Of course it's wrong - but some of the comments in here show that there are huge cultural differences in what we *mean* by paedophilia. Tadpole said "Surely a 16 year old would be less damaged than a 4 year old, but that certainly does not make it right" - but a 16 year old having sex is perfectly legal in most European countries (certainly in the UK); indeed, 16 year olds can get married in the UK (with parental consent).

In Spain, under General Franco, it was legal to marry off your daughter at 12 - and that applied up to the 1970s.

The problem with defining paedophilia by age alone is that it can end up with ludicrous cases. If two 15 year olds have sex with each other, are they paedophiles? I can see a big difference between a 15 year old girl having an 18 year old boyfriend, and a 15 year old girl having a 48 year old boyfriend - both in terms of social acceptance and in terms of the power relationship between them. I think it's the Netherlands that have a rule that if sex occurs between two people and one of them is under age (i.e. under 16), then no criminal act has taken place if the age difference between them is less than five years. That seems to make more sense to me.

The other issue is that medically, paedophilia is surely people who are attracted to pre-pubescent children? A heterosexual man is likely to be attracted to a physically fertile and attractive woman; are we saying if he finds a young woman physically attractive the day before her eighteenth birthday then he's a paedophile, but the day after he won't be? In nature's terms, once mammals start producing sex hormones, they have the possibility of being sexually active, and are therefore designed to be sexually attractive - and humans are mammals. Ethically, it would be wrong to act on those impulses, because relationships are about far more than simple procreation, and it's perfectly possible for 15 year olds, 18 year olds and even 25 year olds to be emotionally damaged by being cajoled into sexual relationships.