Brenda Power: Have courage - change this law for the sake of our young men

A 20-year-old man is going to jail for eleven months because his girlfriend’s parents don’t like him.

The young man hasn’t been violent or committed any assault and has no previous convictions, but yet he made the mistake of falling for a girl whose parents didn’t like him. The court convicted him for having sex with an under-age girl.

At the time of the offence, he was 19 years old and was dating a 16-year-old girl who would become 17 years old within three months witch is the legal age of consent. Most parents will know that of the two, she was probably the more emotionally mature. He was also unaware of the legal age of consent. He truly believed it was 16 when in fact it is 17. Ignorance of the law is no defense, but he genuinely believed the was acting legally.

The parents of the young girl insisted to end their relationship, but she didn’t agree. In the 6^th of August 2008, the two met each other in a quiet wooded area. They began kissing and it proceeded to having sex. The girl’s father had followed her and he took her to the Irish police department, known as the ‘garda station’ and he made a complaint.

The views of the girl’s parents should be irrelevant. Their feelings about the young man, their disapproval of the relationship, none of these should matter. The most recent figures suggest that at least forty girls under the age of fifteen give birth in Ireland every year. Why aren’t their boyfriends in jail?

You can’t have one law for irritated parents. There has to be an age of consent. It is essential to protect young people from pedophiles, but also to spare them the potential trauma of early sexual activity. It is to save them from themselves and their own immaturity.

Hard cases make bad law but this one is clear evidence of a need to look again at the age of consent because the girl is often a little below the age of 17. Raising the age of consent for boys would be a practical response given that girls mature earlier, but that would almost be certainly be unconstitutional.

So the only sensible option is to legislate to withhold prosecutions for under-age sex where the age gap is less than five years and there is no evidence of violence.

The judge decided to suspend the young man’s jail sentence when the case comes back to his court in January 2009. He is placed on the sex offenders’ register, he may not enter the United States, he may not practice any job that involves contact with children. In fact, he will be lucky to get any job at all..

I think that the judge is wrong. The boy and the girl made an entire agreement. The girl was only three months away of the age of consent. The boy was not violent and didn’t rape the girl. The parents of the girl are ridiculous. Just because they don’t like the boy, they have made the boy’s young life miserable. The chance exist that he may not find a job witch is necessarily to survive. This is just ridiculous and outrageous!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article6888770.ece