“…Nowadays, children-particularly adolescents-generally reach sexual maturity in the physiological sense long before their sexual activity becomes socially and legally acceptable (Gittins, 1998). The fact that many teenagers in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions, like the UK, the US, and Australia, start their engagement in sexuality earlier than permitted by law demonstrates the inconsistency between legislation and the experiences of children (Zhu and Van der Aa, 2017a). In the UK, for instance, a national survey (excluding Northern Ireland) found that nearly 33% of men and 25% of women had intercourse before they were 16, despite the legal age of consent being set at 16 (Moore and Reynolds, 2017).…”