YOUTH at the National Children’s Summit yesterday passionately contested the viability of the current age of consent, saying it should be changed to 18 years.

“The age of consent is 16 and girls plan to have sexual intercourse at the age of 16. Why is it that the parent is still responsible for them until they are 18 and if anything happens it is the parents’ responsibility’,” a member of the Child Development Agency’s (CDA) Advisory Panel questioned.

In response, Minister of Youth and Culture Lisa Hanna said if that were passed the justice system would be more pressured, as the country does not have enough judges, children’s homes, places of safety or remand centres for persons between the ages of 17 and 18 who are sexually active.

“What the data actually shows is that the first initiation for the boys in terms of sex in this country is 13 and for a girl it’s 14; those are the facts. So, at the end of the day, one of the things you would have to realise is that if the age of consent were moved to 18 you would have a lot of young people being criminalised for something that often times is misguided. Sometimes you end up in a circumstance, sometimes people lure you, and sometimes it is peer pressure.”

“Yes, it can be moved to 18, but ask yourself this question: ‘What happens if you move it to 18? How many persons are going to get charged and have a criminal record for having sex?” Hanna continued.

Suggesting that the permission for sex is too much of a responsibility for a 16-year-old, an ambassador to the Office of the Children’s Registry then questioned the law’s practicality.

“At 16 years old we are allowed to have sex, but at 16 we cannot vote, we cannot move out of our parents’ house, we are still going to school, we cannot get a job to care for a child, we cannot drive, we cannot do anything like that but we are allowed to have sex?” she said passionately.

She said that some of her peers anxiously anticipate 16 just to have sex instead of focusing on school.

Although the minister admitted that she agreed with her in principle, she said the consequences of such a change would be too vast.

The delegates also discussed the rights of a child, with Minister Hanna explaining the Child Care and Protection Act to the forum.

“… One of the problems we face is that there are so many competing messages that are out there and there are so many competing technologies, so we have to find creative ways; [one of which] is to have this summit. Another one is to make sure we put our things up on Twitter, on Instagram on Youtube…We do a lot of things now through social media making persons aware of their rights,” Hanna said.

“I would say that over the last two years we have really ramped up our efforts in terms of you and people seeing and hearing more from the CDA and the OCR and understanding what UNICEF does and all that. It’s for the children themselves to go in search of it, we can’t spoon feed them into swallowing the information,” she argued.

In addressing the rights of the child, one delegate from the Homestead Place of Safety said: “There are children who abuse the rights of the child. For example, we know that adults cannot beat a child and there are children who know that [an] adult can’t beat them when they are feisty with the adult yet, they do anything they feel like because that adult cannot react and hit them.

Her colleague then reiterated that the situation would not be so if parents trained their children properly from a tender age.

“What is the consequence of children frustrating an adult?” one delegate questioned.

She was told by the minister that, “What has to happen is that a parent has to understand patience, especially when a parent is under stress…The child can be taken to a remand centre or the parent can ask for the child to be put in a children’s home”.

The students also highlighted and discussed the issue of bullying and the need for love in the homes.