My take

It was disturbing for me to read that the Mizoram Law Commission was planning to reduce the age of consent from 16 to 14 years.      www.news.outookindia.com/item.aspx?687062

I don't think children at 14 have the required maturity to decide to have sex. Most girls would be undergoing sexual development, with development of breasts, menstruation etc at that age, and full development is said to be at 16 to 18 years. And boys are known to be slightly slower than girls! So even with our changing lifestyle and maybe a slight precocity seen in today's children, 14 is way too young, for males or females, to start having sex.

The argument for the cause is that men who have consensual sex with underaged girls are having to face charges of rape. In my book, serves them right! I don't think any self-respecting, God-fearing, NORMAL man would go around having sex with a 14 or 15 year old even if she happens to be a Lolita. An adult has to show restraint, even the face of great temptation. I don't think it saves him from being labelled as  anything more than a pedophile. And if there is sex between two underaged children, I don't think that makes it any more right. We as parents and adults have to simply try to teach children about the right time to have sex, and taking the extreme shortcut of reducing the age of consent is a terrible injustice done to all  future generations. Because a law once passed, will be difficult to change, if not impossible.

So what will be the possible consequences if this new age of consent comes to pass?

• Much younger children are going to start having early sex. Even with the present age of consent being 16, there are already many underaged children indulging in sex. When it actually becomes legal, we can expect 12 and 13 year olds to start experimenting with sex.
• More men are going to beguile and persuade innocent children to have sex, or rape them, and then say it was consensual in defense. 
• Parents will have to be even more careful and maybe even neurotic, about what their child is upto. I for one will not want to my children to have pre-marital sex, forget about sex at 16. And since even the most careful parents can never completely protect their offsprings, we would be living in constant fear in a world which is growing too fast, too complex for us.
• Studies say early sexual encounters lead to delinquency, poor mental health and adversely affect a child's entire future life. I don't think there is a study that says the reverse. 

So why encourage and legalise something which we already know to be harmful? Shouldn't we instead make sure the present law is carried out more firmly and stringently? The reason there are so many  orphaned children and  divorces in our state is that too many kids have sex without proper education, get pregnant, get an easy marriage and get an equally easy divorce.