Hello from Paris.
I ate snails…I’m spending my days writing strategy documents, emailing Stakeholders and meeting heads of international NGOs based here in Paris. I have more meetings tomorrow so I’ll sum up Paris next week when I’m half way to Luxembourg and explain how it all went. Tonight, I’d just like to make clear my reasons for creating the Road to Change. The 10,000 mile walk is of course the ‘Road’ around 31 European Capitals but ‘Change’ is referring to two key issues on which I would love to see harmonised reform across this beautiful continent.
These crucial issues, which currently allow children to be sexually abuse and inhibit survivors’ ability to acquire justice and healing are:
‘The age of consent’ and ‘The statute of limitations’.
(Probably best get a cup o tea and sit back as you take in this weeks blog)
‘Age of consent’ is the legal age at which children can consent to sexual contact. Varying from country to country, these laws were established in relation to a number of cultural, religious and biological factors over the past eight centuries. Puberty is our body’s way of saying it’s ready to procreate, so historically the consent laws have began after this natural mile stone. The emotion intelligence required to mentally process a sexual relationship is arrived at almost on an individual basis, some research suggests the human brain does not reach its full emotional capacity until the age of 23. So where do we drawl the line? A lot of teens want to have sex. When I was in High school, kids in my class began having sex (with other teens) from around age 13 and there was a lot of peer pressure to become one of them. Little did they know, my uncle had already exposed me to many of the new experiences they were now discovering way back when I was in primary school…The consent policy needs to both respect the sexual liberty of young people while protecting them from older predators: a complex and sensitive decision for any government.
In the UK, the law is currently 16 but across Europe it ranges from 18 down to 13. The EU was introduced as a mutually beneficial economic relationship but I think it’s time we established a unanimous humanitarian policy towards child protection and the rights of survivors. In my lifetime, I want to see harmonised reform introduced by parliaments across Europe and furthermore, I don’t believe the ‘line-in-the-sand’ policy is most effective on many fronts. The age of consent should not just be raised (or lowered…as a top British Barrister recently suggested) In fact, I believe an entire restructuring of the law for the benefit of all children, teenagers and the adults who care about them should be introduced.
YOU MIGHT NOT AGREE WITH ME ON THIS BUT PLEASE READ ON AND HEAR MY REASONS.
Statistics would indicate that countries with lower age of consent also enjoy lower instances of teen-pregnancy and teens contracting STIs. Why are these figures so high in the UK when under-16s are legally prohibited from having sex? Well, human nature. If you tell someone (especially a teenager) they’re not allowed to do something, if often becomes the one thing they want to do. Perhaps if you had made it their choice to begin with they wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. This seems to be the case in some other European countries. I’ve heard, and will learn more when I get there, that countries like the Netherlands have a much more open approach to Sex Education and also introduce Sexual Health information at a relatively young age. The result: far lower counts of teens actually becoming sexually active and therefore far lower teen pregnancies and STI. Problem solved? Should we just lower the age of consent and let teens make their own minds up about when they’re ready to have sex then? No! Lowering age of consent might empower teenagers to make their own choices but it simply makes them vulnerable to older predators. Can we sexually liberate and empower teens to make their own choices while the same time legally protect them from older attackers? Yes!
How? Well… a system where the age of consent is ‘staggered’. This, in my mind, best addresses all sides of the problem. To explain…
In the UK, teens can legally begin to have sex once they reach 16. Sex under that age with anyone their own age, older or younger is illegal, but teens younger than this are already having sex. We can’t seem to stop them and telling them they can’t hasn’t worked…In some European countries, the age of consent is 18. Imagine if you will, two 17-years-olds in one of these countries. They’ve have been dating for a two years and have been having a sexual relationship most of that time. Suddenly one of them turns 18 and their sex-life continues. They are now in a situation called ‘Statutory rape’. Of course, realistically, the now younger teen is probably not going to press charges against their slightly older partner but still, in the eyes of the law, a sexual offense on a minor has occurred. This 17 and 18 years old couple are not unusual but the law ignores the fact that young people are intelligent and can have loving relationships. To prevent this legal quandary, some argue that the age of consent should simply be lowered – just let teens sleep with each other if they want and leave the police out of it. Of course, the problem with a simply lowering the age of consent is that it opens the child up to attacks from predators. (When I say ‘attacks’, I don’t mean violence. In my experience of child-sex-offenders, they are deceitful yet charming. They convince you that you want to be doing what they want you to do. You cannot match the emotional intelligence of a teenager with that of a forty-year-old predatory paedophile)
So the solution I propose, the ‘Staggered’ system, would work SOMETHING LIKE this… From 14 years old, a teenager could legally consent to have sexual contact with someone who is aged 14, 15 or 16. A 15-year-old could consent to sexual contact with someone who is up to the age of 17 and a 16-year-old could with someone who is up to the age of 18. You see? Teens are then legally allowed to make their own choices (a system proving successful in reducing the amount of teens becoming sexually active anyway) and yet this policy still protects them from predators.
Now you might be throwing your hands up in horror that Matthew McVarish is advocating lowering the age of consent to 14. Not exactly. I would prefer that if teens are going to be having sex with each other (and they currently are and always have been…) that we provide them with an environment which encourages safe sex and legally empowers them to decide when they are ready. I was raised in a nice (strongly Catholic) suburban town just outside Glasgow and yet pressure to become sexually active from puberty was very real. Yes, it was illegal, it was frowned upon by our parents and the church but it happened and is still happening. A lot. Lets accept it and deal with it, can we?
The stagger system would in fact raise the UK age of consent between an adult and teen from 16 to 18. (Suddenly I sound like a puritan…) It would take a while for everyone to understand and get used to this new system but it is in fact very simple and solves a number of problems at once. I welcome discussion of this idea but I believe it could be the solution for 21st century Europe.
To digress a moment…I noticed when studying Shakespeare (stick with me here folks…) in 17th century Britain, the most popular playwright of that time was writing jokes about bodily functions and homosexuality. In a number of sonnets, Shakespeare quite openly refers to having a wife and a boyfriend. He even wrote a whole poem about his erection. The Queen of England would have been in the Globe listening to this ‘filth’ yet at that time it was considered perfectly acceptable material for polite company. Compare that to Britain today. Many flinch at the mention of sex in mixed company and homosexuality is now unaccepted in many communities and workplaces. What happened?
When did Britain become so reserved? Staunch religion and Queen Victoria seems to be to blame, before Victoria Britain was allowed to express itself. She created the idea of the ‘stiff-upper-lip’, the emotional stoicisms that creates loneliness and isolation for many male and female survivors to this day. In other places on our continent, that didn’t suffer this social suffocation, you can still see men get very emotional quite publically and it’s no bad thing. It’s good for your blood pressure and general mental health. Add the churches stance on ‘no sex outside of marriage’ and suddenly Britain became completely unable to even discus sex. Nudity went from being something natural to something shameful. We went around chiselling off the genitalia from ancient marble statues and gluing on fig leaves, painting loin cloths on priceless nude painting and we put so much clothes on ourselves, to cover up our ‘shameful’ bodies, that apparently even the sight of a woman’s ankle would drive a man wild…We have overcome at lot of this now, in some ways, but mostly unregulated ways. It bothers me to see sexually explicit images of woman (and men) on the front of magazines on news-agent’s shelves at the eyelevel of a toddler and the dawn of the internet has meant younger and younger children are exposed to sexually graphic content on daily basis. The unregulated sexualisation of our society and our children is happening more and more without anything really being said or done about it.
Still, consider Scandinavia with its family saunas and plunge pools, people of all ages, relatives and friends, sitting around naked and relaxing together. Immediately, from a British standpoint, this seems grossly inappropriate but only because we automatically associate nudity with sex. Now, don’t panic. I’m not suggesting that we all start leaving our speedo at home when we go down the local pool, but I am pointing out why Child Sexual Abuse is such a difficult issue to break the silence around. We are not accustomed, culturally or historically, to talk about sex…and so sex with children, which we all need to be able to talk about if we are going to be able to prevent it, is unfortunately the farthest thing from our comfort zone…Enough’s enough. We need to get over ourselves, for the sake of our children and the millions of survivors who cannot begin to heal unless they can talk to someone without being made to feel they’re being ‘inappropriate’.
Rant over…
Statute of limitations: the law that prescribes a time period within which a victim can report a crime. After which, no action will be taken. THERE SHOULD BE NO STATUTE OF LIMITAIONS ON REPOTING CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE!
Why does such a law even exist? Is it that 14 years and 11 months after being raped it still bothers you but exactly 15 years after the incident you suddenly get over it? No! This law is to prevent legal costs and ‘wasting the courts time’. Of course, the longer since a crime was committed (any crime) the harder it is to gather evidence or witnesses but really the prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse is so abundant within society, the courts needed to find a way to reduce the amount they would actually have to deal with. Courts cost money. Housing prisoners costs money. Governments want to keep the cost of the judicial and prison systems as low as possible so taking someone to court then putting them in prison, feeding them and clothing them for a number of years begins to seem like a massive waste of state funds when they can simply create a law that allows them to simply ignore their crime to begin with. It’s all about money. It does not take into account the devastation in the life of the adult survivor. Their life might be ruined. They might still being living with depression, anxiety or lasting emotional disorders every single day due to the abuse they suffered decades ago but their authorities are telling them that nothing will be done about it.
A few things that are majorly unjust and dangerous about the current Statute laws:
1 – Most survivors take many many years to come to terms with having been abused. Many circumstances out with the survivors control contribute to when or if they’ll ever reach a point where they feel capable of disclosing it to anyone, let alone the police. I didn’t report my Uncle to the authorities until I was 25. 12 years after the last time he molested me. Maybe those who have never experienced being abused can’t understand why I waited. I guess I didn’t want it to be my fault that my family might be torn apart by me ‘dragging out the past’. I didn’t want to be the one to bring ‘shame’ on all of us. I had originally waited for my Gran to die, so she wouldn’t ever know what her son had done, but I was only 17 when she died and by then I was scared that if I tried to press charges I wouldn’t be believed. I worried that bringing it up so publically would make home life really awkward and if that got too much perhaps eventually I’d just have to leave and lose contact with everyone…On top of all that, I guess the main reason it took me so long was that I didn’t want to give people the mental image of me having sex with my own uncle. I still hate that. Is it any wonder that one in ten survivors will never disclose to anyone for as long as they live…
2 – Having spent your childhood as nothing more than a sex toy for a perverted adult, one’s ability to gauge any sense of self-worth can be dependent on witnessing some form of retribution, seeing your offender being held accountable for what they did to you and the misery it’s left you with. When the country you live in tells you that they are not even going to let you press charges because it was over 15 years ago, they are saying ‘We don’t care. You don’t matter and all that pain you’re left with is not our problem’. How can a person who grew up as someone’s sexual plaything learn that they are now an important and valued member of society when their country is telling them they don’t matter?
3 – Just because you were abused 20 years ago doesn’t mean your offender isn’t still abusing other children today. They might have been 32 when you were 9. They’re only 52 now and running the under 10s football team, with weekends away from mum and dad, but you didn’t report them in time, so now you can just forget about it and let the offender continue doing whatever they want…
4 – Until very recently, the full impact of having been sexually abused in your childhood was not fully understood. Some researchers are now calling it ‘brain damage’ because abuse or neglect when our brains are forming (throughout childhood) actually alters the shape and function of our brain as an adult. Many survivors of child sexual abuse are diagnosed with PTSD. If the crime happened 30 years ago but the damage from the crime is still impacting you life today, why is there a law stopping you from reporting it? It messed me up so badly that I’ve reached the point where I think walking 10,000 miles is actually a good idea…
5 – Many European countries decide the statute of limitations in relation to the length of prison sentence the crime could receive. If a child is abused in France, the crime is deemed to be either a ‘Serious crime’ or a ‘Major crime’ depending on the severity of the incident. Therefore the survivor here has to report it within a time period of 3 to 10 year respectively. Following so far? Now, here’s where the law is moot…you cannot quantify the damage to the child’s brain and therefore the impact on the rest of a survivor’s life based on the details of the incident. How can anyone decide what is ‘serious’ and what is ‘major’ between someone who was tied up, stripped naked and fondled when they were 14, and is now illegally self-medicating on non-prescription-drugs, against an adult who was ‘just’ filmed showering when they were 11 but now can’t let anyone ever see them naked, even a doctor? How abuse affects each survivor in later life is different in every case. The Statute of Limitation reflects nothing of the reality of life for survivors.
These laws were formed before this research was available and in light of this information, and for the safety of other children from offenders that muted survivors know of, I believe the statute of limitations must be abolished!
Look at it this way…If an adult took away a child’s ability to breathe, the child would be dead. There would be a dead child’s body to prove the crime happened so the damage of the crime would be obvious to all. The adult would probably be caught and made to pay for their crime. Imagine now if that same adult molested the child and didn’t take away its ability to breathe but instead took away their ability to be happy, or to trust anyone, or to enjoy sexual contact with anyone as they grow up and begin to form adult relationships, or to believe that anyone who is kind to them doesn’t wants to hurt them, or their ability to sleep through the night without waking up screaming, or their ability to share their emotions with anyone for the rest of their life? The damage of this crime is almost invisible and extremely difficult to document. The child would still be breathing as they pulled their pants back up and will continue to breathe throughout the rest of their shattered life…but with no dead child’s body as evidence of the ‘major crime’ why should we ‘waste courts time’ with something that happened over 15 years ago?
I’m writing to Policy Makers across Europe. What can I do really? I don’t know, but I won’t shut up about it…
More meetings in Paris tomorrow then the Road to Change begins to Luxembourg.
Thank you for reading and feel free to comment.
Matty x
Marilyn McVarish :D