Today Newsbeat on Radio 1 has rekindled the never ending issue about raising the minimum age for consumption of alcohol to 21, staying pretty much in line with previous BBC hosted polls that put the population as being half in favour and half not for the changes. This issue is a particular bugbear of mine, not only with drinking but also with the age of sexual consent and entertainment certification as more than a guideline. As someone who believes in personal liberties I find it discomforting that I should be viewed in the same light as the rest of the population my age and assessed in a generalised manner as to what I can personally deal with; I like to think that kids actually affected by these legal limits feel somewhat the same.

This isn't to say that I don't understand the need for basic levels of protection, to protect rebellious children from themselves if their parents are unable to give them the supervision and guidance they require, however to try and claim that arbitrary age limits on performing certain actions are successful in that task, I feel, is naive and short sighted.

Alcohol

The trouble with trying to assess the success of alcohol age restrictions is that it is clear from looking at the many various statistics that the limit on the age at which you can start drinking alcohol has a varied bearing on mortality rates. To take these statistics, you can argue that raising the drinking age to 21 in the UK would help because the US has better mortality rates; you could even say that such an argument is strengthened by Frances male mortality rate being significantly higher than the UK. However take a look at this report

Note that Finland, Germany and Norway have the biggest problem with alcohol related deaths, with Denmark and France not far behind (data from 1995). Now while France, Germany and Norway have lower age limits on drinking than the UK, Denmark and Finland share the same 18+ legislation (with exceptions). The country with the lowest mortality rate is Greece it would seem, who also have a lower age limit than we do here in the UK, and "miraculously" in 1995 had a rate of 0.0 for mortality per 100,000 in Greek women. So it's not so simple to determine the usefulness of legislation in stopping the effect of drinking on mortality rates.

One interesting correlation that we could also take comes from ESPAD where it's clear to see that countries such as Denmark and Finland have a high proportion of students drinking at the age of 16 to the stage of getting drunk 10 or more times in a year. The UK is not far behind them. But France, with significantly higher mortality rates than the UK, has much better control over the issue of its children getting drunk. The theory that perhaps drinking younger bears stark relation to mortality rates in fact couldn't seem to be farther from the truth with 31% of respondents in Ireland saying they've taken part in binge drinking at least 3 times in the last 30 days, yet with that percentage being almost 3 times the amount of students that responded the same in France, it is France that has the higher liver cirrhosis (6.5 times higher for men and more than double that of Irish women) and alcohol related deaths (over 3 times higher for men and the same for women)

With statistics like these, quite frankly all over the place, how anyone can try and argue a case for increasing an age limit on consumption of alcohol based on death rates alone is absolutely beyond me. Ireland has the same problems we do in the UK, statistically, in underage drinking and alcohol related deaths...yet the UK has more than double the liver cirrhosis deaths. If this issue was as simple as "X amount of people drinking Y amount of alcohol from Z age" then we simply wouldn't see such a difference. The fact that women have consistently lower mortality rates than men when it comes to alcohol only goes to cement in my belief that the problem is not legislation and a lack of stringent enough law, but one of culture and how different areas of society use alcohol.

What about the effects of poverty on alcohol abuse? Russia during the fall of the Soviet Union would certainly suggest that correlations can be found between the two; but with the UK experiencing higher poverty levels in general than those countries with the worst death rates surely that also casts doubt on just how strong that correlation is as anything more than a contributory factor.

I'm not a professor of social science nor have I spent long researching this subject, but to me all that I can find in the jumble of contradictory and non-conclusive statistics is that the UK hasn't got as big a problem with alcohol related deaths as our media wishes to make out, yet we clearly do have a bigger problem with attitudes and behaviours while drinking than other countries (one study shows UK respondents on the subject of alcohol related injuries outshone almost all countries in "fighting" being a prominent reason). So why is it when nothing at all points to alcohol alone as an entity being responsible for a quantifiable risk to young people without also having to factor in these attitudes and behaviours that the general public feels the answer of raising the drinking limit will help anything, is it just because it is an easier answer than taking responsibility for our society?

They're going to do it anyway

Besides, if there is one thing that IAS factsheet linked to above shows, it is that kids will drink even if they are not supposed to. Denmark and Finland, in line with the UK's own laws and behaviours, rate highest on percentage of young girls and boys getting drunk multiple times in a year, and getting drunk before the age of 13. This is the main reason why hiding behind legislation as a level of protection for our children just can't and won't cut it. If you wish to be ignorant and assume that people will follow laws against their liberty simply because you bark it loud enough and wield a big enough stick then you are in dire need of some perception re-alignment.

People become responsible by being properly taught, given responsibility, and then held accountable for their actions. We don't tell young people to "just say no" to driving, fail to teach them to drive, and then on their 18th birthday give them drivers licenses and turn them loose on the road. But this is the logic we follow for beverage alcohol because neo-prohibitionism underlies our alcohol policy.

Teen Pregnancy

No clearer is this fact made than in the case of teen pregnancy in relation to the age of consent. In the US, with a much greater emphasis on the Christian principles of no sex before marriage and the stigma that comes with that leading to a lack of education on even the basics, they have the highest een pregnancy rate of the "rich" world with an age of consent that varies around the 16-18 age mark dependant on the state. The UK with an age of consent of 16 has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe, while countries such as Sweden (15+) and Italy (14+) have teen pregnancy rates 5 times lower than our own. Korea with age of consent set as low as 13 actually has the lowest teen pregnancy rate of all "developed" countries and (if the example of Korea doesn't sway you) Spain (13+) has a teen pregnancy rate over 3 times smaller than the UK. (source: UNICEF)

Pretty damn clear then that prohibition and legislation doesn't stop teen pregnancy from happening, and therefore from people having sex "under age". Even despite the ability to have sex legally for longer, these countries clearly don't harbour a great desire to start a family until after the teenage years, and that also lends credibility to these countries educating their children much better from a younger age about safe sex. But when are kids in these countries actually starting to have sex?

As you can see from this document those countries such as Italy and Spain, despite their lower ages of consent, tend to have sex at a later age than our kids in the UK. Despite the lack of stigma that may make UK respondents give a "legal" answer being lessened in these countries they still admit to having sex later in life. Could it be, shock/horror, that plenty of information in a liberal family atmosphere without restrictions imposed against people in the most rebellious stage of their life can actually result in more measured and mature decisions?

So what now?

It is time that the British public, and the media, stopped its infatuation with age limits and arbitrary figures. It is the kind of mentality that says "well 18 isn't working, lets stop action X until 21" that allows people like the Home Secretary to pull a 42 day figure out of her hat for unnecessary detention of "terrorist" suspects. We tell kids that they can't possibly handle certain violent and sexual content in films until 18 despite it being clear that different people develop at completely different rates, and we take the power of mediation on this issue away from the people that understand that personal and individual development the most to be warded over by faceless organisations and enforcement agencies. I would, of course, say that we should encourage and promote for people to take some responsibility for more open and frank education with their kids and to abandon the idea that centralised governance hold the answer for our children's protection; but ironically, as is probably proven somewhat by the above article, I wonder if we can even be bothered to do that.