complainant, who is the victim, and the interests of justice or of society. Where the sexual intercourse is non-consensual, that defence is obviously inapplicable as section 65 (rape) becomes the charge and not section 70. What the statutory defence entails is essentially an exercise in proportionality. On the one hand is the protection being afforded to the young person, and on the other is a consideration of the reasonable belief inducing the accused to act in a particular way believing not to be in violation of the law. In England the House of Lords in R v K [2001] 3 All ER 897 considered the applicability of strict liability to the provisions of section 14 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 (now replaced by section 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003) – the defilement laws. The defendant, aged 26 at the time of the incident, was charged under section 14 with the indecent assault of a girl aged 16. The complaint made by the schoolgirl was that she was indecently assaulted by K touching her private parts without her consent. K's case was that the girl told him that she was 16 and he had no reason to disbelieve her. She consented to all the sexual activity which occurred between them. The House of Lords, while quashing the conviction, concluded that where a defendant was charged with an indecent assault on a girl under the age of 16 contrary to section 14(1) of the 1956 Act, but the girl had in fact (although not in law) consented to the alleged assault, the prosecution was required to prove that the defendant had not honestly believed at the time of the incident that the girl was aged 16 or over. Such a conclusion was consistent with the constitutional principle that guilty knowledge was an essential ingredient of a statutory offence unless it was shown to be excluded by express words or necessary implication. If, however, it was shown that an underage victim had not in fact consented, and that the defendant had not genuinely believed that she had consented, any belief held by the defendant concerning her age is rendered irrelevant, since the victim's age is only relevant to her capacity to consent. In that case, Lord Bingham proceeded as follows: “The general rule that a crime involves a guilty mind as well as a forbidden act is, as the Latin version of the rule makes clear and as Lord Reid emphasised, of very long standing. Brett J in his dissenting judgment in R v Prince (1875) LR 2 CCR 154 referred to it at pp 159-169, concluding, at p169: ‘Upon all the cases I think it is proved that there can be no conviction for crime in England in the absence of a criminal mind or mens rea.’ In R v Tolson (1889) 23 QBD 168 Stephen J, an authority on the criminal law without rival in his time, observed, at p 187: ‘The mental element of most crimes is marked by one of the words 'maliciously', 'fraudulently', 'negligently', or 'knowingly', but it is the general - I might, I think, say, the invariable - practice of the legislature to leave unexpressed some of the mental elements of crime. In all cases whatever, competent age, sanity, and some degree of freedom from some kinds of coercion are assumed to be essential to criminality, but 28