Claire became a member of the Sea Org at the age of sixteen, and was assigned to the Gold Base.

NEWYORKER: The Apostate

The statistics are horrifying: In the United States by the age of sixteen one in six boys and one in three girls have had unwanted sexual contact with an adult or more powerful minor involving touch or penetration.

FORBES: Caring For Survivors of Boyhood Sexual Abuse Is The Next Step In The Penn State Case

He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of sixteen, and, after his graduation from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro where he was remembered as a class clown, but religious enough to forgo meat when eating at Burger King he signed on with the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, receiving military training and establishing ties with Islamist terrorists.

NEWYORKER: The Black Sites

Then there was Monica Seles claiming the French Open for the first time in 1990 at the age of just sixteen.

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Compulsory schooling, introduced in the nineteenth century, pushed back the age of maturity to sixteen or so.

NEWYORKER: Spoiled Rotten

The heroines of this robustly poignant coming-of-age film are fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls who are working out their identities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, during the fading weeks of summer.

NEWYORKER: Our Song