Friday 28 September 2012

They Tried to Tell Us...

Any post about the case of fifteen-year-old Megan Stammers and her elopement with a thirty-year-old teacher from her school would, of necessity, be long and complex. So let’s leave aside the relatively insignificant matter of the age difference, the rather more significant matter of the teacher-pupil relationship, and the fact that their escapade was interrupting her education. Let’s just keep it to the simple question of age in isolation.

Even if Ms Stammers’s beau hadn’t also been her teacher, there would still have been an outcry:

‘She’s only fifteen,’ people would have screeched. ‘She isn’t old enough to know her own mind in matters of romance. She isn’t mature enough to fall in love. She can’t know the meaning of the word.’

Well, frankly, neither do I, not even after a lifetime of practice. And neither does anybody else. It’s just one of those abstract terms which is used to describe an emotional condition too deep and mysterious to define in any way that makes it universally applicable. So let me say this.

I remember being fifteen quite clearly, and I can assure you that I knew my own mind very well. By that time I’d had two romantic relationships, one when I was thirteen and another when I was fourteen. The girls involved were sixteen and thirteen respectively. The way I felt about the second in particular was no different than the way I felt about all the other women I became involved with over the ensuing decades. Fifteen-year-olds are perfectly capable of falling in love – with all the concomitant slings and arrows – whatever it means.

I don’t know Megan Stammers, and so I can’t know her personality, her mindset, or her level of maturity. That means I can’t speak up for her as an individual, even though I can probably imagine what she’s going through and feel considerable sympathy. But it bugs me that people make judgements based on culturally prescribed notions of what people are and are not capable of at certain ages, especially when age limits are usually at best arbitrary and sometimes determined purely to suit cultural exigencies. Let’s not forget that when I started school it was considered normal to start work at age fifteen. When my dad was at school, it was fourteen. And before the advent of universal education, it was common practice for young people to marry and start a family at age thirteen.

And a note of caution: I do hope that people treat Megan Stammers with sympathy and understanding, because it strikes me that too heavy-handed an approach could do more long term harm than her romantic adventure would ever have done.

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