Official Wants Law to Limit Youth Sex
 

(submitted by gekkogecko)

Reuters to My
Yahoo!

TOKYO (Reuters) - Parents in Tokyo would be legally
responsible for keeping school-aged children from
having sex if the city's top law and order official
gets his way.

The feasibility of such a step, proposed by Tokyo Vice
Governor Yutaka Takehana, will be one of the topics
discussed when a panel of experts meets on Wednesday
to try to figure out how to deal with Japan's
increasingly sexually active youth.

Takehana, the city's first vice governor in charge of
law and order, was quoted by Kyodo news agency as
saying that such a rule "would convey the
determination of adult society" to prevent youth sex,
even if no penalties were imposed.

A Tokyo government official acknowledged that
enforcing such a law would be difficult. "If this sort
of topic were to emerge at the meeting, we could not
ignore it," he said.

"Certainly enforcement would be difficult," he added.
"I imagine that the idea of a law will be vetoed."

The concerns behind the proposal are real, however.

The legal age of consent in Tokyo is 18.

Some 20 to 30 percent of Japanese 16-year-olds have
had sex and nearly a quarter of these have four or
more partners, according to Masako Kihara, an AIDS
(news - web sites) expert and associate professor at
Kyoto University.

As a result, both AIDS and other sexually transmitted
diseases -- such as chlamydia, which can cause
infertility -- are on the rise among young people.

Of new HIV (news - web sites) cases in 2003, at least
33 percent were in people under 29.