Is a fumble behind the bike sheds now deviant?

OPINION: When a five-year-old and two six-year-old boys are being seen by police over sexual assault claims, I do wonder - and not necessarily about the children.

Depressing statistics came out this week about the illegal activities of children under the age of nine, but I can't help questioning what children of this age are truly capable of, and what we should call it.

Attitudes towards kids and sex have changed in so many contradictory ways in the past few decades that it can be difficult to say what's happening, whether it's a change in attitude or behaviour, and whether we should worry.

It's become OK, for example, for kids of any age to have access to contraception and information about sex, and the legal age of consent has become theoretical if we're to believe what kids say.

That may be all to the good, for all I know.

In some secondary schools, kids are encouraged to identify as gay, possibly before they're even sexually active, and drugs have become as freely available from primary school age onward as licorice straps.

Many people think nothing of watching pornography and leaving the DVDs around where their kids can get their hands on them.

No, I don't have statistics for that, but I have heaps of anecdotal evidence, and it probably doesn't worry a lot of people.

What balances these relaxed attitudes about what once made us uptight, and apparently with no sense of contradiction, is anxiety about sexual abuse.

What kids once had to just deal with as part of growing up, so long as it involved voluntary play with children of similar age, can now be seen as sinister.

Police can't tell us what was involved in complaints about these small boys, for privacy reasons, but it leaves open a lot of questions, such as how many children are being punished for their curiosity by panic-stricken parents, and how you judge sexual exploration.

I hope that, when we talk about children under the age of nine in the same sentence as sexual complaints, we don't label them forever as deviants.

Jokes about what happens behind the school bicycle sheds are as old as bicycle sheds, after all, and if you're to turn a searchlight on the past with a quest for horror stories in mind, you're bound to find what you're looking for, though no harm was necessarily done - or is it not now OK to say that?

In all, 716 children under nine were "apprehended" by police in 2008-09, the latest statistics available. Most were involved in arson, wilful damage and shoplifting. That's worrying enough. I suggest we turn the searchlight of moral panic onto older people instead, who should be setting a proper example.

After all, there were 17 criminals aged 85 and older recorded in the same statistical year, the eldest of them a 93-year-old who got a written police warning for using offensive language on private property.

We're not told what she said, and to whom, but by the time you reach that age I think you're entitled to a bit of indulgence.

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There's got to be bonuses amid the many humiliations of age, though I draw the line at the physical assaults that several people, well into their 80s, inflicted on hapless victims who were probably just trying to deliver Meals On Wheels.

My favourite elderly offender is Prince Philip, who was at it again last week, asking a 24-year-old woman sea cadet what she did for a living. When she replied that she worked in a club, he asked, "What, a strip club?"

"I think he was just putting people at their ease," she explained to reporters, who eagerly recorded his lame conversational gambit.

Being a well-mannered person, and a mere commoner, she didn't take offence; she'd know that aristocrats are entitled by birth to say what they like to the peasantry anyway.

But aren't we losing our grip when an exchange like this becomes world news? Prince Philip is 88 years old. We should be marvelling that he's still tottering around on his pins doing boring royal duties at his age, and isn't yet wheeled about in a bathchair, drooling and pinching pretty nurses' bottoms.

It seems to be the fate of men, after all, to go full circle in their second childhood, and a pinched backside is a truly painful experience.

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