I congratulate Daniel Castles for this deeply thoughtful article. I continue to be impressed by the contribution that women without sons can make to the discussion of male adolescent problems and disappointed that I see little that is insightful and helpful coming from those who were themselves once adolescent males. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. There is, though, one omission. You don't have to look overseas to find traditions of involuntary, arranged child marriages. It is also an ancient and continued Australian tradition. My wife was expected to go involuntarily to the camp of her middle aged promised husband at the age of 13. She refused to and got away with it, partly because both her promised husband and father were men of honour who understood the difference between the spirit and the letter of the law. In this country too much of the national debate rages around the responsibilities of governments to support the rights of indigenous peoples to practice their cultures without a challenging, intelligent analysis of what that means for the individual rights of those struggling to reconcile tradition with life in the contemporary Australian society and economy. Ms Castles is certainly right about the implications for the education and mental health of Aboriginal girls in remote Australia. She is also refreshingly insightful in her comments on the almost complete neglect of the recognition of the moral and legal dilemmas facing adolescent boys and the consequent implications for their mental health. The monopolising, in marriage, of young women by older, and presumably wiser, men is rapidly being replaced by 'kangaroo marriages' between adolescents with the male members demanding the status and powers of their older male ancestors but without their wisdom and without the traditional societal supports. Their dilemma is complicated and compounded by all of the other issues facing contemporary Australian, adolescent males. It is a recipe for disaster as the vast over-representation of young, Aboriginal men in our gaols indicates.

It's refreshing to see this sensitive subject discussed free of the usual media scripts. Ms Castles does not exaggerate the power of testosterone, and her comparisons of different cultural approaches to teenage sexuality puts our own approach into a humbling context.

The article raises questions about age of consent. Can such an age in fact be set? Is more harm done by criminalising young people who technically infringe this arbitrary threshhold than by treating each case on its merits, and taking into account cultural differences?

I was grieved to hear recently of a young indigenous male who was put through the legal wringer after a social worker dobbed him in for having consensual sex with his "under-age" girlfriend. He committed suicide. Where is the benefit?

Such people need guidance and support, if anything, not prosecution. The test should be "Has harm been culpably done?" rather than "Has a legal technicality been breached."

I remember having 'wet' dreams when I was a teenage boy. I thought I was suffering from some kind of sickness. It was not the sort of thing I could talk to my mother or father about. Years late my mother mentioned she knew I was having that experience. How would I know it was normal? Why didn't she talk to me about it? Later I started to take out girls with consequent adolescent fumbling. I was in awe of them. They were so wonderful. Sometimes when I took a girl out my eyes would tear, I would sneeze spasmodically and I would develop a rash. I wondered if I was homosexual and allergic to girls even though I was not attracted to males. Years later I found the explanation. I was allergic to orris root which was a common ingredient in cosmetics. I got married to my first wife due to a powerful sexual urge which ended up in pregnancy. Probably many boys have shared my experiences.

Having an informed person I could have talked to would have made life much easier.

Interesting article and comments.

It is not at all clear that the better approach to adolescent sexuality is to criminalise it, as we do in the west, rather than legitimise it as is done in many cultures and was done in the west until only quite recently.

The objections on child protection grounds too often turn out, on examination, to be really based on views of sexual morality - (horror at the idea of adolescent girls having sex) - or even worse, because of sexual jealousy of the older generation at the younger which everyone at UNICEF pretends doesn't exist. There is no reason why these prejudices should form the basis of public policy.

Nor is it any use to try to formulate rules on the basis of what different "cultures" value. A culture is not a decision-making entity. What its values are, and who is bound by them, can be nothing but arbitrary.

Nor is it legitimate to dictate utilitarian goals, such as education, over and above the will of the individual person. People have a right to be free to do what they want, so long as they are not harming others.

The question should always be, whether a particular act is harmful, from the point of view of the actor. In other words, consent answers all issues.

This then opens a can of worms about the age of consent. However the commonest objection, that consent under a certain age must be be lacking, a) is factually not true, b) is not an argument against relations where the parties do consent, and c) criminalises half the population by the time they or their partners reach the age of consent.

One option is not to have a one-size-fits-all age of consent, but for the age of consent to be the age of sexual maturity in each individual, which would be a matter of evidence. Another option is to lower the age of consent to the average age of puberty

David
Being allergic to cosmetics must have been a disaster.
I have never been allergic to any sort of root, my allergy comes from pineapple.
I would be reluctant to lower the age of consent, at 16 they are just informative and that's all.
When sex does occur between two underage kids, they have to be councelled, and not punished in any way.
Information has got to come from the home, which could be the problem.
With so many one person parent, and both parents working, this leaves itself wide open for parental neglect.
I wonder how many 11 year olds there are on the pill. With a lifetime in front of them, they can be putting themselves at risk of being infertile.

An overlooked part of the 'sexualisation' of youth is biological...fatherlessness.

Girls who grow up without their Natural Father reaach puberty prematurely - and are 5-7 times more likely to get pregnant as teenagers. THis means that these girls often start periods in primary school! This is interesting as the girls that suffer most from this effect are those who grow up with a man who is not their natural father (ie a step-father). The effect is well documented in other mammal species who partner.

This is not junk-science, this is repeated, published and peer-reviewed research, of large co-horts, correcftly controlled for race and socio-economic status, in the US and in NZ show this.

Protecting children from the dangers of premature sex and teen pregnancy could be as simple as protecting girl's human right to maintain a relationship with their Natural Father!

Citations
http://www.reeis.usda.gov/web/crisprojectpages/204060.html
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s958787.htm

Several full-text articles are available from Dr Bruce Ellis's bio page...
http://ag.arizona.edu/fcs/fshd/faculty/ellis

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