Age, consent and legal boundaries: A cross-national analysis of close-in-age provisions in canada and india
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper compares state-driven protective approaches and adolescent autonomy in regulating sexuality, focusing on close-in-age provisions in canada and india. It analyzes how each jurisdiction conceptualises consent, balances adolescent agency with child-protection goals, and addresses misuse of statutory-rape laws. Canada’s criminal framework adopts a pragmatic model, using “wherein” And close-in-age exceptions that recognise adolescents’ evolving capacities while preventing exploitation. In contrast, indian law under the ipc, pocso, and later the bhartiya nyaya sanhita maintains a rigid regime that criminalises all sexual activity under eighteen, leading to disproportionate consequences, including misuse by families, policing of inter-caste and inter-religious relationships, judicial backlog, and stigma. Drawing on statutory analysis, case law, feminist theory, and international human rights norms (udhr, iccpr, cedaw, uncrc), the paper argues that canada’s proportional approach better aligns with the uncrc’s “evolving capacities” Doctrine and recommends reforms to introduce close-in-age exceptions and greater judicial discretion in india.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".