Dr. Sharon Lambert:

For male and female, but men, for socialisation and biological reasons, are at increased risk for risk-taking behaviour. If one looks at things like suicide, road traffic accidents or accidents by any cause, one will see that there is a graph, and at age 15 starts to increase, it peaks in the early 20s and then it starts to decrease. In law, 18 years of age is an adult but that does not mean anything in psychology terms and is just this blunt instrument. There are some young people who are incredibly mature and are not risk-takers and there are others who are. When we are talking about a 21-year-old, for example, they are not neurologically equal to a 40-year-old. When we apply laws for over-18s to a 21-year-old, we are asking an apple to be a pear because we are asking them to adjust to adult services when they cannot. We know that across a whole range of services.

For example, when young people transition from health services into adult services, many of them drop off and go missing because they cannot make that leap between services for children and adult services. The first time anybody ever looked at this was within the United States during the HIV epidemic because they were concerned about the number of young people who were under the age of 18 who were HIV positive and at the time there was no treatment. They were very concerned about the disease being transmitted. They looked and discovered that there was a whole group of people who, when they turned 18, just disappeared from the services in diabetes, in mental health care, etc. What is happening is that the brain is not adjusted yet. One does not wake up one morning on one's 18th birthday and start planning one's pension. That is something that comes with maturity and maturity is something that happens over time.