Wikipedia is terrible when it talks about English law. It gets the UK entry pretty seriously wrong. The age of consent is 16, unless one of the people is in a

Wikipedia is terrible when it talks about English law. It gets the UK entry pretty seriously wrong. The age of consent is 16, unless one of the people is in a position of authority over the other (where authority is defined in law and covers things like teachers) when it's 18; prostitution is legal in England but definitely not if the person is under 18. > Any person who engages in sexual intercourse with a person under the age 16 could be prosecuted. However this therefore means that even sexual intercourse between willing people of a similar age (i.e. A 16 year old and a 15 year old) could result in the older person being liable for prosecution for committing a sexual offence. Because of this, when the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was created, separate sections of the act were put in place to be used on how to appropriately prosecute a person who had sexual intercourse with a person under the age of 16, depending on exactly how young a person under the age of 16 was at time the sexual intercourse took place. This therefore maintained a "two-tier" cut off age system regarding sexual intercourse when it involved a person under the age of 16. Currently this depends on whether a younger person was Under 16 or Under 13 at the time of the sexual intercourse taking place, with the latter being automatically overall illegal, and the former still being illegal, but with defences due to the younger person's older age, more flexibility in sentencing and flexibility overall whether to prosecute or not based on individual case This is incorrect. The different ages exist in law because too many abusing men were claiming that they honestly thought that the 12 year old they had abused was a willing 16 year old. The law removes this dishonest defence by adding this 13 year limit. We want the law to adequately capture the seriousness of the offence of rape of a child. The reason we don't prosecute 15 year olds who have sex with each other has nothing to do with this two-step age limit: it is because our crown prosecution service has to ask two questions: "Is there a reasonable prospect of a conviction?" and "is it in the public interest to prosecute?". It's not in the public interest to prosecute children for having sex with each other so long as there's no element of coercion or force. The CPS guidance to prosecuting sexual offences is here: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offences-chapter-2-sexual-offences-act-2003-principal-offences-and https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/rape-and-sexual-offenc... > The overriding public concern is to protect children. It was not Parliament's intention to punish children unnecessarily or for the criminal law to intervene where it is wholly inappropriate. During the passage of the bill, Lord Falconer said: > "Our overriding concern is to protect children, not to punish them unnecessarily. Where sexual relationships between minors are not abusive, prosecuting either or both children is highly unlikely to be in the public interest. Nor would it be in the best interests of the child ..." The guidance on youth offenders contains more detailed descriptions: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/youth-offenders https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/youth-offenders