Nice essay by Jesse Bering — an excerpt from his forthcoming book — about ‘age of consent’ laws and their variation over time and across different countries, whose cutoffs range from 12 to 21. (And in olden times, some US states had the cutoff as low as age 7 -!) A fine example of the conflict between law and science.
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/age-of-consent/Content?oid=17715319
Either some societies have the one true age of consent and every other has therefore got it wrong, or any given society’s age of consent is based on what its citizens have simply chosen to believe about human sexuality and psychological development.
