Lucy Beaumont is, I have to say, someone I’d never heard of until she surfaced in the aftermath of the Walliams affair. It seems, very much to her credit, that she was one of those who raised concerns about the behaviour of David Walliams, who is alleged to have preyed on 15-year-old girls and had relations with girls of 16 years or over. (He denies any wrongdoing.)
Social censure is one thing, the law is another
Now Lucy has declared her support for the Close the Consent Gap campaign, along with Mia Latter, who claims she was abused by Russell Brand when she was 16. The organisation wants to change the law to make it a criminal offence for anyone aged 20 or over to have sex with teenagers aged 16 or 17, that is, unless the age gap is no more than three years. ‘We are trying to stop grown adults having legal sexual access to children,’ says its website.
Lucy B puts it another way. ‘If you have a 12-year-old daughter, in four years’ time a man in his 60s can legally have sex with her. It’s hard for me to write this and I’m sure for the majority of us it’s hard for us to read it.’ Well yes, Lucy. We can count. You might as well say that if your daughter is ten, in six years’ time some elderly perve can legally have his way with her. Or if you’ve got a baby, in 16 years’ time. It’s just another way of saying that 16 is a young age for a teenager to be having sexual relations with someone who’s not a teenager.
There is of course a very decided yuck factor about older men having sex with young women, at least from a female perspective. My daughter is 19 and if she were to step out with a 60-year-old I should be less than pleased. The redoubtable pundit, Richard Littlejohn, gave us a good, usable rule of thumb a while back when he observed, ‘if she’s young enough to be your daughter, you’re a pervert.’ Or you could be even more robust and take the views of the Catholic church, that unless you’re married, forget it.
But social censure is one thing, the law is another. And the age of consent is one of those things that we really can’t have a sliding scale for, because it would be just too complicated. This hasn’t stopped ministers – ever willing to sweat the small stuff – saying that they’re considering it. We can, as I say, count, but the prospect of a judge having to decide whether two people knowingly kept inside the three-year age window when they engaged in carnal relations would make cases involving consent mind-bendingly complicated.
If the age of consent is to be comprehensible, it needs to be simple. And that means, I’m afraid, one age beyond which it’s legal to have sexual relations. Obviously, if a case involving coercion comes to court, a judge can take a much dimmer view of an old bloke having sex with a 16-year-old, but that’s different. The law needs to be simple to be understood, especially in this rather basic area.
Which brings us to our old friend, social censure. It may not be illegal for an old man to have carnal knowledge of a 16-year-old boy or girl, but it can be ridiculous. When one friend of mine went out with a girl who was about 35 years younger (the girl, in her twenties, was by no means coerced) he got short shrift from the females in his circle who would ask icily whether she’d had her periods yet. It didn’t do much good but it meant he was a little self conscious about it. But what mature females like me must acknowledge is that on the whole, men are attracted to young women or youths to an extent that isn’t true, even now, the other way round.
All the same, we need to keep our heads on the question of consent. The distinguished historian, Andrew Roberts, once wrote a novel that should have got much more attention, called The Aachen Memorandum. I recall it played with the notion that in some not very distant future, individuals would have to obtain written consent 24 hours before sexual intercourse if it was to be legal; by then, of course, they may have cooled off the idea. Certainly in some American circles it’s already a done thing; if you dig around online you can find a sexual consent form which makes clear that the parties concerned are up for it but doesn’t have any legal force. But it’s a bit chilling, no? And not quite how these things work.
Anyway, back to Lucy Beaumont. If we are working on the assumption that 16-year-olds are old enough to decide this important question, then they’re also old enough to determine whom they’re going to do it with. Me, I’d make it 17 and crucially make it the same for marriage. (The separation by Labour of the age of consent from the marriage age was an innovation.) Oh and the same for voting – though really, 18, or better still, 21, would be preferable for the franchise. But a variable age of consent is just asking for trouble.
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