For instance: age of sexual consent, age for legally drinking alcohol, age for driving, age for voting, age for participating in pornography
Depending on the place, each of those requires a different minimum age. Why is that? Are some activities “more adult” than others? Using USA as an example: legal drinking age is 21, legal driving age is 16, age of consent varies between 16-18.
Not asking about different countries/states having different ages, but any single place having different ages for different adult activities
Of course the first example would be that. No, you can’t screw kids. Internalize that as fact.
That is a fact. But they can screw each other, if they’re old enough. But they’r still classified as kids. “Adolescent kid” is a subjective term, and I would even suggest raising the age higher than 16: until they’re legally adults.
I think the question is coming from a “why is it different in different countries” point of view.
I’m not going to Google it and put myself on a watch list, but I think I recall hearing some back-asswards country where the age of “consent” was 14, or some even lower. Culturally that doesn’t make any sense to me - but then i agree with you that kids shouldn’t be screwer nor screwee.
The other ages are interesting too - in the UK we wait for our teens to grow up a bit before putting them behind the wheel of a car. The driving age is 18 - and forget even getting affordable insurance until you’re 25 anyway.
To be fair, most first world countries seem to have settled on 18 for all of this. I think the wrong assumption is that the age limits are related to each-other, while they’ve been brought into law at different points in history and there hasn’t been a need to change them. There are also the environmental factors, such as the driving age in the USA probably being lower as a consequence of a car-centric culture.
It’s all arbitrary and most of it is based on nothing but cultural assumptions. Almost everything people think they know about teenagers, even the existence of “teenagers” as a group, can be traced to culture or marketing far more concretely than anything inherent or biological.
As others have said, there are no solid principles backing practically any of this. It’s all junk science and looking for confirmation of assumptions.
The idea is that by those ages most people should be capable of doing those tasks responsibly. Not everyone is responsible enough to drive at 16, but most are.
I’m guessing it’s because different parts of us mature at different rates. Brain development continues into the early twenties, so mind-altering substances are generally regulated with that in mind. Physical maturity ends in the late teens, so things like military service eligibility start there. Other activities are based on more abstract measures like responsibility, emotional stability, etc.