In this well publicized story a 25-year old teacher pleads guilty to two counts of “lewd and lascivious battery” and she gets house arrest and has to register as a sex offender.
I can’t help think that if this was a 25-year old male teacher and a 14-year old girl then there would be a tremendous hue and cry across the land that the punishment was a mere slap on the wrist?
In fact, I know there are people who read the story and think, “Where were teachers like that when I was 14?”
Am I wrong about this? Or is there in fact a double standard? If so, why? Is it a reaonable distinction?
Yes, I think there is a double standard and yes I would think, “Where were teachers like that when I was 14?”
I can’t reconcile the two. At age 14 this would have been a wonderful event. I am not sure a girl would feel much different but there is a very large double standard. I imagine even the father probably secretly thought, “Way to go kid, I glad he’s not gay”. If it was his daughter, he would have been shopping for a good accurate weapon.
How do you reconcile the two different attitudes?
I apologize if my honesty disturbs anyone, I don’t think the opinions I express are that far from the normal.
As a 28 year old teacher I will tell you that 14-17 year old boys are incredilbly easy to manipulate. Not that I want to have sex with them (ugh), but if I did I have no doubt that I could manipulate many of them into believing about anything I wanted to and seriously fuck with their heads. And I kinda think that the overwhelming odds are that anyone who actually wanted to have sex with 14-17 year old boys would be more attracted to the chance to fuck with their heads/manipulate them/control them than be actually attracted to their physical charms. And trust me when I say that in any group of teenagers there are some of both sexes who are so needy and naive that they can be so skillfully maniplated that consent is really not meaningful.
Put in another way, whether or not there is sexual abuse going on in a sexual relationship between an adult and a child, there is almost certainly emotional abuse going on, and that needs to be harshly prohibited/punished.
And for those of you that think you were too emotionally stable to have allowed your teacher to emotionally abuse you–you may well have been. So you’d never have been targeted by a sexually predatory teacher. The laws have to be there to protect the ones who are vunerable.
I think the teacher’s punishment was too light. I find particularly absurd the defense contention that she’s “too pretty, it would be dangerous for her in prison”. Tough shit.
But mainly I think this sets a bad precedent. I don’t doubt that this case will be trotted out every time a teacher acts like an idiot. I wish that they’d taken her to trial and meted out a very heavy sentence.
That last paragraph there was incredibly insightful in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the matter laid out in it’s separate logical constructs so impressively before.
What the take of psychologists on this? Does any psychologist support the position that it would psychologically damaging for a 14-year-old girl to lose her virginity to an adult man, but not damaging (or less damaging) for a 14-year-old boy to lose his virginity to an adult woman? (Or vice-versa?)
This is an amazingly true analysis and critique, except for the “almost certainly” in the second paragraph.
Adolescents vary immensely in maturity, worldly-wiseness, and the other factors needed for a mature sexual relationship. The greater proportion of sexual offenders who are identified and convicted are no doubt emotion-manipulators and abusive is too mild a word. But I would guess that a minority of boys in that age range and an even smaller minority of girls can make adult-level decisions and choose to enter into non-manipulative love relationships with adults or older teens that include sexual activity, and which are not harmful to them unless social condemnation makes it so. So I’d support MandaJo’s assertion of the laws as needed for protection from sexual predators, with a suggestion that they may need a “savings” clause that permits cases where the evidence shows non-predatory, non emotionally manipulative, thoroughly consensual activity, to be simply dropped as not targeted by the statute.
In other words, I’m all for the protection of children and adolescents from sexual predators. The amount of hurt that sociopathic types of that sort cause is astronomical, and I think the court system sees only the tip of the iceberg.
But I think that equal damage is done by the conviction and branding of people who are, after all, only human, and who are not predatory. There was an instance from Australia reported in the gay press a while ago regarding a man in his 20s convicted of a sex offense for engaging in gay sex with a 15-year-old boy who maintained to the court that it was his idea, that he had been the aggressor in turning the relationship sexual, and that his older partner had at no time played any head games with him.
And that sort of thing means that we need to figure out how to walk a very tough balancing act.
I think that the reason for why we treat male and female sex offenders differently is that men have usually been the ones to initiate a sexual relationship. Deep down, many people don’t believe that a woman could do this. Also, men (even teenagers) are usually larger physically, so the only way a boy could get himself into it is to be roped in psychologically. And we’ve all seen how society reacts to people who suffered anything less than brutal torture before they were raped (e.g. the legitimacy of date rape). And of course, the whole machismo thing plays in too–a lot of guys don’t want to admit to being forced into a bad sexual situation, because guys are supposed to want it all the time and not have any feelings about it. So that leads to a belief that males can never be scarred by rape or sexual assault, so it shouldn’t be punished as heavily.
I also agree that the teacher’s sentence is way too light and I think the “too pretty” comment demeans women in general. This woman should serve the same sentence a male sex offender would receive, in a real prison full of ugly people.
Look at child custody cases. Yes the law has a double standard, and men and women are different. Treating them all the same would be a crime against humanity.
The hard part is how to treat them differently but equally (I think I heard that before)
Hell yes, it’s too light! I would personally with my bare hands kill any fucked-up 20- or 30-something woman who molested (and yes, people, that’s what it’s called whether the victim is a boy or a girl under the age of consent) my 13-year-old son. I wouldn’t care how cool his friends thought it was.
It certainly exists, and I think it’s ridiculous. Hiding behind “men and women are different” is just sexist bullshit, but it’s precisely the sexist bullshit that politicians and courts always seem to trot out.
Now, if you ask me about penalties for statutory rape, there it gets a little wonky. Frankly, I don’t know. I think it can be a very grey area. But the penalties should be the same, no matter the sex of the victim in relation to the sex of the assailant.
BTW: I think the penalty should have been harsher, but I also can’t help but think the boy will never mind it.
Weird twist on this tale of disgrace and statutory rape, what would you do if the teen had managed to solicit sex from an 18+ Prostitute? Should she be simply charged for prostitution or for statutory rape?
An open question just to add to the morale ambiguity.
And I think that if we have to err, I’d rather err FAR on the side of protecting minors: the potential harm of a “relationship” where the balence of power is as drastically shifted to one side as it is between someone under 18 and an adult seems much greater than the potential harm of denying (or delaying) a potentially healthy, satisfying relationship. A non-consumated love affair is no harder on the heart than a non-requited one, and we recognize that as a sort of pain that a normal person can expect to go through and learn from. Sustained emotional manipulation from someone that you have no chance of exerting any control over yourself is much more serious.
Yes, age is arbitrary–some people are so needy and naive that there consent is never really meaningful–but it’s the best thing we’ve got. And if that means that some people that could have been happy together never have that chance, I am ok with that.
And again, I think you are assuming this boy is like you were at that age. And I am willing to bet that he isn’t. That if he were capable of having a casual sexual relationship and of taking nothing from it but good times, that alone would have meant he wasn’t attractive to the teacher. If she wanted an adult-style friends-with-benefits type arrangement, she’d have one with an adult.
Sexual predators are attracted to the kids they can overwhelm, the kids they can terrify, the kids they can isolate. They are attracted to the kids that are insecure, alienated, or lonely. Those are the kids you can control. Those are the kids you can get to worship you. Those are the kids that won’t be able to walk away when it’s over without any reprecussions. Those are the kids who can’t consent.
Protecting those kids is worth denying some other, more balenced kids the chance to have an story they can wow the other Frat boys with in a few years.
I know you are right. Everything you say is right. **You are 100% correct. **
But even 25 years later, I still remember being 14 and I just can’t think of a kid I knew back then that wouldn’t have jumped at the chance. Well maybe one, but we kind of knew he was gay and wasn’t ready to admit it yet. The Hetero crowd would have all went for it happily and been dumb enough to tell someone else about it. (Possibly tell everyone about it.)