It is time to rethink the age of consent

In 1983 Samantha Fox was sixteen years old when she first appeared topless on Page Three of the Sun. That paper and its kind used to delight in doing birthday countdowns: in just three days, they’d promise, alongside a picture of a provocatively pouting fifteen-year-old, it’ll be legal for us to show you her breasts. Wahey!

In more recent memory (a 2003 change in the law having outlawed topless shots of under-18s) Emma Watson was ‘upskirted’ by photographers on her 18th birthday: they were handsomely compensated for images that, a few hours previously, would have landed them in jail. The Daily Mail’s so-called sidebar of shame likes to use the phrase ‘all grown up’ to signpost sexualised paparazzi images of young women.

All this seems to point to two things. One is that there is a very strong appetite in the culture for sexualising images of girls in their early and mid teens, the borderline between what’s legal and what’s illegal being a particular locus of titillation.