Allegations against Russell Brand and, separately, David Walliams have led to calls for greater legal protection for 16- and 17-year-olds from being sexually exploited by older adults.
A staggered consent law is one route favoured by campaigners, supported by some Labour MPs. Claire Waxman, the victims' commissioner for England and Wales, has called for “serious conversations” on the potential for legislative change.
The barrister Charlotte Proudman, who specialises in law regarding violence against women and girls, said: “Staggered, or graduated, age of consent means that the law takes account of the age difference between sexual partners, rather than treating 16 as the point at which a child can legally consent to sexual activity with someone of any age.
“A sexual relationship between a 16-year-old and an 18-year-old is fundamentally different from one between a 16-year-old girl and a 50-year-old man.”
A 16-year-old cannot buy alcohol or cigarettes, yet someone decades older can legally have sex with them. “The law does not adequately recognise the significant power imbalance between children and much older adults, particularly where grooming, financial dependence, celebrity status or emotional manipulation are involved,” Proudman said.
A change to staggered consent, which she supports, “would place responsibility on the older adult”, she said, rather than requiring a teenage complainant to demonstrate grooming, coercion or exploitation.
“This is not about denying young people sexual autonomy,” she said. “It is about recognising that consent must be understood in the context of age, maturity, vulnerability and power.”
The Close the Consent Gap campaign proposes a staggered age of consent making it a criminal offence for a 16- or 17-year-old to consent to sexual activity with anyone more than three years their senior.
“For example, a consensual relationship between two teenagers close in age would remain lawful, whereas sexual activity between a 16-year-old and a 35-year-old would be prohibited,” said the campaign's founder, Layla Stone.
“Every other framework of the law recognises 16- and 17-year-olds as children. We want the law to recognise children – 16 and 17 years old – as children who need to be protected in all frameworks of the law.”
She said there could be a “huge power imbalance” between a 16-year-old living at home and a 21-year-old with money and independence.
The legal landscape on the issue in the rest of the world is complex and varied. Some countries have extra safeguards built in for 16- and 17-year-olds. Canada, for example, recognises age difference as a factor in determining exploitation for this age group. For 14- and 15-year-olds, Canadian law criminalises any sexual activity if a partner is five or more years older.
Prof Roger Ingham, the director of the Centre for Sexual Health Research at the University of Southampton, said: “My question, as a researcher, is what is the evidence that it actually works or doesn't work to protect young people.”
He said there was no strong evidence that different countries with different ages had completely different patterns of sexual behaviour or outcomes. But he said it was a difficult question to answer “because a lot of these cases are simply not reported”.
Ingham said “tinkering with the law” could divert attention from other efforts including better sex education, and risked young people avoiding seeking contraceptive advice, or other support they needed, if their relationship was deemed illegal.
Dr Sophie King-Hill, an associate professor at the University of Birmingham researching sexual behaviour of children and young people, said people were “looking for fixes, looking for blame, looking for gaps in the law,” but she also questioned where was the evidence that it worked.
“If we're looking at preventing grooming and preventing young people being exploited, we've got to be really careful not to confuse this changing of the law with solving the problem,” she said.
It was “a very complex and complicated” issue, King-Hill said. “And grooming, coercion, manipulation and abuse of power don't suddenly begin at 16. I can see where it's coming from. People feel like they need to do something, and I'm not necessarily opposed to it in its totality, but I think it's really naive to see it as such a solution to something that's really complex and complicated within society.”
It risked creating a false sense of protection for young people, she said, and risked children and young people not coming forward “because they'll be worried they've broken the law”.
She said: “I think from my research perspective and the work that I've carried out, you've got to do things like this really carefully, because you can inadvertently make things worse or oversimplify a very complex and complicated problem.”
