I’m not sure one is needed. I think the best arguments against adults having sex with children are more along the lines of “criminal child endangerment” laws.
I.e., you don’t punish the adult solely in a case where they did harm the child, you also punish them for putting the child in a situation where they were in significant danger of harm.
I’m sure that many adolescent children have had sex with adults and not been harmed by it at all. I’m also sure that there’s absolutely no way to tell for sure when an adolescent would be seriously harmed by consensual statutory rape and when they wouldn’t. Therefore, responsible adults should simply consider all underage adolescents off-limits, in order to avoid the potential danger.
That was largely the conclusion of the book *Harmful to Minors; The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex
by Judith Levine, University of Minnesota Press, 2002. It caused a great firestorm among experts in the field, and even became political, with some politicians in the Legislature trying to cut the University budget for allowing the book to be published.
Being of a cynical nature, I noted that the ‘experts in the field’ making the firestorm were all making a good living from the current ‘huge public scandal’ method of dealing with this.
We don’t punish people based on harm, anyway. If you break in and steal my antique flowerpot, it doesn’t matter that I never liked it much anyway. If you steal $10,000 from Bill Gates, it doesn’t matter that he won’t notice it. We
How? No, really, I have no idea what mechanism she would have that could destroy his life, other than “I’m pregnant and we have to get married.” Flunking World History because you wouldn’t have sex with your teacher is not the end of the world, and as other have pointed out, the teacher has MUCH more to fear.
What power differential? Do you think guys think about things like that, especially when they are 15 and horny? Or care about grades when there is sex involved? I was too big a religious prude to go along with it, at least at first, but that would make me an unlikely target, too. And I certainly would not be mentally damaged by the experience, however it turned out.
A teacher in HS who has sex with a student, even without laws prohibiting this contact, could not ‘destroy’ anybody’s life with a single word. He need only tell the admin that they were doing it, and, she would lose all of her ability to influence anything in re him.
I can’t see where anybody couldn’t see it as being consensual. Somebody’s ability to destroy a life isn’t necessarily equal with coercion.
Bill Maher says men and women are different, so the effects are different. He says
" A male teacher having sex with a female student can do some real damage. A female teacher having sex with a male student could only cause raised self esteem"
BUT, there is such a thing as too much self-esteem! It would not be hard for a guy to get the wrong idea of how easy it is to get sex/a girlfriend, and what he has to do. This could culminate after years, when the psychic damage of not having sex sets in.