Green square with stylised pink writing & graphics that say Elio on a staggered age of consent
By Elio Sea
Following Russell Brand's conviction and the allegations against David Walliams, it seems that criminalising age gaps is suddenly up for debate. Novara's Ash Sarkar has called for a "staggered" age of consent, arguing that "a 16 and 17 year old is vulnerable to manipulation and consent-warping imbalances of power that the law should protect them from”. Claire Waxman, the victims' commissioner, has backed "serious conversations" about the law. Lucy Beaumont, comedian and Walliams whistleblower, has come out in support of the Close The Consent Gap Campaign, which aims to change the law that "legally allows adults to have sex with children".
The instinct is understandable; most of us recoil at the idea of a man in his thirties or older pursuing a 16-year-old. But disgust isn't a good basis for policy-making, especially when it would make things worse. Given the extraordinary amount of effort that educators and campaigners have put in to destigmatising and increasing sex and relationships education for young people over the past few decades, giving abusers another tool for coercive control – "don't tell anyone or I'll go to prison" – isn’t the right solution to address adult men preying on teenagers.
An age of consent law tells young people the problem can be recognised through a number, not a behaviour, which undoes years of consent education teaching them to recognise coercion, pressure and control. Under this year's Crime and Policing Act, teachers, nurses and doctors will soon have a legal duty to report child sexual abuse. Under an additional age-gap law, a teenager seeking contraception who confides in a nurse about an older partner could set off a police referral, whether the teen wanted one or not. When telling an adult or seeking a service carries consequences that big, a young person will stop doing it. And we've been here before. Until 2000, gay and bisexual young men couldn't legally consent until 18, a law also justified as "protection" that criminalised and isolated a generation instead.
Most sexual abuse, particularly of children and young people, already goes unreported. The Centre of expertise on child sexual abuse estimates that at least one in six children in England and Wales are sexually abused during childhood. Two-thirds of survivors who gave evidence to the national child abuse inquiry (IICSA’s Truth Project) say they told no one at the time. The NSPCC reports it takes almost eight years on average for a child to disclose.
Celebrity cases fill the headlines, but they are the exception. More often than not, they’re published because the celebrity is of as much interest as their behaviour. More than 90% of sexually abused children are abused by someone they know, and over a third by a family member. Most abuse is distressingly mundane and happens at home, at the hands of people who are trusted, loved and depended on. Predators of young people tend to try and build a similar, trusting rapport with their victims before escalating to a sexual relationship, which is part of why those betrayals have such a long-term emotional and psychological impact. It is also exactly why silence is so easy to enforce.
Children are growing up in increasing isolation. The arrival of COVID lockdowns in 2020 disrupted years of independence and social development. According to Onside’s Youth Research 2026, 1 in 6 young people spend most of their free time alone, 1 in 5 feel that outside of home and school they have no safe physical space where they belong, and government research found that nearly half of young people spend the majority of their spare time in their bedroom. At the same time, teenagers have fewer adults to confide in, with the number of full-time youth workers in England falling by a third in the last 15 years, and council spending on youth services in England down 73%. Since 2010, 760 youth centres have closed, and UK Youth estimates more than half the country’s youth clubs are gone. Furthermore, schools increasingly meet distress with discipline; in the 2024/25 school year suspensions hit 913,000, permanent exclusions 9,906, and isolation booths are seemingly so routine that nobody records their use. Our education system is teaching young people compliance, not confidence, and a child trained to obey adults under threat of punishment is not a child equipped to refuse one. Each of these is a gap that even modest investment would start to close, and any one of them would do more to protect teenagers than a new criminal offence.
I've had multiple conversations in the last two weeks with people, many of them experienced feminist campaigners trained to recognise exploitative relationships, who are revisiting and reframing our own childhood and teenage experiences in a new light. It's hard to realise that something so normalised wasn't okay, and to grapple with how no-one around us noticed or took action. It would be even harder if we didn’t have each other to talk to about it. If it takes adults like us decades to see it clearly, we can't build a law that relies on a 16-year-old not only seeing it in the moment but also being willing to go through a criminal trial.
And we know that prevention works. After the Teenage Pregnancy Strategy launched in 1999, England's under-18 conception rate fell by half. The strategy worked without punishing anyone, through improved sex and relationships education, accessible services and contraceptive resources, and support for young parents to break intergenerational cycles. Relationships and sex education only became compulsory in every secondary school in 2020, and updated guidance became statutory this September. We are at the start of what education can do, not the end.
Any new law would need funding for enforcement, and that money would go further directed towards infrastructure for prevention rather than punishment. That means age-appropriate sex education covering the basics of consent, bodily autonomy and how to recognise exploitative dynamics, but also teaching adults the skills to recognise and prevent exploitation. Supported spaces for youth to gather outside of school make it easier and safer to disclose and be supported, as does resourcing services so that a disclosure leads somewhere, and building a culture where a teenager in a relationship with someone much older can talk to a trustworthy adult without worrying about setting off a prosecution. If we want to close a consent gap, we should start by closing the silence, because we cannot legislate our way out of children having no-one to talk to.
Elio is a London-based producer and occasional writer. Their background is in organising around labour rights and criminalisation, and in 2019 they co-founded Decriminalised Futures, an arts and popular education organisation. They currently hold governance roles with groups working on protest rights and civil liberties.