Quote Originally Posted by UnreasonablyReasonable
Also Syme I already agreed with you, so I don't understand why you're trying to get me to explain something that's now irrelevant? Either way sexual maturity is the age at which one can reproduce, looked it up for you.
I see that you have agreed with me that the best way to handle age of consent in statutory rape cases is to ameliorate the severity of the offense when the adult thought that the child was an adult. However, as I understand it, you have been making a broader argument in this thread--you have been arguing that legal adulthood in general should be tied to sexual maturity. Is this not correct?

And "the age at which one can reproduce" is the narrowest definition of sexual maturity--it's the one a biologist would use--but it's far from the only one, and it was far from clear that it's what you meant. Again, puberty is a process that lasts years. For the record, by that definition, humans can be "sexually mature" as early as age 6.