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     gender

This page is under development.

Salient works include Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002 (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2005) edited by Nicholas Bamforth.

Amnesty International reports include Crimes of Hate, Conspiracy of Silence: Torture and Ill-treatment Based on Sexual Identity (2001). Within Australia see in particular the 2007 HREOC Same-Sex: Same Entitlements report. It notes that 58 federal laws denied same-sex couples and their children basic financial and work-related entitlements available to opposite-sex couples and their children. Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes commented that

This discrimination is completely unfair. There are 58 federal laws breaching the most fundamental of human rights principles - non-discrimination, equality before the law and the best interests of the child.

Until late 2008, when the Rudd government belatedly moved to address that discrimination, Australian same-sex couples did not receive the same entitlements in employment, workers' compensation, veterans’ entitlements, health care subsidies, family law, superannuation, aged care and immigration law as their straight peers. They are, of course, still disadvantages in terms of recognition of marriage.

     consent

In common use the 'age of consent' is the age - typically identified by statute - at which a person can legally consent to sexual activity. That age varies from nation to nation, with law embodying gender stereotypes and perceptions of homosexuality, disagreement about individual autonomy and privacy, values regarding the familiy and family planning, and regulation of sexuality as a mechanism for maintaining social hierarchies.

Salient works include Matthew Waites' The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality, and Citizenship (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005), Helmut Graupner's Sexualität, Jugendschutz & Menschenrechte: uber das Recht von Kindern und Jugendlichen auf Sexuelle Selbstbestimmung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang 1997), his 2000 'Sexual Consent: The Criminal Law in Europe and Overseas' in 29 Archives of Sexual Behavior 5 (415-461), and Carolyn Cocca's Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States (Albany: State Uni of New York Press 2004).

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