10.10.1996

Arbitrary ages

Recent articles and letters in the Weekly Worker on the arbitrary nature of ‘ages of consent’ brought to mind an incident which occurred while I was in Boston, USA earlier this year. The ‘Just say no’ bandwagon has been rolling there quite some time. The campaign to stop under-age drinking had reached fever pitch.

A teenage birthday party was in full swing - the parents were present. The ‘grown-ups’ were allowed to drink, but not the teenagers. Despite the best efforts of the oldies to keep the naughty teenagers away from the bar, they were still managing to get cans. The spirits had been locked up.

One of the youths, at 2am in the morning and quite drunk, decides to get in his car and drive home. He hits a tree and is killed. The local press has a field day - “Killed by under-age drinking!” and “Let this be a lesson to all you young people”, etc. Worse, the family of the dead youth then press for charges of murder against the parents of the boy whose party it was. They were aiding and abetting under-age drinking, and had contributed to or caused the death of the lad. In every way they were branded as abusers and perverts.

The boy was 19, as were his mates - the youngest were 18. You have to be 21 in theory to drink in this state. That the death is tragic is undoubtedly true, but the hysteria and witch hunting about ‘under-age’ was clearly demonstrated, since of course you can drink in Britain quite legally at 18.

I say theoretically you can drink at 21 - in reality it’s not as easy as that. We went to the Cheers pub and, dodging the crowds, I got to the bar first and asked for a round of drinks. “Who is it for?” Well, for me. “Yes, but who else is it for? I need to see them,” the barperson explained. OK, I say, that’s my party over there.  Looking them over, she then says: “Do you have ID?” (the youngest person in the party is 23). No. “Are you all over 30?” she then asked to my amazement. If you cannot prove you are 21, you have to look over 30.

It got worse in the supermarket. My son-in-law had dragged a huge pile of cans to the check-out. He is 26, but no ID in the supermarket means you have to look 40 before they’ll serve you.

The point is: it just goes to show how stupid these ‘ages of consent’ laws are. In more enlightened times a legal committee was set up to consider lowering the age of consent to 14. Lord Denning commented that whatever it was, it should be more than 54 because he was 54. All these people going on about who is old enough to have sex or drink make sure they are past the barrier themselves.

I always find they are counterproductive anyway. I was 14 when I started going to boozers, because I wanted to be grown up - most teenagers do the same here. But in Holland where you can drink at 14, the kids do not generally - and at discos more often than not, you see them drinking Coke or Fanta, because drinking alcohol is no big deal. I guess the same might be true of sex. In Holland, the age of consent is 12: about 10% of people between the age of 11 and 15 engage in it. Here the age is 16: about 23% of people in the same age group engage in it. Most parts of the USA it is 18 or 21: about 34% of people in that age group engage in it. There must be something in the human make-up that says, ‘If someone tells me I cannot do it, I’m damn well going to show you I can’.

Of course, it could be as the old Yorkshire saying goes - ‘If god made owt better he kept it for himself’ - and, that being the case, it is highly unlikely anyone is just going to keep sitting on it once they knew what it’s for.

Dave Douglass