The case against child voters

Votes at 16 is the most cynical of politics

If you’re under the age of 18 in Britain, you can’t buy alcohol or cigarettes, go to war, do jury service, or get either plastic surgery or a tattoo. The Government is also very keen that you don’t get your hands on any sharp objects, lest you hurt yourself or someone else, and already on some websites you can’t buy a cutlery set until you’re that age. This is a level of mollycoddling reminiscent of Billy Connolly’s sketch about his mother warning him to be careful playing with a balloon, as it ‘might take your eye out’.

The trend in recent decades has been for people to grow up later; Jonathan Haidt even argues that one of the reasons for recent student unrest in the US is that 18-year-olds are notably less mature than with previous cohorts, and suggests starting higher education a year later to reflect this.

Certainly the age at which people partake in traditional teen rites of passage, whether it’s the loss of virginity or first alcoholic drink, goes up each decade. When I was 16, I could buy cigarettes, and the way we talk about the danger of young people being hooked on smoking clearly suggests that our idea of when adulthood begins is changing. You could also still marry at 16 - with parental approval - until 2023, which was changed because, again, there is the consensus that young people are unable to make such big decisions.

Yet despite this, Labour have announced that children of 16 and 17 will soon be able to vote. Britain is by no means unique in this: sixteen-year-olds are already able to do so in Austria, and in Germany the voting age for European elections was lowered last year. Several other countries have instituted similar changes. And it is not entirely out of the blue; as far back as 2013, Ed Miliband proposed giving 16-year-olds the vote because, as he put it, it will make them ‘part of our democracy’.

This seems odd when one considers how much adolescence is being extended and adulthood delayed, and written into law. Since 2022, Scotland has had the bizarre situation whereby criminals who were 24 or under when they committed an offence have rehabilitation as their ‘primary consideration’ in sentencing. This reflects ‘compelling scientific evidence on the development of cognitive maturity’ which suggest ‘that a young person will generally have a lower level of maturity, and a greater capacity for change and rehabilitation, than an older person.’

The young are indeed immature, but this has led to some very egregious sentencing in which men have been given short prison spells for rape or even community service. It is true that humans do not reach mental maturity until their mid-20s, and new guidance for psychologists states that adolescence ‘now effectively runs up until the age of 25’. Until then, our prefrontal cortex has not developed sufficiently. This is partly why violent crime is a young man’s game, with murder peaking around 18-20, and violence more generally even earlier.

Yet that guideline is contradictory. As psychologist Stuart Ritchie pointed out at the time, ‘in Scotland in particular, it’s been decided that you can, for example, vote at 16 and apply to join the police at 17-and-a-half.’ You’re mature enough to investigate a crime, but not mature enough to understand its gravity for another seven years.

The system also allows criminal gangs to thrive, in part because children are easily exploited by older criminals who see these naive creatures as vessels to achieve their own aims. The same might be true of child voters.

In almost no area of life do we treat 16-year-olds as adults, the exceptions being the age of consent (which would be impossible to police, even if we wished to raise it), and the fact that one can still join the army at 16. Even here, volunteers cannot see active service until 18, and there are growing calls to raise this age limit in Scotland, seen as a relic of the past. (Lord Nelson, it should be pointed out, commanded his own ship four years before the Scottish legal system would consider him to be ‘mature’).