Thank you.
I think we need to keep in mind that we're not talking about the age of approval; we're talking about the age of consent. Consent is a very basic act, and we're saying we don't want 14- to 16-year-olds to have the ability to have the legal capacity to consent at all. What follows from this is that a 15-year-old who represents herself as being over 16 and presents fake identification is acting in an unconscious fashion. They don't understand at all what's going on.
Perhaps from an adult perspective there are perceptions about teenagers engaging in risky behaviour. We've heard that some teenagers regret their decisions, and we might want to protect them from that. But we have sociological evidence, and studies show that teenagers perform on par with adults when considering the costs of risky behaviours. I can provide the citations for anybody who is interested, and we have a position paper that will be online shortly. Another study examined the common perception that adolescents feel invulnerable to negative outcomes of risky behaviour, and that perception was not supported.
So we think we're protecting teenagers from themselves here, but the truth of the matter is that if we're going to give teenagers a kind of autonomy and want them to act as autonomous adults, the way to do it is not to say anybody under 16 can't make the most basic of decisions for themselves under any circumstances.