Come 12 November 2025 and the Supreme Court will hear Indira Jaising’s case on lowering the age of consent from 18 to 16 in India. One would wonder if Indira Jaising has no other job but to waste the Apex court’s time on something that is detrimental to society, but we never know and not our concern.
The narrative is that the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, is too harsh, unfairly criminalizing “consensual romantic relationships” between older adolescents and thus, the calls for lowering the age of consent from 18 to 16 years.
The Biology of Adolescence
Modern neuroscience is unambiguous. The prefrontal cortex – the brain region governing decision-making, impulse control, and consequence-evaluation does not mature until the mid-20s. At 16, this critical structure remains incompletely developed, with white matter development continuing well into early adulthood. More significantly, there is a neurological mismatch during adolescence: the limbic system (governing emotion and reward-seeking) matures earlier, creating what scientists term “dual-systems imbalance.”
This means that at 16, teenagers experience heightened sexual drive and emotional intensity coupled with underdeveloped executive control. They may intellectually understand that something is risky yet lack the neurological capacity to override impulses or resist manipulation. Consent obtained from a brain in this developmental stage is not informed consent, it is consent extracted from neurological immaturity.
By 18, while brain development continues, the trajectory shifts markedly. Impulse control strengthens, consequence-evaluation improves, and resistance to manipulation becomes substantially more robust. This neurological reality, confirmed by decades of MRI and longitudinal studies, is the biological foundation for why 18 not 16 serves as a coherent threshold across voting, driving, marriage, and employment.
18: The Bedrock of Legal Adulthood and Responsibility
Before delving into the specifics of POCSO, it’s critical to recognize that 18 is not an arbitrary number. It is the universally recognized threshold for legal adulthood in India, a line drawn after due deliberation to mark the transition from childhood to civic and social responsibility.
Consider the rights and responsibilities that vest at 18:
The Right to Vote: At 18, a citizen is deemed mature enough to elect the government of the world’s largest democracy. We trust them with the future of the nation, yet some argue they are not mature enough to understand the consequences of a sexual relationship.
The Right to Drive: Obtaining a driver’s license at 18 acknowledges the requisite judgment, reflexes, and sense of responsibility to operate a vehicle safely. The state recognizes that this level of cognitive maturity is necessary to protect both the individual and public safety.
The Right to Contract: At 18, an individual can enter into legally binding contracts, be it for education loans, rental agreements, or employment. The law holds them accountable for their financial and legal commitments, believing they can comprehend complex, long-term consequences.
The Age of Marriage: The law sets 18 as the minimum age for women to marry (at least for Hindus in India), recognizing that marriage requires the emotional and mental maturity to build a family and navigate a partnership.
It is a profound contradiction to argue that a 16-year-old is mature enough to consent to sexual activity, a decision with immense physical, emotional, and psychological ramifications while simultaneously holding that they are not mature enough to vote, drive, take a loan, or marry. This coherence across laws is deliberate. It creates a clear, consistent bright line that protects young people and provides legal certainty.
Global comparisons: Why “Lower” Is Not Stronger
Across the world, ages of consent differ but lower legal thresholds are not proof of greater protection or youth empowerment. On the contrary, they often correlate with heightened risks.
Many European countries have ages of consent between 14 and 16 years (for example, Austria, Germany, Italy set it at 14).
Globally, adolescent pregnancies remain a serious challenge: in low- and middle-income countries, an estimated 21 million pregnancies occur each year among girls aged 15-19, of which around half are unintended.
Teenage birth-rates in Europe: in 2022, countries such as Bulgaria recorded almost 10.2 % of births to teenage mothers.
These figures show that simply having a lower age of consent does not guarantee better outcome for minors. It provides a legal minimum, but what matters far more are protective systems, social norms, education and enforcement.
Between 2017 and 2022, 41,083 teenage pregnancies were recorded with 35% (14,561) occurring outside wedlock. In the Philippines, where consent was historically set at 12 and then changed to 16 recently, the situation is grimmer still: over 500 girls aged 15 to 19 become mothers every single day.
Parental Trauma and Inter-generational Effects
Beyond statutory ages and birth-rates, there is another layer too often ignored: the trauma borne by parents, and the consequences for children. Research shows that cumulative maternal trauma (exposure to abuse, substance use, PTSD, etc) predicts higher parenting stress, greater potential for harsh discipline, and in turn higher risk for child behavioural and emotional problems.
What does this mean in the context of lowering the age of consent?
- Earlier sexual activity and adolescent parenting often coincide with disrupted schooling, financial strain, family instability and emotional stress – all potential sources of trauma for both parent and child.
- A minor parent is more likely to experience mental health challenges (depression, anxiety, adverse childhood experiences) which then impact the next generation’s development.
- Legal thresholds of 18 inherently reflect a recognition that full emotional and cognitive maturity takes longer and that children need protection not only from external abuse, but from the cascade of inter-generational damage that exploitation, early parenthood and untreated trauma set in motion.
The Illusion of “Consensual” Adolescent Romance in India
Proponents of change in India often cite studies that claim a significant proportion of POCSO cases involve consensual relationships. But this framing is deeply flawed. The fundamental error lies in taking the term “consensual” at face value. We live in times where sexual grooming has unfortunately become common parlance. How can adults in such a society agree that a 16-year-old’s acquiescence to an older partner ever be considered free and informed?
Lowering the age of consent would provide these predators with a ready-made legal defence, making it exponentially harder to prosecute what is, in essence, sexual exploitation. The experiences of the countries where age of consent is 16 such as in Malaysia and Philippines show us the real-world outcome of such a policy: not liberated youth but exploited adolescents and a surge in teenage pregnancies.
The Indian Data Tells its Own Story
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data for 2022 paints a clear and sobering picture:
- Over 1.6 lakh crimes against children were registered.
POCSO cases constituted 56.6% of these, amounting to 91,068 cases in a single year. - The majority of victims are not older adolescents in romantic entanglements.
- A significant proportion are children below 14, with many under 12, suffering horrific abuse, often at the hands of family members or neighbours.
The claim that POCSO is primarily used to punish teenage love is a dangerous mischaracterization. The law is overwhelmingly applied to combat severe sexual violence against the most vulnerable. Diluting it based on a debatable subset of cases, while ignoring the clear warning from our regional neighbours, would be a catastrophic misstep.
The Predator’s Playbook
The romanticised image of two slightly-older teenagers in a relationship, oppressive law enforcement overreaching bears no resemblance to actual POCSO case profiles. India’s own child protection research documents systematic predation disguised as relationships. A 16-year-old girl is sexually assaulted by a man who funds her expenses and falsely promises marriage. A teenager is drugged, photographed without consent, then coerced into repeated sexual acts through threat of image publication. A 15-year-old is abducted, confined for days, and raped.
These are not innocent romantic entanglements. They are predatory exploitation at scale. Grooming, the deliberate cultivation of trust followed by exploitation is endemic across documented cases. Adult predators exploit power imbalances, economic vulnerability, and developmental naiveté to systematically violate adolescents.
If the age of consent were 16, perpetrators could simply claim consensuality. Prosecutorial burden would shift dramatically; prosecutors would need to prove coercion rather than defendants proving consent. In circumstances where vulnerable adolescents are often unable or unwilling to testify openly, this represents a massive prosecutorial handicap. Lowering the age of consent does not fine-tune justice; it creates legal loopholes through which predators escape.
The Digital Dimension
The landscape of adolescent vulnerability has dramatically shifted. Teenagers face unprecedented exposure to pornography and hypersexualised digital content. Research links frequent exposure to permissive sexual attitudes, earlier sexual debut, and riskier sexual behaviour. It is also associated with elevated rates of depression and anxiety.
In this environment, where predators use online platforms to systematically groom adolescents and where teenagers are inundated with sexualised messaging, lowering the age of consent would remove a critical legal backstop. It would signal to predators that adolescents are sexually available to teenagers that early sexual activity is developmentally appropriate, and to society that we have abandoned our protective obligation to young people.
Sensitivity without dilution
There is legitimate concern that older adolescents in consensual relationships may be swept into criminal processes that are designed for predatory abuse. That calls for better enforcement: judicial discretion, contextual assessments, training of law-enforcement. The juvenile justice system already allows for screening of 16-18 cases for maturity and intent. But lowering the statutory threshold is not the right fix. It substitutes complexity and risk for clarity and protection.
The Line Must Not Move
The campaign to lower the age of consent may be framed as reform, but it is in fact regression from its hard-won protections for children. However eminent the advocates, their argument collapses before the evidence. Neuroscience, developmental psychology, and global public-health data converge on a single truth: adolescence is a period of heightened vulnerability, not full autonomy.
Legal reform must be informed by science and the lived realities of survivors, not by ideological or rhetorical convenience. To dilute the law is to invite harm that cannot be undone.
India’s legislators and courts must hold their ground. The age of 18 is not a matter of sentiment or culture; it is the product of empirical reasoning, constitutional duty, and moral clarity. To compromise it would be to turn away from the very children the law was created to protect.
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