I was a 15 year old, hung out with 15 year olds, some were having sex with peers, some weren't, pretty much all guys wanted to bang hot older girls and quite a few of the girls had much older boyfriends. Derive from that what you will.
Awesome! Hope you can put those superhuman computing powers to curing cancer and solving the climate crisis. Even fusion would already be amazing really. Thanks in advance 😘
But you've mentioned the grooming angle only now. Before you exclusively talked about risk evaluation. Hope you yourself don't get a sports injury from moving those goalposts so vigorously.
The teacher-student part is cause for concern because of a likely power imbalance. But the French state (and with a lot of support throughout the greater French society) deems 15 to be mature enough. Someone has suggested a borderline theocratic (and certainly socially much more conservative and traditionalist) Erdogan's Turkey to be a viable alternative. Or the US that has a history of very twisted, repressed, commercialised in the extreme and puritanically derived views on human sexuality and intimacy. Which is ridiculous.
The part of the brain that evaluates risk is practically non existent in teenagers
How are they "obviously completely" different? Dying or getting paralysed from a sports injury is generally much more likely than from having sex. And I don't know if you maybe came into this world fully formed as a middle aged person but yes, I have been a teen and, if you can imagine, even (gasp!) a pre-teen. In my experience the level of maturity and sexuality/libido has varied greatly among my peers (I would even claim that, for biographical reasons, the statistical significance of my personal experience is in all likelihood quite a bit greater than yours).
So teenagers also shouldn't do extreme sports like surfing, bmx, snowboarding, freerunning, etc. either? What about the modern DPRK, Cuba and PRC? What about the DDR which generally according to a well known study had higher sexual happiness than West Germany?
Yeah, I think it's awfully inconsistent that teens can get hauled off into the prison-industrial complex because of having sex with each other but getting minors hooked on drugs and gambling is totally ok.
This is what I'm getting at here: socially binding policy needs to be science and evidence based. If the current research shows that it is impossible to consent before the full development of the brain (25 seems like a too arbitrary number), or that it is detrimental to healthy psychological development then we should use that as a basis for further decision making. Still waiting for people to start linking studies instead of raging though... On the other hand, we do know from studies that humans develop sexual urges and sexual curiosity at a very young age, in many cases well before puberty. Does that mean it needs to be a free for all without any restrictions? Obviously no. But as you said: the primary reason for restrictions is predatory behaviour and coercion, not just a gut feeling (which most of the time is not even an inherent gut feeling but conditioned by received social tradition) of things being "icky".
On which of the countries above should I base them?