I would hope that a woman who had sex with a 17 or 18 year old senior would receive a less harsh penalty. HOWEVER, I think she should lose her teaching license FOR LIFE. And the parents of the boy in question might also press charges or pursue a civil suit. 20 years in jail seems a bit harsh, I agree. But can you draw the line at 16? Or where would you draw it?
Well, if the kid is old enough to operate a motor vehicle at 16, he should be old enough to operate his pecker too.
I hope you don’t think this is a cogent or intelligent response. Just because you CAN, doesn’t mean you should. Like I said, if your 16 year old son knocked up his 25 year old teacher, would you be praising his skilled use of his pecker while you paid her child support for him?
Pregnancy is the worst of your worries. If you found out your 16 year old had picked up an STD from his teacher, how would you feel?
You know, I’m not sure if he’d have to pay support, esp. if she was considered to have gotten pregnant via statutory rape. An expert would have to answer that question. Though I wonder if Really Not All That Bright (love that user name) would feel better about calling it statutory rape if it got him out of paying 17% of his salary to support his teenage studmuffin’s love child with his hot, irresistible teacher.
Yeah, I think people in this thread are identifying too closely with adolescent jack-off fantasies about their teachers and not thinking about the realities of the situation and WHY teachers who take sexual advantage of their students are considered wrong and are punished. This is a case where I think the law and society have it mostly right. Teachers should keep their hands off students no matter how hot the teacher and how horny the student. And people who think otherwise should imagine their own children dealing with this situation and not their memories of themselves at that age.
Also, I notice no one has jumped in to defend the 25 year old male teacher who had sex with his 13 year old female student, who claims it was consensual. Is this equally OK or not? Or are we going to fall back on “Men and women are different!” as a dodge, since I feel safe saying a 13 year old girl is likely more physically mature, possible more emotionally mature, than a boy of the same age.
By that logic, anyone who can’t afford child support should be legally barred from having sex.
Anyway, this whole pregnancy/child support argument ignores the fact that teenagers knock up other teenagers constantly.
No, it’s supposed to make you think about why a parent would have a different POV than yours about how cool and OK it is for teenage boys to have sex with their teachers. The teachers should know better but the consequences aren’t all that great for the boy either.
Furthering my point that teenagers should be discouraged from having sex. They are notoriously bad about using birth control, and I bet they’d be even less likely to use it with a woman who is older and more authoritative.
You think that an adult is less likely to use birth control than another teen? Really?
As already noted, nobody is saying that there shouldn’t be consequences. The teachers should be fired, and I’d even agree with the suggestion someone made of revoking their licenses.
I don’t think they deserve criminal sanctions.
At what point, specifically, would you favor criminal sanctions? I assume that if the 25-year-old woman hooks up with a four-year-old boy, that’d be worthy of jail time. How do you know when a child becomes old enough to legally consent, in your (proposed) system? What’s the indicator?
He is expected to use a motor vehicle in a responsible manner. In the same way, he is also expected to use his male member responsibly — which means keeping it away from his teacher.
Because the 16-year-old is (theoretically) not equipped to understand the risks well enough to make an informed decision. When I was 15, I “knew” that sex could result in preganancy, for example. But I didn’t have the life experience or knowledge to grasp that implications of that possibility. Most 15-year-old boys don’t. So we say that they cannot consent to a sex act legally speaking, because consent, by its nature, must be informed to be meaningful.
Perhaps you did have them. But again, there is no reasonable way to judge which adolescent has them and which does not. Every teenager thinks they have common sense, man. Every one. No kid goes around thinking, “I am largely ignorant of the way the world works,” even though it is true in the overwhelming majority of cases.
Well… I mean… it does. Every case is judged on its own merits, in court and in sentencing. I don’t know how else to say it.
And of course, if you kill someone, you’re likely to walk away only if: (1) it was an accident; or (2) you were acting in self-defense. This is because societally, we have an interest in protecting the right to self-defense, and we don’t want to jail people for genuine mistakes done with no malice or recklessness involved. These are principles by which society is well-served.
You seem to think that an adult should “walk away” from nonaccidental sex with a minor based on the defense of “the minor really wanted it.” Once again, we have no societal interest in protecting the right of an adult to bang a teenager.
I disagree. The 20-something has no idea whether or not the guy in question is going to suffer from the encounter. She doesn’t know. No one does. What she does know is that he’s shy of the legal age of consent, and that the punishment for crossing that line might be jail time (it is often not jail time, actually, in cases like this). The law exists to protect everyone under the age of consent who might suffer from the encounter, because again - the twentysomething has no way of anticipating whether she is doing damage before she engages in the act. So she should not engage in the act. This isn’t particularly unfair, or illogical.
But she asked, nicely.
That’s a ridiculous argument.
I’m sure one of my college one-night stands (not that there were many) woke up hating herself the next day, and perhaps even suffered long-term psychosexual issues because of our tryst.
Do we need a law protecting 18-year-olds? 19-year-olds? How about 26? Lots of 26-year-old women have intimacy issues.
I’ve addressed this repeatedly. At some point between birth and age 20 or so, a human being gains the ability to understand the risks and issues involved in making the decision to have sex, and thus the ability to consent to it. Once you’re old enough to understand those risks, your decision to have sex can be honored legally. In such a case, what happens to you is your own nevermind.
But the law ought to protect those who are not capable of making a decision like that. Since there is no way of assessing each individual human being at one-week intervals to determine if they’ve attained the appropriate level of understanding, and since declaring open season on children of any age is unacceptable to (I think) all people, we must choose a line, and say, “by this age, we can be confident that most people are well-versed enough to make an informed choice.” The line will be, by its nature, arbitrary. Some people will be ready before they formally cross that line; others will not be ready even when they do. But there has to be a line, somewhere, because there is no other reasonable way to protect actual children from consenting to things that they are incapable of properly understanding.
Would you allow a 13-year-old to consent to receive an investigational weight loss drug, without parental approval?
It seems to me like there are two separate issues at work here.
One is age of consent. Is it ever ok for someone older than X to have sex with someone younger than X. Frankly, I think somewhere around 16 ought to be the ‘legal limit.’
However, the other issue is that of an adult teacher having sex with a teen student.
I don’t know what sort of criminal proceedings ought to follow, but I do feel that those teachers should lose their jobs at the absolute least.
Part of the school system is that parents entrust their children to other adults. Not only does a teacher sleeping with a student raise questions of abuses of power, but it also abuses the trust parents have in the system.
Oh, but there is. It’s called “school”… 
I know you’re right and there has to be an arbitrary line somewhere but it bothers me that said line is set based on someone’s innate feelings of ooginess.
In Florida, for example, sex with a sixteen-year-old is illegal unless the sexor is under the age of 25, to protect, say, a 19-year old college freshman still dating his high school sweetheart, who’s a junior.
(You can still be charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” for banging a 16/17-year-old if you’re under 25, but not statutory rape)
We set arbitrary consent laws for issues much less important than sex–cigarettes, alcohol, pornography, driving, car insurance, etc. Is it okay for a teacher to buy booze, porn and cigarettes for underaged students? Let them drive his car?
I’m not sure I would saying that driving is less important than sex. Teenager X can kill a lot more people in a car than he can in bed.
I want to reinforce the fact that this isn’t all about age. It’s about power. Teachers have power over their students (or perceived power, which is largely the same thing).
Teachers should not be having sex with their students, just as doctors shouldn’t with their patients, employers shouldn’t with their employees, priests shouldn’t with their congregation, and politicians shouldn’t with their interns. It’s an abuse of power.
That’s why I think it’s okay for a 25-year-old teacher to screw around with someone else’s 18-year-old student, but not with her own.
Hah, I wish I could say the same. I had a teacher in the seventh grade class who was a former cheerleader for the Oakland Raiders, whom I inferred wanted to move on to new career. No way I was going to have crush on her–the stench of her team was too great. Like all immature 13 year olds, I was somewhat of a borderline smart-ass to her. She, was by necessity, was a pretty cold person to the boys making eyes towards her.
Your story triggered a bad memory I’d forgotten about. There was a jerk in the class who was constantly disrespectful to her. One day he made a crack about her “short” boyfriend. I could tell after he said it, it really wounded her; I thought she was about to cry; everyone (except for Satan’s spawn) realized at that point it was really unfair to label her as a “cheerleader”. The classroom was a little more polite (not much more) to her after that incident; as everyone she didn’t deserve that crap. I think she transferred to another school by the end of the year.
I never heard any rumors or stories in high school about this stuff. Even years afterwards, when somebody decides to “confess”. All the really good looking female teachers were normally hitched to their fellow teachers, which was sort of a taboo area for anyone looking for “some.” Who would want to deal with that scenario, should the hubby find out?