This book addresses the contentious issue of how children's sexual behaviour
should be regulated. Responding to contemporary concerns about young people's sexual
behaviour, sexual abuse and paedophilia, this book will engage readers in law and
socio-legal studies, sociology, history, politics, social policy, youth and childhood
studies, and gender and sexuality studies, as well as professionals and practitioners
working with young people.
MATTHEW WAITES is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Department of
Sociology, Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, UK. He
has published a variety of articles on young people's sexuality and lesbian, gay and
bisexual politics in the UK, and is co-editor, with Jeffrey Weeks and Janet Holland, of
Sexualities and Society: A Reader.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Theorising Age of Consent Laws
Age of Consent Laws in Global Perspective
Heterosexuality and the Age of Consent
Homosexuality and the Age of Consent
Sexual Liberationism and the Search for New Sexual Knowledge
Equality at Last? Age of Consent Debates in the 1990s
New Age of Consent Laws: Adulthood and Childhood
Rethinking the Age of Consent
Bibliography
Notes
Index
296 pages, Paperback