Vernon Brooks
What’s the age of consent again – sixteen? Sixteen is definitely too green! At a time when Jamaica is faced with having to cope with a high rate of abortion, the age of sexual consent is absolutely out of proportion. What does a sixteen-year-old know about sex and its complications? At that tender age, she is still in the act of learning from exemplifications.
Let’s connect the dots and see what we’ve got. What would happen if she should be impregnated? Well, that’s where many Jamaican girls have their lives stagnated. Then they contemplate abortion, thinking they are taking the necessary precaution. Some barely make it out alive, others’ lives nosedive. Those who are not so brave, take to the streets to prostitute to become prominent sex slaves.
A sixteen-year-old cannot vote, she cannot take marital oath, unless of course her parents willingly sign a note. She cannot obtain a driver’s licence, and that’s a law that should indeed be tightened. In the sight of the law, at sixteen, you cannot fully work, you still depend on your parents’ purse, plus you really don’t know where danger lurks. Sex comes with a lot of responsibilities in being an adult, and one would be shocked to see how quick other problems easily catapult. The law puts adulthood at eighteen, and yet sexual consent has been lingering right within mid-teen? So what, you have the right to get pregnant, but you can’t fully work? Sixteen and pregnant, but to work, you must wait first? So who will feed the baby? Doesn’t something seem shady?
So here we are with more questions than answers, as we struggle in the society to deal with so many different cancers: child pregnancy, paedophilia, kidnapping of kids, incest, you name it. Preachers, school teachers and government analysts don’t even know where to blame it. These well-wishers might be looking in the wrong direction, trying to get ahead of those who are wallowing with predilection. The issue is really what time sex is served, and this might just go to show that we are definitely on the wrong learning curve.
As it stands, sixteen is the wand we wave as the magic number, but law-makers need to get out of their deep slumber, since that age-old cliché that age is just a number is causing our society to be put asunder.
After all, sixteen has been attached so much significance, whereby even our Cash Pot labels it anything green and young in appearance. Let’s see what sixteen yields by looking out there in the fields where teenagers demonstrate how to behave when put behind the steering wheels.
Sixteen has been used as the yardstick to cherish one’s youth. A ‘sweet sixteen’ party is celebrated to rhetorically say, ‘am I not cute’? This party is planned with many things in mind, as the few surviving ‘virgins’ in these times by then usually decide to place their chastity belts on the line.
What is incomprehensible at this point that’s been said is that Jamaica prides itself as the Lord’s anointed, knowing fully well that sex before marriage is unwelcome in a Christian’s bed. In the Caribbean, Jamaica is the country with the most churches per square mile, hence issues of morality should not be so hard to reconcile. Just like it has been mentioned before, at sixteen marital vows is forbidden encore. In other words, she can have as much sex as she wants, but she can’t get married in the first instance. Hence, age of consensual sex contradicts biblical adherence, since fornication and Christianity can’t fit amicably in the same sentence. That’s what has been tolerated in Jamaican society, licensing sixteen-year-olds to trample the Christian principle of sex in its entirety. It’s as though the country, without a doubt, is speaking through both sides of its mouth.
Experience has taught that between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, many adolescents are the wildest set of human beings. It’s their period of trial and error.
Some, as soon as age fifteen steps in, are in for a countdown to jump in and swim. But what they don’t realize in the interim is that the wayward world cherishes unsuspecting victims. That’s why many get pregnant at sixteen and their life ends before it even begins.. When they find themselves drowning, clutching at straws yet going under, any illegal deed easily makes their heart grow fonder. Sixteen-year-old moms and those even younger have outshone their forerunners and are going all out on a plunder. They are in a yes-nonsense mood and like hornets guarding a nest, they will sting even those who cross their path, with best interest nevertheless.
