Seventeen-year-old Brown stepped down as Kent’s youth police commissioner last week after it was revealed that she had made offensive comments on Twitter.
Writing in The Independent on Friday, Dejevsky said the incident was the result of “the misguided fetish that so many well-meaning adults have with getting down with the kids”.
“Policing is not playtime – and neither is politics, where anyone advocating a change in the voting age should read, mark and learn from the misfortunes of [Kent police commissioner] Ann Barnes and her young protégé,” she added.
In a letter to Dejevsky, the Votes at 16 Coalition called her comments “reactionary and somewhat patronising”.
“Brown is held up as a ‘one-woman reason’ why the voting age should not be lowered to 16 but no individual should be used as a representative sample of the some 1.5 million 16- and 17-year-olds across the UK,” said the letter.
The coalition’s letter was backed by the British Youth Council, the National Youth Agency and Unison.
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