Maturity (psychological) - Legal and Political Issues

Legal and Political Issues

The definition and determination of maturity has been applied to the issue of criminal responsibility of juvenile offenders and to a number of legal ages. The age of majority, the most broadly applied legal threshold of adulthood, is typically characterized by recognition of control over oneself and one’s actions and decisions. The most common age threshold is 18 years of age, with thresholds ranging from 14 to 21 across nations and between provinces. Although age of majority is referred to as a jurisdiction’s legal age, the legal ages of various other issues of legal maturity like sexual consent or drinking and smoking ages are often different from the age of majority. Aside from age-based thresholds of maturity, restrictions based in a perceived intellectual immaturity also extend to those with a variety of mental impairments (generally defined as anyone with a mental disability that requires guardianship), with laws in place in most regions limiting the voting rights of the mentally disabled and oftentimes requiring the judgment of a court to declare fitness. Similar to those restrictions placed on children, persons with mental disabilities also have freedoms restricted and have their rights assigned to parental guardians.

One reason cited for why children and the mentally disabled are not permitted to vote in elections is that they are too intellectually immature to understand voting issues. This view is echoed in concerns about the adult voting population, with observers citing concern for a decrease in ‘civic virtue’ and ‘social capital,’ reflecting a generalized panic over the political intelligence of the voting population. Although critics have cited ‘youth culture’ as contributing to the malaise of modern mass media’s shallow treatment of political issues, interviews with youth themselves about their political views have revealed a widespread sense of frustration in their political powerlessness as well as a strongly cynical view of the actions of politician. Several researchers have attempted to explain this sense of cynicism as a way of rationalizing the sense of alienation and legal exclusion of youth in political decision-making.

Another reason cited against child voting rights is that children would be unduly biased by media and other societal pressures. On the whole, this view is unsubstantiated, with interviews with youth revealing that they often have a great deal of knowledge about news programming, media bias, the importance of evidence, evaluation of arguments on the merits of their evidence, as well as a preparedness for forming arguments of one’s own using available evidence. In cognitive research, some studies conducted in the 1970s offered a skeptical view of adolescent understanding of democratic principles like freedom of speech. However, this research is now recognized to have used challenging and contradictory vignettes that placed a high demand on still-developing verbal and metacognitive skills which are not recognized as requisite to an understanding of individual political rights. More recent research has unveiled that even elementary school age children have a concept of freedom of speech and that by ages 8-9 this concept expands beyond a concern for personal autonomy and onto awareness for its social implications and the importance of the right to a political voice.

Maturity has also been taken into account when determining the fairness of the death penalty in cases involving mentally retarded or underage perpetrators. In Atkins v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court decision banning the execution of mentally retarded persons, was decided on the grounds that “diminished capacities to understand and process mistakes and learn from experience, to engage in logical reasoning, to control impulses, and to understand the reactions of others” was cited as the evidence supporting a reduced view of criminal culpability