The Age of Consent and Female Under-Age Sexual Autonomy

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My topic of academic interest, as the title suggests, is rooted in age of consent laws and theirimpact on underage sexual autonomy. This proposal seeks to give an overview of both my main,and additional postgraduate research aims, which have formed from my interest in this area.As mentioned in my application, I will mainly focus my research on how historical, societal attitudestowards sexual activity (especially those towards young women) resulted in the introduction of ageof consent laws, and how said laws continue to be implemented. The work of Foucault(1928-1984), especially the texts in The History of Sexuality volume, are an obvious aid to help usunderstand how regulations of this kind came into being. These works explain a shift to new formsof power (disclipinary and bio power, for example (Foucault 1998: 135)) which seek to control themost personal and private aspects of the population's lives. Foucault argues that sexuality inparticular became a 'dense transfer point for relations of power: between men and women, youngpeople and old people, parents and offspring [and] teachers and students' (Foucault 1998: 103).Young people's sexuality specifically became (and remains) a highly regulated area, after itbecame a common belief that child sexuality poses 'physical and moral, individual and collectivedangers' (Foucault 1998: 103). I have recently come across Matthew Waites's The Age of Consent(2005), and believe it will provide a fairly comprehensive guide to the legal responses to suchchanges in power and social attitude. Waites provides an 'introduction to the historical emergenceof age of consent laws [which are] conceptualised in the context of broader shifts in thelaw' (Waites 2005 :60), starting in the nineteenth century when curiously, the age of consent wasupped from 13 to 16 years of age within a ten year period. (This change is a perfect example of thelegal developments surrounding the age of consent that I will analyse and explain, by consideringwider social happenings and attitudes towards young people's sexuality during that time.) UsingFoucault's ideas surrounding power, we can also consider how the control of under age sexualityhas manifested itself in non-legal disciplinary systems, such as sex education. The Purity Myth(2009) by Jessica Valenti for instance, provides a strong critique of the agist and misogynisticdiscourse offered by the Christian Church-led abstinence-only sex education movement that'sgrowing rapidly throughout the West (the States especially).