On the next page, a series of charts shows that sex offenders tend to keep to victims within a few years of their own age. When you apply that thinking to 12-to-17-year-olds, you end up with a whole lot of youthful offenders whose lives, in accordance with Meagan’s Law and similar, are effectively over.
From the PDF:
(Side note: ‘Stranger Danger’ is bullshit when applied to sexual assault, especially of juveniles. Assault by a stranger accounts for 7.3% of assaults on all male victims and 14.7% of assaults on all female victims. When you look at assaults on males and females aged 0-17, the numbers drop way the hell into the toilet. See page 13 of the PDF.)
I posted this here because I want a debate on whether all this is, in and of itself, a bad thing: Is there really a sizable amount of real sexual assault going on among teens and pre-teens, or are our laws so hypersensitive that the number of false positives has swamped everything else?
The spike of rape occurances around 14-15 and the precipitous drop off at the age of consent makes me think a decent chunk of the assaults they counted were statutory rapes between kids of similar ages, which is sort of interesting since while people often bring up the scenario of a 16 year-old boyfriend and his 15 year-old gf in rape discussions, I always assumed that that wasn’t a large source of reported sexual violence (not that I doubt it happens a lot, but I assumed it didn’t get reported to the police very often).
The study seems determined to make it hard to tell for certain if thats actually the case. So far as I can see (and I only skimmed it), they never address what types of sexual offense account for what percentage of total offenses, or mention the statutory rape issue except sort of obliquely at the end.
How does the study define “sexual assault?” I ask because some studies include anyone up to 19 years of age as a “child” and I just want to know if their definition of sexual assault is overly broad or somewhat narrow.
Actually, at the end, they make explicit that forcible doesn’t include statutory. They use five categories, four variations of ‘forcible’ and one ‘sexual assault’. I was thinking the latter included statutory, but looking at it again, I think it might just be the sum of the other categories.
So it raises the question, what happens when people hit sixteen that they’re suddenly raped much less frequently? The sharpness of the peak is what made me think it was an “artificial” artifact, that is, the age of consent in most states so that the same sexual activity would no longer count as rape. Hard to think of an explanation if that isn’t the case.
Nope, its the victims that have a spike. Figure 1 in the study, the spike starts at 11-12 (which makes sense, people are more likely to get raped once they reach the age of sexual maturity), but then at 15 the rate plummets down to what it was in pre-pubesent children. After that, it once again does more or less what you’d expect, smoothly decreasing with increasing age (since older folks are probably both less tempting rape victims and less likely to be in situations where rapes occur (dating, clubs, college, etc)).
Statutory rape seemed a pretty obvious explanation, but apparently they’re not counting those, so I dunno.
Anyways, the other interesting part of the study was what the OP pointed out, the most likely people to sexually assault kids are other kids.
Reading the rest, the law was subsequently changed so what Ms. Whitaker did is no longer a crime. However, she remains on the sex offender registry. She is banned from being within 1,000 ft of any place children may congregate and may not work within 1,000 ft of any school or child-care center. And, of course, she’s officially known as a Filthy Goddamned Kiddy-Fucker to the State of Georgia and all of the newsrooms it contains.
But she must be in a very unusual class, right? Well, we’ll let the Great State of Georgia tell the story:
So, is Georgia completely off the charts here or can we project this result to national data? I think the DoJ report I linked to in the OP suggests Georgia is in line with most states.
Couldn’t some of it be that fourteen year olds are around the age where they start get sexual feelings, but they’re young enough that they still haven’t developed self control?
Why the FUCK do we have this “hee hee hee? Let’s have SEX!!! at every single inappropereate second?” mentality among teenagers?
The article portrays Wendy as a victim…but come on…She freaking CONSENTED. I think she shouldn’t still be on the sex offender registry…but she should have been expelled (along with the dude who pressured her for a blow-job)
Actually…I wonder if a lot of this may have to do with the fact that little teens may get into the Yah Dude/douchebag mentality about sex. In wealthy suburbs or prep schools the “prestige” placed on sex (meaning just being VERY …Spur Posse…that is " oh you get “points” for having sex with a girl style of thinking) is beyond disguisting and rediclous.
I don’t know about juvenile offenders as a whole, but a friend of mine was a guard at DJJ for a while, where they had a dorm for the “little” sex offenders and one for the “big” sex offenders - grouped by size/age. He was in charge of the “little” sex offenders dorm for a while and said that was the worst duty he had the whole time he was there - they were more violent, more sociopathic, etc. than even the very violent offenders.
I was going to say that Dereleths example of the girl from Georgia wouldn’t be counted in the study because it was voluntary and the study you cited only counted ‘forcible sodomy’. But reading the definitions in the study again, while they appear not to count statutory rape as ‘forcible rape’, they do count as ‘forcible sodomy’ cases where a person gives/receives oral sex without being forced, but if they’re below the age of consent.
It’s a pretty bizarre way to count things, having sex with a willing minor doesn’t necessarily get counted, but giving one a blow-job does. That said, I’m going back to my original hypothesis, the spike of assaults in the post pubesent, under 16 ages are due to minors having sex under the age of consent, and that this is a major contribution to people who end up on sex-offenders list (indeed the Economist article supports this). Indeed, this spike would presumably be a lot higher if they counted statutory rape.
Did he mention how many of them had a history of being molested or raped themselves? I wouldn’t be surprised to find out if it was 100% of them. Perhaps the early teens spike is a marker, where being abused has turned to abuse (when, at least in the boys’ cases, they have the means to do so, at least with someone physically weaker).
By the time they reach 16, there are more consensual sexual partners available. Some 14-year-olds rape because they can’t find a consensual sexual partner, but fewer 16-year-olds have that motivation.
14-year-olds have significantly worse impulse control than 16-year-olds.
The parents of a 14-year-old victim of statutory rape are more likely to pursue the issue than the parents of a 16-year-old, and some of those victims will decide that it’s better to be a “victim” of a forcible rape than to get in trouble for consensual sex, and will falsify testimony.
Don’t know how much any of those might contribute to the spike (I have no data), but they’re all plausible.