Teen hanky-panky shall cease forthwith!

To lighten the mood before departing to meet his destiny at the ANC conference in Polokwane, South African president Thabo Mbeki signed an absurd law you’d expect to find in a Monty Python farce.

The new Sexual Offences Act says that teenagers under the age of 16 caught kissing, petting, touching or even hugging each other can be criminally charged. It bans any sexual behaviour, from touching on down, among teenagers, even if it is consensual. The law doesn’t specify whether being in possession of teenage hormones will constitute a crime, or whether you’ll have to prove they were for personal use only. Either way, if you’re not 16 and you’re horny, be careful you don’t earn yourself a spanking.

Quoted in an IOL news article, Samantha Waterhouse, advocacy manager of Resources Aimed at the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, calls the law “ridiculous” and “irrational”. Joan van Niekerk, national co-ordinator of Childline, said the act failed children and adolescents in court, passed without public hearings, and differed from the bill recommended by the South African Law Reform Commission.

It appears to be a travesty born out of mediaeval morality or some perverse paternalistic fetish. While finding a picture with which to illustrate this post, it dawned on me that our parliamentarians may well be gravely misinformed about what teen kissing involves. If so, why didn’t anyone explain? Why didn’t Parliament just switch on Google’s SafeSearch, before turning the vast majority of our youth into criminals?

Teens are guaranteed not only to want to break such idiotic laws en masse, but they will also get away with it. I mean really, who’s going to call the police when they see two 14-year-olds necking? The only thing the government achieves with this idiocy is to engender a thorough and justifiable disrespect for the law and the authorities that enforce it. Not only will our teens be nominal criminals by virtue of their innocent and natural interest in the opposite sex, but by the time they are finally permitted to legally hold hands, they’ll be hardened criminals who have learnt that the law is an ass.

Not even the most priggish religious conservatives of the days of verkrampte Verwoerd were half as repressive as this. Nevermind the intrusion upon the privacy and dignity of children, which surely is the province of parents and teachers. Nevermind the impact of grown men with guns hauling kids before court on charges of aggravated hanky-panky. By declaring teen kissing illegal, our leaders prove they are more delusional about the power of government than anyone could have guessed. It’s insane.

Update: I haven’t found a copy of the Act, as signed, in the usual place. If someone can supply a link, I’d be grateful. Here’s a PDF link to the Bill (not the Act) that was published in the Government Gazette (which still, charmingly, finds its way online as scanned images of the paper original). Before anyone jumps to the Bill’s defence by pointing out that it contains a number of important and necessary provisions, I’d agree, but the apparent lack of thought that went into the teen sex issue doesn’t fill me with confidence that the remainder is what legal scholars would call, with characteristic precision, “good law”.