Being in your prime. Said of certain ages along the way as you grow up. I guess it changes with requirement depending on what part of your life you’re going through, and whether society has deemed a need for that. The prime of youth, of being work ready, of being mature, of being ‘at the right time’ often in the eyes of others.

But as child brides and marriage take more of a centre stage in the news and certain cultures that are now prevalent in Britain and Europe, I couldn’t help but to give it more thought. Because it’s not new, and it does seem to be across the board in varying degrees.

Amish – although there are many things to admire about the Amish, this wasn’t one of them. Hearing that the much older male members of the groups, will marry the young women, and the young men often get thrown out. So, they don’t take the young women as wives. Apparently, there are thousands of young men from those groups who no longer have a community because of sexual jealousy.

And that is probably the motivation across the board. Competition, jealousy, desire, and extreme selfishness for personal gratification. All neatly protected by that veil of various religions, or cult mentality, or systematic conditions needed to facilitate it and condition the up-and-coming generations to perpetuate it.

In Britain, we currently have a rather large issue of children being inducted into a system of abuse that spans decades. Not just because of foreign religions or cultures, but they are alongside our very own homegrown abusers. Now we have added a hefty number to that with more people of a twisted mindset and archaic attitude. But it was already here, so embedded that most didn’t even notice, or thought it was rare, a one-off when you did get to hear about it in the news. I thought Jimmy Savile might have opened people’s eyes and minds a bit to the scale and level of it. And now we know how selective the ‘news’ is about what and who they report, it’s not hard to see why so many get away with so much.

In Britain, the age of consent was 12, between 1275 and 1875. That’s quite a long time in my view. And although it always seemed a bit much to have a family by 17 back in the day, if you’ve been ‘available’ for 5 years by then, it makes more sense. It didn’t sit well with me, but it made sense. And if we believe the high infant mortality rates and lower age of death than we are used to today, then it makes more sense.

So, I wonder. What was the real motivation for changing it in 1875. As nothing is ever really for safety or for the good of the people, or because people protest, so my cynical mind sees it as a power move. Like with the Amish strategy, to remove their competition or threaten them with punishment for going near their ‘stock’. You still couldn’t get married, though, until aged 21, up until 1823, so there is quite a big gap between being sexually mature at 12 apparently, yet your deemed not emotionally mature until 21. But after 1823, it dropped to 14 for girls to be able to be married without parental consent.

Perhaps that was because a change in attitudes towards unwed mothers took over, and stigma and shame were put in place to make people ashamed of breeding. Also giving a very handy pool of ‘resources’ they might have use for, maybe leading in to that Rather Dark Enterprise that was around at the time…

(c) MKW Publishing