The row over the legal age at which young people can engage in sexual activity is a distraction from dealing with a major crisis that so far has gone unrecognised, that of sexual abuse by adults, writes Vincent Browne.
Harm may indeed be caused to young adolescents by premature consensual sexual activity with peers but it is a minor issue compared with that of adult child abuse.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on Child Protection chaired by Peter Power, a formidable Fianna Fáil backbencher, made a serious effort to grapple with the issues to do with child sexual abuse in the time it had available to it and has made many sensible recommendations.
But one gets the impression that the purpose of the committee was political: to dig the Government out of the hole it dug for itself during the summer on the "CC" and "A" cases, which resulted in the release from prison of a sex abuser and his subsequent rearrest on an order of the Supreme Court, which, to say the least, was bizarre; but now is not the occasion to reopen that controversy.
For this reason, one suspects, the committee has recommended a constitutional change whereby the defence of an honest mistake would not be available to a man who has sexual intercourse with a girl under the age of 16. This, in my view, is plainly silly, unfair and distracting.
In the vast majority of cases where sexual relations with a young person is the cause of harm, it is with children so far below the age of consent that the issue of an innocent mistake could not possibly arise.
And there are surely circumstances where a man, say aged 17, honestly believes a girl is 16 or over - say, in circumstances in which she shows him a fake identify card showing a false age - that it is manifestly wrong to convict in such circumstances.
The controversy over the age of consent is also bogus.
Manifestly it is a bad idea for young people to engage in sexual intercourse before an age when they might be presumed to be able to cope with the emotional, psychological and physical consequences of that.
What that age may be depends on the individual - in many instances people never reach that stage of maturity! But it seems completely daft to criminalise the behaviour of young people having sexual relations with peers, at an age that we would all agree is too young for that to happen without harmful consequences.
For any of us who have had teenage children, would it occur to us to involve the Garda and the courts system where we had discovered that one of our young teenagers had consensual sex with another teenager more or less of the same age? We might well be horrified, we might well wonder how we had failed to warn off our child from such conduct at such a young age, we may be stricken about the consequences to the child, but involving the criminal justice system? The suggestion that this sends a "signal" to young people about the appropriate age below which sexual relations is not permissible suggests that those who advance that argument both fail to understand the psyche of young people and have entirely forgotten what it was like to be a teenager.
Anyway, all this is a distraction, for only where pregnancy results from such underage activity is it likely that anybody will know about underage sex aside from the people involved and a few of their peers.
But the real argument against making an issue of this is that it distracts from the issue of child sexual abuse.
The now famous (I hope) report entitled The Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland (SAVI) published in 2002 shows that the incidence of child sexual abuse is startling. As reported in the executive summary at the outset of that book (page xxxii and following): "One in five women (20.4 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood and a further one in ten (10 per cent) reporting non-contact sexual abuse. In over a quarter of cases of contact abuse (ie 5.6 per cent of all girls) the abuse involved penetrative sex - either vaginal, anal or oral sex.
"One in six men (16.2 per cent) reported experiencing contact sexual abuse in childhood with a further one in 14 (7.4 per cent) reporting non-contact sexual abuse. In one of every six cases of contact abuse (ie 2.7 per cent of all boys) the abuse involved penetrative sex - either anal or oral sex."
The vast majority of abusers are adults - one third relatives, one third neighbours or people in authority and one third strangers.
The Departments of Justice and Health funded this survey. How is it that both departments have largely ignored its findings and how is it the Oireachtas, whose members get agitated every time there is a controversy over child abuse, has ignored it? There is a major problem here, a problem of proportions we have not begun to realise and all the strutting about the age of consent and abolishing the defence of honest mistake will not make it go away.