Marriage Guidance

As the legal minimum age of marriage is raised to 18, we have won the argument. Now we need a criminal offence of sexual activity with any person under the age of 18 who was more than two years younger than oneself, with a maximum sentence equal to twice the difference in age, and the abolition of different rules for “positions of trust”.

We need to ban abortion and contraception for those under 18 at least without parental knowledge and consent, just as they thankfully cannot now be given puberty blockers. What sort of parent would want to put his underage daughter on the Pill, anyway? There is only one possible reason for doing so. 

And we need to rule out the legal possibility of being a specifically sexual assailant below an age of consent that had been raised to 18, thereby correcting the anomaly that has existed since 2003.

In that year, a male heterosexual age of consent of 16 was created by default due to political horsetrading among the feminist and gay groups around Harriet Harman, of all people, which insisted that both sexes and all acts be treated in exactly the same way. 

That would be fine, except that the age of criminal responsibility remains 10, meaning that boys can be prosecuted for rape, itself significantly redefined in 2003, six years before they can legally have consensual sex. And they are. Indeed, boys who allege abuse by women are routinely accused of having raped them.