English laws criminalise sexual acts with minors.

They do so differently if the minor is under 18, under 16 and under 13.

They also do so differently if the perpetrator is under 18, differently again if they are under 16.

The 'age of consent' is inferred from criminal acts.

I had good discussions over w/e in response to a thread on Women's Rights Caucus, ILGA World and the Age of Consent.

I also had some angry Twitter followers doubling down, so I want to postscript.

The ability of adolescents to consent, their capacity to do so, is not denied in UK law, it is just made irrelevant.

There's a lot to be said about that, and a lot has been said.

Adolescents have no *legal* capacity to consent.

It's an administrative legal convenience.

It's easier and safer to draw a line based on age than it is to assess the individual ages of consent-giving majority for all adolescents, like setting a GCSE in sexual and emotional maturity, as we do for medical consents with Fraser competency tests (aka 'Gillick competence').

When we draw this line, we do so in the knowledge that there will be adolescents who are ill served by the law on either side of it.

It's generally accepted that most children reach an appropriate stage of maturity at sometime between the ages of 15-18.

There will be, on the one hand, some 15 year olds who may not legally have sex with their 16 year old classmates, even though they are genuinely capable (in all but the legal sense) of consenting to do so.

On the other hand, there will be 16 and 17 year olds who are not yet emotionally capable of taking an informed decision, which is why we protect them until they're 18, from teachers and others in direct authority, to abuse from whom they would otherwise be most vulnerable.

Indeed, satute, binding case law (jurisprudence) and prosecution guidance all make some allowances, in some circumstances, for a consenting adolescent.

In statute, a reasonable belief that the minor is of appropriate age is an arguable defence if they're consenting and 13+.

But not if they're under 13.

If they are under 13 and the defence includes consent then the prosecution guidance and IIRC the EW rules of criminal procedure both provide for a Newton hearing (after case of R v Newton), meaning the case is handled differently.

Law is made up of more than just th statutes.

It's overly simplistic to say that the age of consent in UK is 16.

We have three jurisdictions and each has it's own complicated set of interacting laws which balance child protection with the rights of the child.

The earliest British consent laws were set at 10, primarily used to exploit working class girls.

The benchmark is now standardised at 16 but that is recent. There was no age of consent for lesbian sex until 2003, no legal barrier for a woman to have consensual sex with a girl.

Other countries do it differently.

In Germany it's 14, in France it's 15. And in Bahrain, it's 21.

In Bahrain, it's to control female sexuality, to keep sex within marriage, to prohibit sex between young unmarried people, at risk of physical punishment.

It's not good law.

There are many, many other less extreme examples.

Across Africa, the age of consent is used to deny young women access to sex and reproductive healthcare.

To deny them contraception. To deny them abortion. To deny them tests and medication for sexually transmitted disease.

There are none of the nuanced exemptions or legally authoritative case handling guidance for dealing with trickier aspects of the age of consent, for those cases where a child's rights are being suppressed in the name of protection from no harm, or a lesser harm.

And where exemptions are made, they are usually to the benefit of abusers, richer, older, more powerful men or boys, who will, it is said as a blind eye is turned, be boys - as if that were the winning defence.

So, in a continent which has been devastated by the AIDS pandemic, recognising the sexual agency of young women, of adolescents, is an urgent matter of healthcare.

The language used in WRC declaration is misleading but it is common enough and is not meant as it has been read.

If you're just going to shout 'paedophile' at everyone who seeks to balance all these competing, complicated issues, I'm going to assume you are well.meaning but ill informed.

If you're going to do it after becoming informed, I'm going to say you're doubling down, tin eared.

And if you're only going to shout it at organisations promoting LGBT rights, and ignore all the others, I'm going to keep calling that out.

Because what you are doing is harmful.

I believe an honest mistake has been made but we need to be tellers of the truth.

A correction is in order.

@stonewalluk and @ILGAWORLD have now done what was asked of them.

An unqualified denial that they seek to lower the age of consent.

I don't doubt that.

Yes, it would be much better if they hadn't associated the statements with accusations of bad faith and bigotry.

I don't believe that at all.

And, yes, they're hopeless and dangerous organisations.

But I get why they are angry over this. They have every right to be.