Letter Hon – Hon. Senator Malaka Parker: Good Intentions, Wrong Direction
Letter Hon Senator Malaka
We completely share Senator Parker’s passion to protect our adolescents, and we could not disagree more with her support to raise the so-called age of consent to 18.
Teenage pregnancy is a monumental problem in the Caribbean. We have the second highest rate of adolescent fertility in the world. Senator Parker is right to be concerned.
But passion and good intentions by themselves form a dangerous foundation for drafting legislation.
As the Senator knows full well, the law makes several distinctions by age. Indeed, even within the Child Justice Act she mentioned, until 2018, the age of criminal responsibility was as low as 8 (yes, eight), when it was raised to 12. That’s still a far cry from 16.
Question: Can anyone in Parliament, Government or Opposition, point to any country in the Caribbean or beyond, that has raised the age at which sex is no longer a crime to 18 and observed any reduction in adolescent pregnancy from doing so?
Five countries in the Caribbean have reduced the age at which adolescents can have access to healthcare without parental consent from 18 to 16. We are confident that Senator Parker knows that we were the second country in the region to do so – in 1984, more than a generation ago.
Unfortunately, we did nothing more than write the words on paper. We neither promulgated nor implemented the law. We never educated parents, or teachers or healthcare workers, and we certainly made no effort whatsoever to inform 16 and 17-year-olds who were directly affected.
By contrast in 1978, Jamaica started an experiment with a Programme for Adolescent Mothers (PAM), providing education, life and parenting training, access tocontraceptives, and reintegration to schools. Some 80% completed their secondary education. Grenada, St. Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis have replicated the programme and so have Botswana, Gambia and Kenya.
More recently, Jamaica has introduced Teen Hubs, near significant transportation terminals. Students can hang out, use computers, do homework, play video games and have access to healthcare information. Between 2000 and 2021, the country experienced the largest reduction in teen pregnancy in the region, 57%.
In addressing adolescent pregnancy, we need to trust our teenagers and empower them, not seek to place legal barriers in their way. We need to remove the nonsense of parental consent altogether. At 16, about 71% of teenagers are already active. At 14, about 30% are already active. The Caribbean has the second earliest age of sexual debut in the world.
The solution lies in education and access, not in uninformed, restrictive legislation.
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