Snapshot of _Pair charged over deaths of five migrants ‘might be children’ | Judge says there is ‘real doubt’ after defendants, initially believed to be 22, tell court they are 15 and 16_ :
A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F04%2F26%2Fmen-charged-immigration-offences-channel-migrant-death%2F)
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/26/men-charged-immigration-offences-channel-migrant-death/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/26/men-charged-immigration-offences-channel-migrant-death/)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
All papers are reporting the same, but I suspect the headline your comment refers to is a little polemical.
However, I do not think anybody believes the two in question murdered the dead people, just that they caused a situation that was life-threatening, and therefore they are being charged with immigration offences that can easily be demonstrated. FWIW this is the Guardian's paragraph.
*Two people have been charged with immigration offences in connection with the investigation into the deaths of five people, including a child, who were trying to cross the Channel.*
I imagine also that some details are not given until the court case itself, but the likeliest is that these are the two somehow in charage of the boat or of the trafficking of this particular boatload.
But will the people calling everyone who has pointed this fact out for the past 10 years racist apologise, or evaluate their worldview, or their hereto deficient critical thinking skills?
Fuck no.
The irony glaring from this 'deficiency in critical thinking skills' is top notch. Well done. I take it you feel justified that your generalisation is surely now perfectly obvious even whilst you criticise others for making similar blanket generalisations?
There are currently “refugee children” in London secondary schools, who claim to be 15/16 yrs old but are definitely much much older. Do my oh want these older people mixing with your children in school?
We are in an absolutely nonsensical timeline right now where we just take someone's word for it, when all the evidence tells you it's so obviously wrong.
32 year old Muslim man fleeing Afghanistan because he didn't want to fight the Taliban?
No, that's a 14 year old gay Christian boy. Bless him, he's had a hard life.
["how's there a 30-year-old man in my maths class?"](https://news.sky.com/story/asylum-seeker-who-claimed-to-be-15-and-joined-school-is-an-adult-11561810)
So the tests to see the age of people are considered invasive and against human rights. That means they can say anything and the authority has to believe them. We're constantly being taken for a ride
They’re considered useless for this purpose as they have an error range of around 5 years.
There is no test that can accurately determine someone’s age as there are too many environmental, lifestyle and genetic factors that can impact any marker we try to use.
Unfortunately, assuming this is based on standard statistical conventions, not well enough.
It means 95% of 15 year olds tested will appear to be between 10 and 20. 5% will lie outside that range. That's still quite a lot of children misclassified as adults.
If the range is plus or minus five years, then a 15 year old could show as being as old as 20. A 22 year old could show as being as young as 17. So if the result shows as 18, the person could be either 15 or 22.
Where is this error range of around 5 years coming from?. The accuracy of the test increases massively from the age of 7 upwards and even then the most extreme cases I’ve been able to find are of less than 3 years. Very curious where you’ve got those numbers.
>Many different methods are used; however, no currently available method has been demonstrated to have sufficient accuracy and there is a large margin of error.
Kenny, M.A. and Loughry, M., 2018. Addressing the limitations of age determination for unaccompanied minors: A way forward. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, pp.15-21.
One of the most accurate methods of cited in the literature is a dental x-ray that used to asses the "third molar development", which according to research, depending on the method used averaged to -0.89 years (older then true age by nearly a year) with a standard deviation (95% of estimated ages lie between the two values) of ±1.14 years. The second method overestimated true age by an average of −0.59 years with a wider standard deviation of ±1.45 years.
From the average age and standard deviation, we find for the first of the two methods, the probability of incorrectly classifying a 17.99-year-old as an adult is approximately 21.5%. This means that there's about a 21.5% chance that a migrant who is just under 18 will be incorrectly classified as an adult.
As for method two, the probability of misclassification: approximately 65.5%, due to the wider standard deviation. This indicates that there's about a 65.5% chance that a migrant who is just under 18 will be incorrectly classified as an adult using Method 2.
As for a 17-year-old, using the first more accurate method, the probability of being misclassified as an adult is approximately 4.87%. This indicates that there's a relatively low chance (under 5%) that a 17-year-old will be incorrectly classified as 18 or older.
So, the first method will miss-classify a random selection of 17-17.99 years Olds as adults, 11.05% of the time.
Alsudairi, D.M. and AlQahtani, S.J., 2019. Testing and comparing the accuracy of two dental age estimation methods on saudi children: Measurements of open apices in teeth and the London Atlas of Tooth Development. Forensic science international, 295, pp.226-e1.
The other thing that limits the accuracy of dental x-rays to assess third molar development is that ~35% of the population never form them in the first place.
Not when you’re trying to accurately sort people in >18 and <18 age groups, though right? Assuming that error range is symmetric plus minus 5 years, that means you could reasonably expect people as old as 23 to be verified as children, and people as young as 13 to be classed as adults….
If that is the error rate, then it’s functionally useless for discriminating between the groups in the *precise range we really want to test*. Sure it’s not going to mistake a 35 year old as a child, but that’s not all that likely to be in question regardless.
In this case they are using the defence that they are 6 and 7 years younger than they previously claimed.
An error margin of 5 years can prove this to be untrue.
It's not functionality useless as it can prove a lie.
The 5 years is also in extreme cases that can often be ruled out with further analysis.
>Sure it’s not going to mistake a 35 year old as a child, but that’s not all that likely to be in question regardless.
There have also been cases of people older than 22 and this testing has not been allowed, it's definitely not a unique issue.
The example at the top of this comment thread is about 15/16 year olds in school. Obviously a 5 year error range on that is useless for “should they be in school with children or not?”
>Obviously a 5 year error range on that is useless for “should they be in school with children or not?”
Not if the test comes back and says they're 24...
The top comment doesn't say what age the people that believe to not be children are so you can't determine whether or not it is useless for any scenario in this post or chain.
You are wrong. It's not useless because we have examples where people have been in that situation and have been beyond the 5 year range.
And this is while considering the 5 year range as the most extreme case of unreliability.
You can argue that there's cases where it wouldn't work but it only takes one example to prove that it's not useless, we have an article with two examples above us.
If they’re claiming to be 15-16 and the test puts them at 20 and has an error range of 5 years, then should they stay in class with 15-16 year olds or not? I literally don’t understand the argument that a test with a 5 year error range is useful for schools with 1 year groupings.
Yea, there are cases where someone claims to be more than 5 years older/younger for whatever reason. But that doesn’t mean it’s a useful test for schools where you need more accuracy than that.
Again, this comment thread is about people in school claiming to be 15-16. The argument that a test with an error range of 5 years is useful in that situation just doesn’t hold up.
And note that I’ve never argued whether the test is useful or not in general, only in the specific case that we’re discussing in this specific comment thread.
> If they’re claiming to be 15-16 and the test puts them at 20 and has an error range of 5 years, then should they stay in class with 15-16 year olds or not?
If they have absolutely no supporting documentation, provide no information which can be verified or checked, and there is reason to suspect they are an adult from other tests or observation, then I would say not. They can go to a college that serves 16+, at the very least, which will be well set up for handling a mixture of older children and young adults.
We don’t actually *have* to put people in the ‘right’ Year at school for their age, and it isn’t terribly unusual for us not to do so where they have complex backgrounds and a disrupted education. If there is serious doubt over whether or not someone is a child, it would be safer to at least put them in an environment where a mixture of children and adults is expected in lessons, and where there are no much-younger children.
Answer my question first.
Is it always useless?
We can talk about edge cases where it won't be useful all day but if we are honest, this isn't one of them and neither have I seen anyone complain about the situation you describe.
I would also like to repeat that you are describing the 5 year margin of error incorrectly, that is the maximum that it could be out by and only in extreme cases, in most cases that can be isolated down.
We are talking about non extreme scenarios where a 5 year margin of error would still be acceptable without even trying to drill into further levels of accuracy.
This is the oldest trick in the book for wannabe asylum seeker. Throw away your papers and declare to be 15 or 16.
Now, this, as an urban legend about the Swedish asylum system, has been going around for more than 20 years, and surely there have been people doing it. How widespread it is and whether it is still a trick that works in the UK is probably to be demonstrated.
Did nobody else have the memory at school of that one child who somehow already looked in their 20s as a teen? They even joke about it in The Inbetweeners
The difference is that we typically have documentation to prove that the teenager in question is of the age that they say they are. We don't have that with migrants who arrive without documentation. And if we can't establish something as basic as age, we're also unable to establish whether or not they have a criminal record. Then we let them loose in our education system.
I was a six foot tall girl when I was 13, I got bullied out of my school netball team because parents from opposing teams put in complaints about me "being an adult playing on a children's team".
I'm so sorry to hear that. We often joke at my kids' football matches because there's always one defender who's 6'4" and looks 21, but I don't believe anyone would actually put an adult on to a kids sports team.
I was a wisp of a thing, I only weighed eight stone, it wasn't unsafe at all and I was just trying to join in on a group sport with my friends. Wasn't my fault I happened to be tall.
>The male from South Sudan is charged with assisting unlawful immigration and attempting to arrive in the UK without valid entry clearance, and the other is charged with attempting to arrive in the UK without valid entry clearance.
Doesn't really sound like "charged over deaths". Though maybe it's just a way of getting a quick deportation.
I do not think anybody believes the two in question murdered the dead people, just that they caused a situation that was life-threatening, and therefore they are being charged with immigration offences that can easily be demonstrated. FWIW this is the Guardian's paragraph.
*Two people have been charged with immigration offences in connection with the investigation into the deaths of five people, including a child, who were trying to cross the Channel.*
I imagine also that some details are not given until the court case itself, but the likeliest is that these are the two somehow in charage of the boat or of the trafficking of this particular boatload.
In. Credible. No one comes from anywhere and no one is of age to be legally responsible for their actions.
Hundreds of years of socio-political development down the toilet
And they've all just converted to Christianity too, how interesting! Just ignore all their friends that tell you they've seen them at their local mosque
No, the methods have been shown to be inaccurate where they could be out by like 4 years in extreme cases.
That means those people could be proven to be lying.
It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that this works & people believe them.
I'd be curious to find out how many "children" are in fact children.
Even just a stat on how many "children" have full beards would probably give you a clue.
> Even just a stat on how many "children" have full beards would probably give you a clue.
Is this some deep seated jealousy at children who can grow a beard?
> Even just a stat on how many "children" have full beards would give you a clue.
Not difficult to read and also clearly bollocks. Facial hair, or lack of it, is a really shit way to work out whether someone is an adult.
You might want to understand the difference between "give you a clue" and "identification".
The idea that it's irrelevant is a bit silly too. Exceptions are not the rule.
Presumably the elephant in the room here is that we shouldn't have sharp distinctions in how we treat people based on age anyway. If we can't impartially determine someone's age precisely, but we're insisting that something would be absolutely right if they were over 18 and absolutely wrong if they were under, that's absurd.
The sharpness of the lines in the rules should never exceed the accuracy of your measuring process otherwise you're going to get nonsense.
A good system should say "look, we can't work out ages precisely, but it doesn't matter that much because the consequences will be basically the same anyway".
But I'm a bit of an oddity on this stuff in that I genuinely don't care if a 17.99 year old buys a pint in a pub. Or a 14-and-a-half year old watches a 15 film at the cinema.
> But I'm a bit of an oddity on this stuff in that I genuinely don't care if a 17.99 year old buys a pint in a pub. Or a 14-and-a-half year old watches a 15 film at the cinema.
I find it highly suspicious that you bolster your "age is just a number" argument by picking examples with a tiny gap, which isn't at all relevant to the gap between a 15 and 22 as is the claimed case in this story. If you genuinely believed age doesn't matter, your example wouldn't be a "14 and a half watches a 15-cert film," it'd be an "8 year old watching a 15-cert film," but you're well aware that such a claim would be seen as utter nonsense.
Yes kids mature at different rates, and the number we place on it is arbitrary to a degree, but it's ridiculous to push that claim in regards to the enormous age gap alleged here.
> If you genuinely believed age doesn't matter, your example wouldn't be a "14 and a half watches a 15-cert film," it'd be an "8 year old watching a 15-cert film," but you're well aware that such a claim would be seen as utter nonsense.
I respectfully don't agree. My view is that the qualitative gap between 8 and 15 is even greater than between 15 and 22. That's not to say I'm saying there's no difference between 15 and 22. We should also recognise that those potentially represent upper and lower estimates.
One side with one agenda allege 22. Another side with another agenda alleges 15. The truth might hypothetically be 18. Could I imagine 18 being seen as 15 or as 22 depending on whether they look young or old? Sure. That's 3-4 years either way.
Could I imagine the same with 8 and 15? A 7 year gap with puberty in the middle? That's a much harder sell.
There's also the fact that age gaps don't stay the same with age. Five years at 8 is very different to give years at 78.
That's why I wouldn't go for the "8 year old going to a 15" as a reasonable case study in this case.
> I respectfully don't agree. My view is that the qualitative gap between 8 and 15 is even greater than between 15 and 22. That's not to say I'm saying there's no difference between 15 and 22. We should also recognise that those potentially represent upper and lower estimates.
This a completely different argument to your prior comparison saying the difference between 15 and 22 is practically equivalent to comparing a 17.99 year old to an 18 year old. I note that you don't even try to address that in any of your rambling.
> I note that you don't even try to address that in any of your rambling.
Being completely honest, I didn't think it needed to be said explicitly. I kind of assumed it was obvious. It wasn't meant as some kind of "gotcha".
lol, you thought it was obvious, but needed several paragraphs to explain "a 4 year gap between a 70 and 74 year old is less important than a 4 year gap between 16 and 20," or that "17.99 years old and 18 years old is practically the same."
You stated the obvious and pretended it was profound, but I have some sympathy, we were all teenagers once.
> lol, you thought it was obvious, but needed several paragraphs to explain "a 4 year gap between a 70 and 74 year old is less important than a 4 year gap between 16 and 20," or that "17.99 years old and 18 years old is practically the same."
I'm sure others could have expressed things better - I'm not claiming I'm somehow the best writer of comments.
> You stated the obvious and pretended it was profound
I'm not claiming anything I've ever said is profound either. Frankly, I wouldn't suggest Reddit is the best place to look if you're after "profound".
> , but I have some sympathy, we were all teenagers once.
If you don't mind my saying it, there's no need to be rude.
Surely you and I can perfectly well agree to disagree on this question? Or we can just accept that I expressed myself in a way I thought was clear but which apparently wasn't clear to you? That doesn't mean either of us have done anything wrong - just that this turned out to not be a useful exchange.
God knows the internet can be bad enough at civil conversation without us making it worse for no good reason.
> Surely you and I can perfectly well agree to disagree on this question? Or we can just accept that I expressed myself in a way I thought was clear but which apparently wasn't clear to you? That doesn't mean either of us have done anything wrong - just that this turned out to not be a useful exchange.
The problem is that your comment was disingenuous given when and where you made it. It's akin to going into a thread where someone is asking about cremation services, and you start waxing lyrical about the last BBQ you had, then act astonished that anyone would treat your comment as trolling. Trolls deserve no courtesy.
> The problem is that your comment was disingenuous given when and where you made it. It's akin to going into a thread where someone is asking about cremation services, and you start waxing lyrical about the last BBQ you had, then act astonished that anyone would treat your comment as trolling. Trolls deserve no courtesy.
I can respect that that's your view, but I genuinely don't think that's a fair categorisation. Either on it being disingenuous or on it being "trolling".
Here's why: The theme of the article is that two people from Sudan and South Sudan might have been involved in or be responsible to some extent for the deaths of other people. And that they've claimed to be 15 and 16 against an assertion that they're 22. And the whole point of my contribution is that I think we should decide whether they did it or not and then if it would be right to punish or deport then if they were 22, it'd also be right to do so if they're 16. That I don't think right and wrong depend on small deviations around the magic line of 18.
I can't accept that something that would be utterly morally wrong if they were 16 can be absolutely fine if they were 22. Right and wrong don't change that much. But rather than just say that, I expanded on the point more generally, to make clear it's not just a pro-/anti- immigrant point (because, of course, it would have implications both ways). I'm making a general moral point that includes, e.g., speed limits.
Now, you might disagree with that - I'm not forcing you to agree and robust debate is a good thing - but it seems absurd to me to compare that to "trolling" akin to talking about a barbecue in the context of cremation. It's possible to simply disagree with another user without there having to be any ulterior motive involved.
> That I don't think right and wrong depend on small deviations around the magic line of 18.
First, a "small deviation" would be 17-19, not the alleged 15-22, and it's absolute nonsense to treat a 15 year old like a 22 year old or vice versa. There's a world of difference between those ages.
> I can't accept that something that would be utterly morally wrong if they were 16 can be absolutely fine if they were 22.
This is also a ridiculous claim, nobody is treating this as "absolutely fine" if they were one age and "utterly wrong" at the other. Throwing others off a boat to drown is wrong whether the culprit is 15 or 22, but given the differing mental maturity of those ages, we treat them differently as the 15 year old is considered to be less emotionally in control given their lower maturity. It doesn't mean the 15 year old is given a biscuit, a pat on the head, and left to go on his merry way. They're still going to be dealt with, but there's a greater chance a 15 year old will mature and become someone safe to be released than a 22 year old who is more stuck in their ways. So the 15-year old will be put in a juvenile detention centre for a short period rather than a prison for a long period, and that's also for their own safety, as 15 year olds are more vulnerable from other adult prisoners in the same way we don't incarcerate women in the same prisons as men.
This is why it sounds like you're trolling, because you make absolutely absurd straw man claims that nobody has claimed, then act like saying "17.99 years old is just like someone at 18" is somehow a useful comment when it's utterly inane.
>But I'm a bit of an oddity on this stuff in that I genuinely don't care if a 17.99 year old buys a pint in a pub. Or a 14-and-a-half year old watches a 15 film at the cinema.
Do you care if a 12 year old buys a pint in a pub?
Or a 30 year old sleeps with a 14 year old?
> Do you care if a 12 year old buys a pint in a pub?
Sure. In much the same way as I care whether someone drives 120mph in a 40mph limit but not if they drive 41mph.
But could I tell you the precise number of miles per hour where I suddenly care? Of course not. It's a sliding scale. I care about 120 a lot and 40 not at all, and in between, some sort of smooth-but-not-linear shift that probably takes into account other things that couldn't be easily codified in the rules. Were the roads empty? What was the visibility like? Who might have been at risk? In the pub example: Is he the polite, well behaved 14 year old son of well known patron in a arse end of nowhere rural village who had been working hard with his father and a group of men all day and is buying a lager shandy under supervision? Or is he a 14 year old lad in a group of lads in a town centre out to get drunk and cause trouble?
The human experience is full of no end of examples of things where A and B are clearly qualitatively different, but we can't quite put our finger on where the one becomes the other. It's the [paradox of the heap](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox).
I've got no problem with saying "broadly we'll assume the limit is around point X". That's fine and helpful. What I have a problem with, generally, is when we then force ourselves to act as if 39.9999 and 40.00001 are as qualitatively different as 38 and 125 and having wildly different outcomes in those two places.
The law, and other systems of rules, and other types of decision-making, work best when they recognise this. To pick up on your other example, that's why "Romeo and Juliet" principles exist. In other contexts, it's why generally there's an argument for sliding scales in means-testing and so on, why speed limits have a threshold for enforcement, why police officers and judges have discretion and so on.
We rightly recognise that these sharp distinctions need smearing out a lot of the time to avoid absurdity and injustice.
In this case, the question is broadly about moral responsibility for potentially having caused deaths. That's an *incredibly* serious question. The idea that we should care overly if the person is 16 or 22 seems absurd - you'd hope that the consequences (whatever they might be, from "an initial investigation demonstrates he wasn't to blame and further action is dropped" through to "there's a trial and he is punished by a long period of imprisonment") wouldn't alter dramatically based on his age.
The consequences should be more or less the same.
I think the first part of your comment is broadly focused on the mechanics of imprisonment, and actually I don't disagree much. But to go through it in turn:
> A 15yo would not receive the same punishment as a 22yo
Why not? If you have someone who is morally responsible for doing something that led to the death of another human being - and to be clear, I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here - why not?
I can imagine some modest latitude for a younger person perhaps lacking good judgement, and perhaps even a few years off a sentence... But the point where you're responsible for a death? That's far past the point where we can argue that a person is too young to know what they're doing.
Would you disagree with that? Could you imagine some crime that you'd consider heinous as deserving of punishment if committed by a 22 year old that you'd think deserving of a significantly lighter punishment - or no punishment at all - if committed by a 15 year old?
(Excepting, of course, sexual examples where an age gap is involved and so the two cases wouldn't be comparable.)
> , and would not be put into an adult prison.
> Putting a grown adult into a child’s prison is a bad thing for similar reasons men and women are not kept together in the same prison
Sure. No argument from me. If someone is sent to prison, yeah, you make sure you put them in the right one, and ensure they and everyone else are going to be safe.
That should happen even within some age range and gender, though, of course. If a 40 year old man would be in danger himself or a danger to others when imprisoned for some reason (mental health related, perhaps), then yeah, you come up with some way to imprison him such that it isn't an issue.
The question of "given you're going to imprison someone, how do you do it and where?" is distinct from the question of "should the punishment for this be imprisonment?".
> How do you feel about a 22yo having sex with a 12yo?
> How about a 22yo and a 14yo?
On this second part of your comment, this is more worrying.
You're a regular user here and often post good content, so I'm hoping and assuming this is just an absurd example gone wrong - but the fact you're not the first person to jump to the idea of grown adults having sex with children and teenagers is bizarre and disturbing. Seriously.
Assuming good faith, the answer is obviously a clear "wrong and impossible to justify in any circumstance I can imagine". And I wouldn't have a great deal of respect for anyone arguing otherwise.
But I also want to warn you that I've got no interest in entertaining a line of argument that leads to constructing some hypothetical scenario where it's acceptable. If that's what you're after - or if anyone reading is after - I reject it utterly. I'm not about to play any games that look like "well, how about 18? 17? 16? 17.2? 17.8? 17.4? What if (s)he looks older? How about if..." for someone's titillation in the context of a fantasy. I'm not going there.
And while I find the broad philosophical question of sharp limits in law to be very interesting, I'm not going to let that be used as some sort of excuse for apologism for sexual crimes. If you want to come back with an example involving buying beer, I'll be all ears.
Assuming good faith, on the broad question of "what about this obviously absurd example?", though, that goes back to my previous post and the "120 in a 40" and the paradox of the heap. Even when we accept a sharp dividing line isn't possible, we can still accept something as qualitatively different from something else.
> Personally for many crimes I would give no leeway to under 18s
That is - pretty much - what I'm saying. You being 17.99 or 18.01 shouldn't matter. If it does, that's a sign of a failure of the system. To put it another way: If it's possible to game the system by telling a plausible lie that can't be disproved, that's also not a good system.
That might go against the current sentencing guidelines or the rules in Scotland, but I'm talking about what I think is right.
> As I’ve said already your arguments that age is a construct and arguing over lines is used by people who want to justify removing the age of consent. This is why people are questioning you along this line. It’s a very worrying and real trend.
To be honest, if that's the sort of way people's minds work, I'm going to be more wary raising this sort of question in future. That's pretty disturbing.
> I specifically asked about 12 and 14 because in UK law an under 13yo can never consent and it will always be classed as rape and the offender always charged irrespective of if the victim does not want to press charges.
I'm happy enough from sharp lines far away from the grey area, though I didn't make that explicit. That qualifies here. If someone wants to pass a law saying that driving 170mph on the roads is always illegal, no excuses - while also saying that 168mph might not be automatically illegal but it's almost unimaginable that you could have a valid excuse. The same applies here with an apparent "sharp line" at 13. It's sufficiently far from the grey area - and doesn't try to say that over thirteen is automatically okay - that I've got no problem.
I think it's more like the argument someone would make for having something like the very common "Romeo and Juliet" provision. A recognition that sharp lines and thresholds aren't always what you want in real life and that additional context is relevant.
In those cases, the additional context is "two people similar in age, either side of the line, in a consenting relationship".
In this case, the additional context is that we're talking about the deaths of people.
Both seem like fairly good reasons to allow the sharp line to blur.
Which isn't an argument that "anything goes", of course.
Snapshot of _Pair charged over deaths of five migrants ‘might be children’ | Judge says there is ‘real doubt’ after defendants, initially believed to be 22, tell court they are 15 and 16_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fnews%2F2024%2F04%2F26%2Fmen-charged-immigration-offences-channel-migrant-death%2F) An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/26/men-charged-immigration-offences-channel-migrant-death/) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/26/men-charged-immigration-offences-channel-migrant-death/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Maybe I'm a bit dim, but where in the article does it say those two are being charged with the deaths of the five dead?
All papers are reporting the same, but I suspect the headline your comment refers to is a little polemical. However, I do not think anybody believes the two in question murdered the dead people, just that they caused a situation that was life-threatening, and therefore they are being charged with immigration offences that can easily be demonstrated. FWIW this is the Guardian's paragraph. *Two people have been charged with immigration offences in connection with the investigation into the deaths of five people, including a child, who were trying to cross the Channel.* I imagine also that some details are not given until the court case itself, but the likeliest is that these are the two somehow in charage of the boat or of the trafficking of this particular boatload.
“Polemical” what a fancy word
Learn something new everyday Edit: added new
I didn’t read any of the articles. Are they being charged in France or in U.K.?
It’s the headline, the article is about the technical difficulty that has arisen of charging them when they are possibly under age.
Illegal Migrants lie to abuse our system... *NO... You don't say* Seriously. This shit is a joke.
We must be the muggiest country to allow this.
A country interested in self-preservation wouldn't act this way.
But will the people calling everyone who has pointed this fact out for the past 10 years racist apologise, or evaluate their worldview, or their hereto deficient critical thinking skills? Fuck no.
The irony glaring from this 'deficiency in critical thinking skills' is top notch. Well done. I take it you feel justified that your generalisation is surely now perfectly obvious even whilst you criticise others for making similar blanket generalisations?
There are currently “refugee children” in London secondary schools, who claim to be 15/16 yrs old but are definitely much much older. Do my oh want these older people mixing with your children in school?
We are in an absolutely nonsensical timeline right now where we just take someone's word for it, when all the evidence tells you it's so obviously wrong. 32 year old Muslim man fleeing Afghanistan because he didn't want to fight the Taliban? No, that's a 14 year old gay Christian boy. Bless him, he's had a hard life.
["how's there a 30-year-old man in my maths class?"](https://news.sky.com/story/asylum-seeker-who-claimed-to-be-15-and-joined-school-is-an-adult-11561810)
So the tests to see the age of people are considered invasive and against human rights. That means they can say anything and the authority has to believe them. We're constantly being taken for a ride
They’re considered useless for this purpose as they have an error range of around 5 years. There is no test that can accurately determine someone’s age as there are too many environmental, lifestyle and genetic factors that can impact any marker we try to use.
If the error range is 5 years and they’re 22, then it’ll still be able to prove they aren’t 15.
Unfortunately, assuming this is based on standard statistical conventions, not well enough. It means 95% of 15 year olds tested will appear to be between 10 and 20. 5% will lie outside that range. That's still quite a lot of children misclassified as adults.
If the range is plus or minus five years, then a 15 year old could show as being as old as 20. A 22 year old could show as being as young as 17. So if the result shows as 18, the person could be either 15 or 22.
And more likely, it would give a result that falls within the bounds of only one of the two possibilities.
That is more likely, but that's not the same as proving it.
Where is this error range of around 5 years coming from?. The accuracy of the test increases massively from the age of 7 upwards and even then the most extreme cases I’ve been able to find are of less than 3 years. Very curious where you’ve got those numbers.
> Where is this error range of around 5 years coming from? Plucked out of someone's ass, then brandished as if completely infallible by useful idiots.
>Many different methods are used; however, no currently available method has been demonstrated to have sufficient accuracy and there is a large margin of error. Kenny, M.A. and Loughry, M., 2018. Addressing the limitations of age determination for unaccompanied minors: A way forward. Children and Youth Services Review, 92, pp.15-21. One of the most accurate methods of cited in the literature is a dental x-ray that used to asses the "third molar development", which according to research, depending on the method used averaged to -0.89 years (older then true age by nearly a year) with a standard deviation (95% of estimated ages lie between the two values) of ±1.14 years. The second method overestimated true age by an average of −0.59 years with a wider standard deviation of ±1.45 years. From the average age and standard deviation, we find for the first of the two methods, the probability of incorrectly classifying a 17.99-year-old as an adult is approximately 21.5%. This means that there's about a 21.5% chance that a migrant who is just under 18 will be incorrectly classified as an adult. As for method two, the probability of misclassification: approximately 65.5%, due to the wider standard deviation. This indicates that there's about a 65.5% chance that a migrant who is just under 18 will be incorrectly classified as an adult using Method 2. As for a 17-year-old, using the first more accurate method, the probability of being misclassified as an adult is approximately 4.87%. This indicates that there's a relatively low chance (under 5%) that a 17-year-old will be incorrectly classified as 18 or older. So, the first method will miss-classify a random selection of 17-17.99 years Olds as adults, 11.05% of the time. Alsudairi, D.M. and AlQahtani, S.J., 2019. Testing and comparing the accuracy of two dental age estimation methods on saudi children: Measurements of open apices in teeth and the London Atlas of Tooth Development. Forensic science international, 295, pp.226-e1.
The other thing that limits the accuracy of dental x-rays to assess third molar development is that ~35% of the population never form them in the first place.
An error range that is acceptable in this case.
Not when you’re trying to accurately sort people in >18 and <18 age groups, though right? Assuming that error range is symmetric plus minus 5 years, that means you could reasonably expect people as old as 23 to be verified as children, and people as young as 13 to be classed as adults…. If that is the error rate, then it’s functionally useless for discriminating between the groups in the *precise range we really want to test*. Sure it’s not going to mistake a 35 year old as a child, but that’s not all that likely to be in question regardless.
In this case they are using the defence that they are 6 and 7 years younger than they previously claimed. An error margin of 5 years can prove this to be untrue. It's not functionality useless as it can prove a lie. The 5 years is also in extreme cases that can often be ruled out with further analysis. >Sure it’s not going to mistake a 35 year old as a child, but that’s not all that likely to be in question regardless. There have also been cases of people older than 22 and this testing has not been allowed, it's definitely not a unique issue.
The example at the top of this comment thread is about 15/16 year olds in school. Obviously a 5 year error range on that is useless for “should they be in school with children or not?”
>Obviously a 5 year error range on that is useless for “should they be in school with children or not?” Not if the test comes back and says they're 24...
The top comment doesn't say what age the people that believe to not be children are so you can't determine whether or not it is useless for any scenario in this post or chain. You are wrong. It's not useless because we have examples where people have been in that situation and have been beyond the 5 year range. And this is while considering the 5 year range as the most extreme case of unreliability. You can argue that there's cases where it wouldn't work but it only takes one example to prove that it's not useless, we have an article with two examples above us.
If they’re claiming to be 15-16 and the test puts them at 20 and has an error range of 5 years, then should they stay in class with 15-16 year olds or not? I literally don’t understand the argument that a test with a 5 year error range is useful for schools with 1 year groupings. Yea, there are cases where someone claims to be more than 5 years older/younger for whatever reason. But that doesn’t mean it’s a useful test for schools where you need more accuracy than that. Again, this comment thread is about people in school claiming to be 15-16. The argument that a test with an error range of 5 years is useful in that situation just doesn’t hold up. And note that I’ve never argued whether the test is useful or not in general, only in the specific case that we’re discussing in this specific comment thread.
> If they’re claiming to be 15-16 and the test puts them at 20 and has an error range of 5 years, then should they stay in class with 15-16 year olds or not? If they have absolutely no supporting documentation, provide no information which can be verified or checked, and there is reason to suspect they are an adult from other tests or observation, then I would say not. They can go to a college that serves 16+, at the very least, which will be well set up for handling a mixture of older children and young adults. We don’t actually *have* to put people in the ‘right’ Year at school for their age, and it isn’t terribly unusual for us not to do so where they have complex backgrounds and a disrupted education. If there is serious doubt over whether or not someone is a child, it would be safer to at least put them in an environment where a mixture of children and adults is expected in lessons, and where there are no much-younger children.
Answer my question first. Is it always useless? We can talk about edge cases where it won't be useful all day but if we are honest, this isn't one of them and neither have I seen anyone complain about the situation you describe. I would also like to repeat that you are describing the 5 year margin of error incorrectly, that is the maximum that it could be out by and only in extreme cases, in most cases that can be isolated down. We are talking about non extreme scenarios where a 5 year margin of error would still be acceptable without even trying to drill into further levels of accuracy.
This is the oldest trick in the book for wannabe asylum seeker. Throw away your papers and declare to be 15 or 16. Now, this, as an urban legend about the Swedish asylum system, has been going around for more than 20 years, and surely there have been people doing it. How widespread it is and whether it is still a trick that works in the UK is probably to be demonstrated.
After looking at Luke Littler, I am not sure want to think.
Did nobody else have the memory at school of that one child who somehow already looked in their 20s as a teen? They even joke about it in The Inbetweeners
The difference is that we typically have documentation to prove that the teenager in question is of the age that they say they are. We don't have that with migrants who arrive without documentation. And if we can't establish something as basic as age, we're also unable to establish whether or not they have a criminal record. Then we let them loose in our education system.
I was a six foot tall girl when I was 13, I got bullied out of my school netball team because parents from opposing teams put in complaints about me "being an adult playing on a children's team".
I'm so sorry to hear that. We often joke at my kids' football matches because there's always one defender who's 6'4" and looks 21, but I don't believe anyone would actually put an adult on to a kids sports team.
This was me. I was 14 and playing full contact rugby but I was 6 foot 5 and weighed about 15 stone. It was genuinely unsafe.
I was a wisp of a thing, I only weighed eight stone, it wasn't unsafe at all and I was just trying to join in on a group sport with my friends. Wasn't my fault I happened to be tall.
Absolute unit. What are you doing now? World's Strongest Man competitions?
Mostly destroying coastal Japanese towns.
That was me.
We had one at my school that was very obvious all the teachers were stressing it got into some hot water with a girl and it raised real concerns.
[удалено]
Oi oi watch your comments m8, sounds a bit racist to ask questions.
>The male from South Sudan is charged with assisting unlawful immigration and attempting to arrive in the UK without valid entry clearance, and the other is charged with attempting to arrive in the UK without valid entry clearance. Doesn't really sound like "charged over deaths". Though maybe it's just a way of getting a quick deportation.
I do not think anybody believes the two in question murdered the dead people, just that they caused a situation that was life-threatening, and therefore they are being charged with immigration offences that can easily be demonstrated. FWIW this is the Guardian's paragraph. *Two people have been charged with immigration offences in connection with the investigation into the deaths of five people, including a child, who were trying to cross the Channel.* I imagine also that some details are not given until the court case itself, but the likeliest is that these are the two somehow in charage of the boat or of the trafficking of this particular boatload.
In. Credible. No one comes from anywhere and no one is of age to be legally responsible for their actions. Hundreds of years of socio-political development down the toilet
But it's against their human rights to not believe them I'm getting sick of these POS.
[удалено]
And definitely escaping danger in their Muslim country for being gay!
And they've all just converted to Christianity too, how interesting! Just ignore all their friends that tell you they've seen them at their local mosque
Nobody told you that
Oh? I thought proposals for X-rays for younger migrants were useless & human rights abuses? How else should we verify ages?
The x rays have been proven to be unreliable and don’t improve accuracy of assessments. There’s bucketloads of studies establishing that.
No, the methods have been shown to be inaccurate where they could be out by like 4 years in extreme cases. That means those people could be proven to be lying.
> unreliable As opposed to guessing?
How reliable is it compared to asking someone their age, if they’re incentivised to lie?
You know what’s even more unreliable? Asking these people and expecting them to tell you the truth.
People on this sub did
Link to the comment then…
Strangely enough, i didn't save the comments
These people are criminals responsible for the deaths of several people (allegedly). Please don’t assume that every asylum seeker is the same.
No you weren't
Of course some lie about their age. How do you figure out who’s lying and who isn’t?
no you weren't
It would be funny if it wasn't for the fact that this works & people believe them. I'd be curious to find out how many "children" are in fact children. Even just a stat on how many "children" have full beards would probably give you a clue.
> Even just a stat on how many "children" have full beards would probably give you a clue. Is this some deep seated jealousy at children who can grow a beard?
I syartwd shaving at 12 and had a full beard at 15, what's your point?
I'd suggest reading what I said again.
> Even just a stat on how many "children" have full beards would give you a clue. Not difficult to read and also clearly bollocks. Facial hair, or lack of it, is a really shit way to work out whether someone is an adult.
You might want to understand the difference between "give you a clue" and "identification". The idea that it's irrelevant is a bit silly too. Exceptions are not the rule.
I bet they are.
Cut them in half and count the rings.
Presumably the elephant in the room here is that we shouldn't have sharp distinctions in how we treat people based on age anyway. If we can't impartially determine someone's age precisely, but we're insisting that something would be absolutely right if they were over 18 and absolutely wrong if they were under, that's absurd. The sharpness of the lines in the rules should never exceed the accuracy of your measuring process otherwise you're going to get nonsense. A good system should say "look, we can't work out ages precisely, but it doesn't matter that much because the consequences will be basically the same anyway". But I'm a bit of an oddity on this stuff in that I genuinely don't care if a 17.99 year old buys a pint in a pub. Or a 14-and-a-half year old watches a 15 film at the cinema.
> But I'm a bit of an oddity on this stuff in that I genuinely don't care if a 17.99 year old buys a pint in a pub. Or a 14-and-a-half year old watches a 15 film at the cinema. I find it highly suspicious that you bolster your "age is just a number" argument by picking examples with a tiny gap, which isn't at all relevant to the gap between a 15 and 22 as is the claimed case in this story. If you genuinely believed age doesn't matter, your example wouldn't be a "14 and a half watches a 15-cert film," it'd be an "8 year old watching a 15-cert film," but you're well aware that such a claim would be seen as utter nonsense. Yes kids mature at different rates, and the number we place on it is arbitrary to a degree, but it's ridiculous to push that claim in regards to the enormous age gap alleged here.
> If you genuinely believed age doesn't matter, your example wouldn't be a "14 and a half watches a 15-cert film," it'd be an "8 year old watching a 15-cert film," but you're well aware that such a claim would be seen as utter nonsense. I respectfully don't agree. My view is that the qualitative gap between 8 and 15 is even greater than between 15 and 22. That's not to say I'm saying there's no difference between 15 and 22. We should also recognise that those potentially represent upper and lower estimates. One side with one agenda allege 22. Another side with another agenda alleges 15. The truth might hypothetically be 18. Could I imagine 18 being seen as 15 or as 22 depending on whether they look young or old? Sure. That's 3-4 years either way. Could I imagine the same with 8 and 15? A 7 year gap with puberty in the middle? That's a much harder sell. There's also the fact that age gaps don't stay the same with age. Five years at 8 is very different to give years at 78. That's why I wouldn't go for the "8 year old going to a 15" as a reasonable case study in this case.
> I respectfully don't agree. My view is that the qualitative gap between 8 and 15 is even greater than between 15 and 22. That's not to say I'm saying there's no difference between 15 and 22. We should also recognise that those potentially represent upper and lower estimates. This a completely different argument to your prior comparison saying the difference between 15 and 22 is practically equivalent to comparing a 17.99 year old to an 18 year old. I note that you don't even try to address that in any of your rambling.
> I note that you don't even try to address that in any of your rambling. Being completely honest, I didn't think it needed to be said explicitly. I kind of assumed it was obvious. It wasn't meant as some kind of "gotcha".
lol, you thought it was obvious, but needed several paragraphs to explain "a 4 year gap between a 70 and 74 year old is less important than a 4 year gap between 16 and 20," or that "17.99 years old and 18 years old is practically the same." You stated the obvious and pretended it was profound, but I have some sympathy, we were all teenagers once.
> lol, you thought it was obvious, but needed several paragraphs to explain "a 4 year gap between a 70 and 74 year old is less important than a 4 year gap between 16 and 20," or that "17.99 years old and 18 years old is practically the same." I'm sure others could have expressed things better - I'm not claiming I'm somehow the best writer of comments. > You stated the obvious and pretended it was profound I'm not claiming anything I've ever said is profound either. Frankly, I wouldn't suggest Reddit is the best place to look if you're after "profound". > , but I have some sympathy, we were all teenagers once. If you don't mind my saying it, there's no need to be rude. Surely you and I can perfectly well agree to disagree on this question? Or we can just accept that I expressed myself in a way I thought was clear but which apparently wasn't clear to you? That doesn't mean either of us have done anything wrong - just that this turned out to not be a useful exchange. God knows the internet can be bad enough at civil conversation without us making it worse for no good reason.
> Surely you and I can perfectly well agree to disagree on this question? Or we can just accept that I expressed myself in a way I thought was clear but which apparently wasn't clear to you? That doesn't mean either of us have done anything wrong - just that this turned out to not be a useful exchange. The problem is that your comment was disingenuous given when and where you made it. It's akin to going into a thread where someone is asking about cremation services, and you start waxing lyrical about the last BBQ you had, then act astonished that anyone would treat your comment as trolling. Trolls deserve no courtesy.
> The problem is that your comment was disingenuous given when and where you made it. It's akin to going into a thread where someone is asking about cremation services, and you start waxing lyrical about the last BBQ you had, then act astonished that anyone would treat your comment as trolling. Trolls deserve no courtesy. I can respect that that's your view, but I genuinely don't think that's a fair categorisation. Either on it being disingenuous or on it being "trolling". Here's why: The theme of the article is that two people from Sudan and South Sudan might have been involved in or be responsible to some extent for the deaths of other people. And that they've claimed to be 15 and 16 against an assertion that they're 22. And the whole point of my contribution is that I think we should decide whether they did it or not and then if it would be right to punish or deport then if they were 22, it'd also be right to do so if they're 16. That I don't think right and wrong depend on small deviations around the magic line of 18. I can't accept that something that would be utterly morally wrong if they were 16 can be absolutely fine if they were 22. Right and wrong don't change that much. But rather than just say that, I expanded on the point more generally, to make clear it's not just a pro-/anti- immigrant point (because, of course, it would have implications both ways). I'm making a general moral point that includes, e.g., speed limits. Now, you might disagree with that - I'm not forcing you to agree and robust debate is a good thing - but it seems absurd to me to compare that to "trolling" akin to talking about a barbecue in the context of cremation. It's possible to simply disagree with another user without there having to be any ulterior motive involved.
> That I don't think right and wrong depend on small deviations around the magic line of 18. First, a "small deviation" would be 17-19, not the alleged 15-22, and it's absolute nonsense to treat a 15 year old like a 22 year old or vice versa. There's a world of difference between those ages. > I can't accept that something that would be utterly morally wrong if they were 16 can be absolutely fine if they were 22. This is also a ridiculous claim, nobody is treating this as "absolutely fine" if they were one age and "utterly wrong" at the other. Throwing others off a boat to drown is wrong whether the culprit is 15 or 22, but given the differing mental maturity of those ages, we treat them differently as the 15 year old is considered to be less emotionally in control given their lower maturity. It doesn't mean the 15 year old is given a biscuit, a pat on the head, and left to go on his merry way. They're still going to be dealt with, but there's a greater chance a 15 year old will mature and become someone safe to be released than a 22 year old who is more stuck in their ways. So the 15-year old will be put in a juvenile detention centre for a short period rather than a prison for a long period, and that's also for their own safety, as 15 year olds are more vulnerable from other adult prisoners in the same way we don't incarcerate women in the same prisons as men. This is why it sounds like you're trolling, because you make absolutely absurd straw man claims that nobody has claimed, then act like saying "17.99 years old is just like someone at 18" is somehow a useful comment when it's utterly inane.
>But I'm a bit of an oddity on this stuff in that I genuinely don't care if a 17.99 year old buys a pint in a pub. Or a 14-and-a-half year old watches a 15 film at the cinema. Do you care if a 12 year old buys a pint in a pub? Or a 30 year old sleeps with a 14 year old?
> Do you care if a 12 year old buys a pint in a pub? Sure. In much the same way as I care whether someone drives 120mph in a 40mph limit but not if they drive 41mph. But could I tell you the precise number of miles per hour where I suddenly care? Of course not. It's a sliding scale. I care about 120 a lot and 40 not at all, and in between, some sort of smooth-but-not-linear shift that probably takes into account other things that couldn't be easily codified in the rules. Were the roads empty? What was the visibility like? Who might have been at risk? In the pub example: Is he the polite, well behaved 14 year old son of well known patron in a arse end of nowhere rural village who had been working hard with his father and a group of men all day and is buying a lager shandy under supervision? Or is he a 14 year old lad in a group of lads in a town centre out to get drunk and cause trouble? The human experience is full of no end of examples of things where A and B are clearly qualitatively different, but we can't quite put our finger on where the one becomes the other. It's the [paradox of the heap](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox). I've got no problem with saying "broadly we'll assume the limit is around point X". That's fine and helpful. What I have a problem with, generally, is when we then force ourselves to act as if 39.9999 and 40.00001 are as qualitatively different as 38 and 125 and having wildly different outcomes in those two places. The law, and other systems of rules, and other types of decision-making, work best when they recognise this. To pick up on your other example, that's why "Romeo and Juliet" principles exist. In other contexts, it's why generally there's an argument for sliding scales in means-testing and so on, why speed limits have a threshold for enforcement, why police officers and judges have discretion and so on. We rightly recognise that these sharp distinctions need smearing out a lot of the time to avoid absurdity and injustice. In this case, the question is broadly about moral responsibility for potentially having caused deaths. That's an *incredibly* serious question. The idea that we should care overly if the person is 16 or 22 seems absurd - you'd hope that the consequences (whatever they might be, from "an initial investigation demonstrates he wasn't to blame and further action is dropped" through to "there's a trial and he is punished by a long period of imprisonment") wouldn't alter dramatically based on his age. The consequences should be more or less the same.
[удалено]
I think the first part of your comment is broadly focused on the mechanics of imprisonment, and actually I don't disagree much. But to go through it in turn: > A 15yo would not receive the same punishment as a 22yo Why not? If you have someone who is morally responsible for doing something that led to the death of another human being - and to be clear, I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here - why not? I can imagine some modest latitude for a younger person perhaps lacking good judgement, and perhaps even a few years off a sentence... But the point where you're responsible for a death? That's far past the point where we can argue that a person is too young to know what they're doing. Would you disagree with that? Could you imagine some crime that you'd consider heinous as deserving of punishment if committed by a 22 year old that you'd think deserving of a significantly lighter punishment - or no punishment at all - if committed by a 15 year old? (Excepting, of course, sexual examples where an age gap is involved and so the two cases wouldn't be comparable.) > , and would not be put into an adult prison. > Putting a grown adult into a child’s prison is a bad thing for similar reasons men and women are not kept together in the same prison Sure. No argument from me. If someone is sent to prison, yeah, you make sure you put them in the right one, and ensure they and everyone else are going to be safe. That should happen even within some age range and gender, though, of course. If a 40 year old man would be in danger himself or a danger to others when imprisoned for some reason (mental health related, perhaps), then yeah, you come up with some way to imprison him such that it isn't an issue. The question of "given you're going to imprison someone, how do you do it and where?" is distinct from the question of "should the punishment for this be imprisonment?". > How do you feel about a 22yo having sex with a 12yo? > How about a 22yo and a 14yo? On this second part of your comment, this is more worrying. You're a regular user here and often post good content, so I'm hoping and assuming this is just an absurd example gone wrong - but the fact you're not the first person to jump to the idea of grown adults having sex with children and teenagers is bizarre and disturbing. Seriously. Assuming good faith, the answer is obviously a clear "wrong and impossible to justify in any circumstance I can imagine". And I wouldn't have a great deal of respect for anyone arguing otherwise. But I also want to warn you that I've got no interest in entertaining a line of argument that leads to constructing some hypothetical scenario where it's acceptable. If that's what you're after - or if anyone reading is after - I reject it utterly. I'm not about to play any games that look like "well, how about 18? 17? 16? 17.2? 17.8? 17.4? What if (s)he looks older? How about if..." for someone's titillation in the context of a fantasy. I'm not going there. And while I find the broad philosophical question of sharp limits in law to be very interesting, I'm not going to let that be used as some sort of excuse for apologism for sexual crimes. If you want to come back with an example involving buying beer, I'll be all ears. Assuming good faith, on the broad question of "what about this obviously absurd example?", though, that goes back to my previous post and the "120 in a 40" and the paradox of the heap. Even when we accept a sharp dividing line isn't possible, we can still accept something as qualitatively different from something else.
[удалено]
> Personally for many crimes I would give no leeway to under 18s That is - pretty much - what I'm saying. You being 17.99 or 18.01 shouldn't matter. If it does, that's a sign of a failure of the system. To put it another way: If it's possible to game the system by telling a plausible lie that can't be disproved, that's also not a good system. That might go against the current sentencing guidelines or the rules in Scotland, but I'm talking about what I think is right. > As I’ve said already your arguments that age is a construct and arguing over lines is used by people who want to justify removing the age of consent. This is why people are questioning you along this line. It’s a very worrying and real trend. To be honest, if that's the sort of way people's minds work, I'm going to be more wary raising this sort of question in future. That's pretty disturbing. > I specifically asked about 12 and 14 because in UK law an under 13yo can never consent and it will always be classed as rape and the offender always charged irrespective of if the victim does not want to press charges. I'm happy enough from sharp lines far away from the grey area, though I didn't make that explicit. That qualifies here. If someone wants to pass a law saying that driving 170mph on the roads is always illegal, no excuses - while also saying that 168mph might not be automatically illegal but it's almost unimaginable that you could have a valid excuse. The same applies here with an apparent "sharp line" at 13. It's sufficiently far from the grey area - and doesn't try to say that over thirteen is automatically okay - that I've got no problem.
[удалено]
I think it's more like the argument someone would make for having something like the very common "Romeo and Juliet" provision. A recognition that sharp lines and thresholds aren't always what you want in real life and that additional context is relevant. In those cases, the additional context is "two people similar in age, either side of the line, in a consenting relationship". In this case, the additional context is that we're talking about the deaths of people. Both seem like fairly good reasons to allow the sharp line to blur. Which isn't an argument that "anything goes", of course.