• Question from:Ali

Hello,

Now maybe this question isn't a very good question to ask on a website like this, but maybe you guys can help me.

I'd like for someone to give me links for peer reviewed scientific peapers talking about the right age for consent where the brain is fully developed and the body is actually ready to have sex and the girl can actually have a normal pregnancy and has the capacity to consent.


I'd really appreciate it.

Thank you very much in advance

  • University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
  • Posts: 307

This isn't exactly on topic, but it does talk about adolescent brain development, with particular reference to decision making.

http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/20 … the-human/

The link is obviously a blog, but does contain links to the papers.

As far as I know the "age of consent" is an arbitrary cultural construct and isn't based on scientific studies. The actual age that a particular individual is "ready" for sex/children/etc of course varies a great deal, not to mention that measuring such a complicated concept would be subject to a great deal of error. The difficulty in setting a universal age for matter such as these is seen in the many different "ages" that an adolescent goes through. For example, in New Zealand our age of consent is 16, you can vote and buy alcohol at 18, but you aren't a full adult in the eyes of insurance companies until 25.

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  • Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Beijing, China
  • Posts: 237

To complement the link John provided, here's a paper discussing the age of consent in pre-modern times:

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1 … 6v16n02_03

You probably won't have access to the paper unless you're at a subscribing academic institution (I don't have access to it myself), but the abstract can be freely viewed and contains some interesting information. The main point seems to be that the age of consent (although that term might not have been used) was set in the early teens (12-14) in Western societies until fairly recently, when it tended to be raised at least slightly.

In general, the assumption in the past seems to have been that people were ready for sex as soon as they had gone through puberty and were biologically capable of engaging in intercourse and (in the case of girls) becoming pregnant. The abstract of the paper I linked to says that the reasons for raising the age of consent beyond this level "have not always been clear", but among the current arguments for keeping the age of consent relatively high are that adolescents may not be psychologically ready to engage in sex in a responsible way and that they need to be legally protected from being pressured into sexual activity by adults.

There are also risks associated with early teenage pregnancies, so it could be argued that there are straightforward public health reasons to prevent adolescent girls from having sex. The added risks might not have been clear in pre-modern times, when pregnancy was somewhat dangerous and infant mortality relatively high regardless of the age of the mother.