauchery of our society with the usual moral panic button being pressed fixatedly. But it still is virtuous to hear politicians and commentators talking about 16-year-olds, trying to understand, even if it is one of those issues that bamboozle our society, how young people think in terms of sex at what 'we' consider as being an 'impressionable' age. But the mistaken thing to do is to set down all 16-year-olds in one basket because there is no way that 16-year-olds subscribe to one homogenous cluster. [Excerpt]