Tapu Misa: Sex law clamour misses the point of an excellent idea

Regular readers of this column will know that I am not the country's most hip mum when it comes to sex and children. If it were up to me, children wouldn't be having sex until they were grown-up enough to leave home - on current trends, some time around 30.

After that, as I've told my children repeatedly (to much eye-rolling and uncomfortable squirming), they're perfectly free to discover that sex is a precious, beautiful thing to be shared by two consenting, committed and well-armoured adults.

So you can imagine how shocked, horrified, appalled and morally outraged I felt on reading that the legal age of consent was being dropped to 12.

For once, I found myself in complete sympathy with those who yesterday flooded the letters page, condemning this promiscuous and evil piece of anti-family legislation.

Except that, well, call me a stickler for details, but this is not what is being proposed under the Crime Amendment (No 2) Bill, which has caused such an outpouring of community outrage.

The legal age of consent remains where it's always been: 16. What's new is a legal defence against prosecution for children between 12 and 16 who have consensual sex with each other, and only if there's an age difference of no more than 2 years.

Which seems to me like a good idea since, let's face it, who in their right minds would want such children to be regarded as criminals?

This is what they are under the current law.


Like most sensible parents, I think that sex before the age of 16 is a bad idea, but I also think that if you write something into the statute books, you should mean it.

And if we're going to leave the law as it is, we should be prepared to throw the promiscuous little buggers in jail.

Besides, one of those things you learn in Parenting 101 is that kids can spot inconsistencies at 50 paces.

You should always mean what you say and never make threats unless you're prepared to carry them out. Otherwise, you end up with disrespect and anarchy.

And what is the point of a law that no one is prepared to enforce? To make us feel better? To send the right messages to our kids?

Please. If we want to talk seriously about sending the wrong messages, there are many more places we could look than at a law that is being strengthened to protect our kids.

We might, for example, look at the barrage of sexual messages being peddled through the media, or at the root causes of premature sexual activity - like peer pressure, family dysfunction, or the prevailing societal attitudes from which many teenagers take their cues.

We might look, too, at the sad fact that many girls who end up pregnant before 16 just want to be liked and accepted.

Would the threat of jail time keep teens from experimenting? Not so far. More likely, it keeps them from seeking the help and advice that might save them from the equally damaging effects of unwanted pregnancies, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases.

The evidence for the prosecution - that a lower age of consent contributes to rising teenage pregnancy rates, and encourages teenagers to experiment earlier - doesn't stack up.

The age of consent in the United States, for example, is between 16 and 18, yet it has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the developed world.

The lowest teen pregnancy rate is in Japan where the age of consent is 13.

Many countries with lower legal consent ages than New Zealand - Canada, Italy, the Netherlands among them - also have lower teenage pregnancy rates.

As for that first sexual encounter, in Spain, where the age of consent is 13, the average age of first sex for girls is 19 and boys 18. In California, where it's 18, most lose their virginity between 16 and 17.

New Zealand isn't the first country to try to remove the stain of criminality from sex between consenting teenagers. Canada, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Malta already make the same distinction in law.

This is not the case in the US, from where we get cautionary tales like that of Marcus Dixon, a black teenager who is spending 10 years in prison for having consensual sex with a white classmate who was three months shy of 16 at the time.

The football and academic star was charged last year with aggravated child molestation under a Georgia state law which makes it illegal for anyone, regardless of their age, to have sex with an under 16-year-old.

Until Marcus, the law had never been applied to consensual sex between two teenagers with less than three years' age difference.

Though the jury was in no doubt that the sex was consensual, it had no choice but to find Marcus guilty of child molestation. It was the law. But even the jury expressed dismay at the sentence - 10 years without the possibility of parole.

Even if that seems a remote possibility here, there seems little sense in tolerating a law we don't seriously mean to enforce. Laws ought to be respected, unless they're outdated and contradictory, in which case, logic should demand that they be changed.

This is what the Crimes Amendment (No 2) Bill sets out to do.

Other eminently sensible changes being proposed include tougher penalties for adults who prey on children, removing the anomaly that allows a woman to escape penalty for having sex with an under-age boy, and getting rid of the defence that makes it possible for an adult to argue that a child consented to sex.

All moves in the right direction. Like the change that would have given a legal defence for the minority of under-16s caught in the act.

Thanks to the clamour of the past few days and the reaction of a Government which appears to have lost its nerve, that probably won't happen now. Pity.