How do you reconcile your assessment with the fact that in many other countries which do not treat teens like babies, teen pregnancy rates are far lower, and average age of first sexual encounters is higher?
Have you ever considered that, just maybe, teens are capable of much more than you thought?
Have you ever considered that our culture of treating them like infants is an anomaly in the history of human society?
And it isn’t just the mature 14 year olds who are hurt by this, as you seem to think.
In fact, it is the less mature teens who are hurt far more. By denying them education, denying them responsibility, and constantly telling them how immature they are, we stunt their development.
This actually makes them more likely to mess up their lives by getting pregnant young. The statistics prove it. Maybe it is because by telling them how immature they are, we make them long for someone who will treat them as an adult, and make them want to do adult things. Maybe it is because by taking away their responsibility, we make them feel like they can do anything with no consequences. Maybe it is because by refusing to educate them and treat them like they have brains, we create teens who actually are immature and are easily tricked into having sex. Maybe all of the above and more.
But if our policy hurts mature teens, and it really hurts the teens who are kept immature artificially… just who are we protecting?
The fundamental issue here is that in the US, we don’t trust teens, we don’t think they are capable of intelligence, and so we don’t even bother to educate them or talk to them like they are fully human.
Sure, the statistics show that if we treated them like intelligent beings and gave them education and responsibility, they would do much better and avoid pitfalls.
But then… where would that leave all of us? Increased teen pregnancy and immaturity is a small price to pay for our right to create a whole class of humans we can pretend are helpless infants we have to protect.
No, the fundamental issue here is that a 14 year old girl (who may now be pregnant) was having secret sex with a 21 year old who – regardless of the 14 year old’s stated intention, desires or voiced/implied willingness – had no legal, ethical or moral right to ever touch her.
All of this hoo-ha about how America treats teenagers and blah blah blah is all fine and good in the abstract and in the bigger picture then we absolutely have to change the amount of education we’re giving our kids about sexual matters. That, however, will only confer changes over time, and will not do anything about this particular girl and the trouble she may well be facing from pregnancy or STDs, not to mention the emotional issues which are too numerous and labarynthian to discuss.
We can debate about statutory rape until the cows come home. That won’t help this girl. What will help this girl is for this situation to be taken seriously, and treated for what it is: a scandal which cannot be permitted to happen again with this girl or any other. The best way to do that is make sure that this girl learns a very real, very hard lesson about why giving in to hormonal cravings isn’t the wise way to live and to make sure that the 21 year old finds out that there’s no excuse and no leeway for him to nail girls that young.
Legal? Maybe. But ethically and morally, if she was willing, of course he had a right to touch her - she is the one who gets to decide who can touch her, not you or Uncle Sam.
Pressing charges against the guy won’t help those issues either.
Nonsense. The best way to help the girl is to give her enough education so she can protect herself from pregnancy, STDs, and that vague labyrinth of “emotional issues”. She’ll have to learn it sometime anyway - she won’t suddenly pick it up the moment she turns 17 (Texas’s AOC).
Wow. This is so far from what I would think of as a “best way” that I don’t even know what to say.
So a girl who was not educated on sex, whose sexuality and hormones were never acknowledged, needs to now be taught a “very hard lesson” why?
And why is she suddenly able to understand this very hard lesson, when a second ago she was too immature to even know if she wanted to have sex?
Why not just educate her, as should have been done in the first place? Especially given the overwhelming statistics that education works so much better?
Your response is typical, though. A lot of the same people who want to treat teens like babies, and deny them education and responsibility, also want them to suffer through “very hard lessons”.
I’ve never understood exactly how they come up with this. Certainly the actual welfare of the teen is not their goal. Sometimes I think they like the high teen pregnancy rates in America, because it means more teens are learning “very hard lessons”.
Is it some kind of masochism by proxy? Is it “no pain, no gain”? I just don’t get how anyone could think that was the “best way”.
By villa: “And agan, people seem to be avoiding the important element here. Her contribution to this is irrelevant, …” And*“14 year old girls also cannot, in the eyes of the law, consent.”*
Throw in all the legal semantics about this situation that you care to. She repeatedly sneaked out of her house to meet this guy for the purpose of having sex with him.
If I’m on the jury, there’s No WAY that I would vote to convict him of rape. Some lesser charge, contributing to the deliquency of a minor or similar, maybe. But not rape.
Enough to hang a jury. I doubt the prosecution would go to the expense of trying the guy again.
Course it’d be a shame to create a scandal by doing something like pressing charges and making her sex life (which she has demonstrably chosen to have) a matter of the public record.
If nothing else, she’ll be victimized after that happens.
Well, you’ve got a choice. You can commit a criminal offence by lying during voir dire, or you can answer truthfully and be dismissed from the panel. You cannot legitimately get on a jury with this attitude. When they ask you whether you can apply the law to the facts, think carefully about your answer.
Actually, a jury’s job isn’t just to apply the letter of the law to the facts. A jury does have the right to exercise its opinion on the spirit of the law, and in fact decide not to find someone guilty if they think the law is wrong.
Actually, yes it does… While the girl says she consented, the law says she was not capable of so doing. And guess what? The law wins.
I’d call it rape. Why, what would you call it? Honestly, female on male rapes appear to be far less common than male on female, though their reporting is on the rise. I tend to talk about male on female rape more because it covers the overwhelming majority of reported cases, and, the survey data suggests, the overwhelming majority of unreported cases too.
(Previous Villa post regarding change of mind during sex in Illinois now requiring the man to cease penetration)
Intriguing - not a case I have come across. Can you give me a cite so I can look it up, please?
(Response to Villa citing Brownmiller, Against Our Will on the evidence strongly suggesting no greater levels of false reporting in sexual assault cases than other major offenses)
That is one of the most disengenuous things I have seen. Look at the portion you have quoted from me - it ends in a semi colon. My full remark was:
You chose to delete the second part. Try Linda Farstein, Sexual Violence: Our Was Against Rape. She directed the Manhatten Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit, by the way, and certainly has no reputation as a man hater. And if you want to discredit Brownmiller’s research in this area, why don’t you try to do it. There are some pretty good law review articles out there that try, unsuccessfully in my mind. But snide little remarks tend not to work as counter evidence.
(Previous Villa post suggests an affirmative consent standard in rape law)
If you wanted to, you could. But asking permission usually suffices. And I’d argue that talking about sex is far from a mood killer. It may be for you, and then you have my sympathy in that you are cutting yourself off from a true source of potential pleasure. I have the same bottom line as the Supreme Court of New Jersey on this. Their opinion is that “reasonable people do not engage in acts of penetration without permission.” ( In the Interests of MTS). Pineau, for example, has written a lot about the mutual benefits of communicative sexuality. I don’t think it is asking to much if you end up on a one night stand with a woman to ask if she wants to have sex - there are plenty of ways of doing this that aren’t mood killers. ‘Do I need to use a condom?’ would likely be acceptable by courts as an affirmative request. It’s also a question that any responsible man should be asking in that situation. This is even more important if the woman has said no to advances earlier in the situation.
(Previous Villa post regarding Miranda warnings and the presumption of coercion)
If a custodial interrogation is occuring and the Miranda warning has not been issued, the testimony is, as far as I remember, inadmissible. Yes a spontaneous admission is admissible, but spontaneous means, I believe, that it cannot be the product of a custodial interrogation.
Remember I initially said this may well be a case where the victim’s best interests may be served by not prosecuting, because of the traumatic effects of a trial. I got into this dog fight because I do not believe that physical force, over and above the act of unwanted sexual penetration, should be a necessary element to establish the offense of rape. I actually have a lot more sympathy for jury nullification than the prevailing legal system. In this case, I really think it is likely that the prosecution would get a conviction. I’m not sure a trial would be the best thing, though.
(My apologies for failing to cite previous posts properly. I don’t know what the convention here is for that, and if including a parenthetical about the previous posting is not acceptable, I’ll not do it again.)
That would depend on what questions they asked me, and how much I knew about the case before the actual trial. I certainly could answer that I would apply the law to the facts. (note: Facts)
I’m no stranger to being struck from jury duty. I live in a small county where everybody knows everybody. Defense lawyers around here somehow got the idea that I don’t like drug pushers.
This is just all so ridiculous. 14 year olds are definitely old enough to be making decisions for themselves and taking repsonsibility for those decisions.
To accuse the guy of statutory rape is to completely abrogate any responsibility on the part of the girl. Fuck that.
I’m all for the girl being responsible for her actions. She doesn’t (from the meagre knowledge we have been given) sound like a cowering, shrinking violet that was coerced into having sex.
However, this 21-year-old is a million kinds of stupid, and he is guilty of statutory rape, if my understanding of the law is correct. But “rape,” as in forcing someone to have sex? Don’t know for sure, but the fact that she sneaked around to go meet him makes it sound like she wasn’t forced. So no. Not rape, but statutory rape.
For this guy to knowingly have sex with a 14-year-old (if indeed he knew her age), and put himself in that legally vulnerable position, just for a piece of ass, makes him so stupid, so beyond stupid, that I cannot muster any particle of sympathy for him. The hell with him. He obviously has zero impulse control.
If he had sex with this girl once, in the heat of the moment, and then realized how foolish he was and vowed to never do it again, that would be one thing. But that doesn’t sound like what he was doing. He’s SO STUPID it’s just beyond comprehension.
I felt greatly resentful even at the time, and only gave in so he wouldn’t pester me any more. He was getting more insistent, reaching under my shirt, and all but stripping me naked on the spot. I stopped kissing him, and moved away to try to let him cool down, but he persisted. It WAS rape, and for you to trivialize my feelings is pretty assholish, and absurd. You weren’t there in my skin, I was.
It was rape, because undue emotional pressure was put on me until I capitulated. He forced that capitulation, pressured it. He KNEW I didn’t want to, and I held out for a good long time, but “No” was not the answer he was going to accept, and he may very well have “forced” me with more than emotional blackmail which is what he used. He was picking me up, and taking me to dark secluded spots while kissing me and trying to take off my shirt. (Which I’d never allowed before, and made clear I didn’t want then. I also kept wriggling free from his arms when he’d pick me up.) He definately was not respecting my boundaries, and was not behaving in an honorable way. I told him I wasn’t ready for sex, and that should have been the end of it.
HOW DARE YOU trivialize my feelings, and say that my perceptions of what happened are “absurd”? This is the exact reason why many young girls DON’T report “date rape”! This may be a contributing factor (and other posters agree) as to why the mother of the girl mentioned in the OP doesn’t want to report what happened. You, sir are an ass! You owe me an apology too.
Date rape is still rape, and a consent given under undue emotional pressuring is STILL rape, ESPECIALLY if the girl is young, and hasn’t developed a full self esteem yet. That is what happened to me. The word “No” from a young girl/woman ESPECIALLY should be taken very seriously, and nothing more should be done to try to “change her mind”.
If the woman says “No” it MEANS NO! The man should back off, and try his luck another day when it seems the woman may be ready, but if she says “No” again, then he should back off again. NO IS NO, END OF STORY! As I said, there are states where the man has to pull his penis out of a woman, zip up, and go on his way if the woman says the word “No” at ANY POINT.
Do you get it yet? No means no sex, quit asking, back down, and go take a cold shower or whack off if you have to, but LEAVE THE ONE WHO SAID NO ALONE, don’t ask again, don’t beg, don’t plead, don’t say things like “You don’t love me, if you did you’d do this.” don’t, just…don’t. Meet up to the promises you gave when you asked them out, like paying for dinner if you said you would, or watching the movie, or if she wants to leave now, drive her home, and call it a night.
You directly solicited an opinion as to whether you were raped or not and I gave you one. The behavior of your 16 year boyfriend was incredibly obnoxious to say the least, but you had the ability to walk away for the situation at any point in the proceedings before you agreed to have sex with him. Your characterization of this annoying adolescent assholishness as “rape” is, I will repeat, absolutely absurd, and for you to continue to characterize this way is nonsensical.
As others have indicated you call something anything you want, but it does not make it so. It may have been unpleasant, annoying, obnoxious and manipulative, but what happened between you and you 16 year old boyfriend was not rape regardless of how hard you want to wave the “HOW DARE YOU TRIVIALIZE” banner. You agreed to have sex to stop being pestered by an obnoxious, grabby boyfriend you could have walked away from. To turn yourself into some outraged victim of “rape” in the re-counting of this relatively common adolescent scenario may make you feel better about your decisions in the situation, but it doesn’t make it rape.
Zabali, if you were traumatized, then you were traumatized. No matter what the technical name for it was, at the very least you were manipulated into having sex. And that’s a crappy way to be introduced to sex.
If the law in the OP’s jurisdiction spells out that 14 is too young to consent, then what happened in the OP is technically, statutorially, rape. However, as a fairly reasonable person, I would need to know a lot more about the circumstances before I’d convict this kid of rape, and everything that that connotates.
Specifically, I’d need to know: Did the young man really know the girl’s age? Was he in love with her? Yes, that makes a big difference to me. And before we get into hysterical NAMGLA claims, I do NOT condone relationships between adults and children. Had the man been in his 30’s or 40’s then, by all means, throw the book at him. However, 21 is still very, very young. I know plenty of 21 year olds that still date girls in high school. For all we know the OPers niece is one week from turning 15 and her lover just turned 21. And, gosh, a relationship between a 15 year old and a 20 year old doesn’t sound nearly as damning to me.
When I was 15 (two weeks shy of turning 16, by the way), I began a relationship with one of my substitute teachers. He was 23 and still in college. He subbed for my history class while my regular teacher was on sabbatical. Our attraction was instantaneous. We snuck around because we knew that our relationship would raise more than a few eyebrows. We didn’t have intercourse because neither of us had any intention of being teenaged parents. We may have been young, but we weren’t stupid. Our relationship ended when my Spanish teacher found out via my friend, and that teacher told H that if he didn’t stop seeing me, she’d tell the school administration. That would mean he’d lose his job, no questions asked, and it might have meant the end of his career (teacher and coach). It might have also meant a public scandal for both of us. Had that happened, I have no doubt that some people would have accused him of abusing his power or called me a “victim.” And I’m here to say that I was FAR from a victim. He was FAR from being a rapist. We were in love with each other. He was a bit older than me, yes, but it was as mutual, and mature, as any high school relationship out there.
Had this relationship happened today, my Spanish teacher would have been compelled by law to report the relationship. H’s career would have been ruined. He would have had to register as a sex offender. Me? Aside from the scandal, my record would have been unscathed. How is that fair? We BOTH entered into the relationship and we BOTH snuck around. But from where I sat, and sit today, neither of us did anything particularly wrong. We were two young people who fell in love with each other. However, well meaning people may well have turned what was a youthful attraction into a “sex scandal.”
It may be that the only difference in the OP is that this couple actually had sex, which may mean a baby. That is a HUGE deal, yes, and I don’t mean to minimize it. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a predatory rapist. It may just mean that they BOTH made a crappy decision.
Actually, I am way more in agreement with you than you think. I agree the US needs to dramatically reassess its policies with regard to the way sex is treated, and the level and type of sexual education. I’m not sure where I would set the age of consent, as I haven’t seen enough information either way on this.
Given the system we have, however, I think allowing 14 year olds to ‘consent’ to sex with 21 year olds would be potentially devastating, as the pre-requisite levels of sexual maturity are not there, whether for simple age reasons or the reasons you suggest. The answer isn’t to drop age of consent standards, and sit back and watch the chaos. It’s to improve the level and quality of sex education, and have a more mature society wide attitude towards sex, which will then lessen teenage pregnancy I believe, and then allow the age of consent debate to take place in a more positive environment.
Again, you make a lot of sense. I think it is essential to improve sex ed, to increase the availability and knowledge of contraception of all types, and to allow people to make rational, informed choices regardign their own sexuality. But in the environment we have now, a drop in the age of consent is not practical nor desirable IMHO.
astro Actually, what happened to me, from what I’ve been given to understand by an advocate who worked in conjunction with the battered woman’s shelter I ended up in years later (she also worked as an addiction counselor, very capable woman) is that it falls under the “date rape” catagory. She was working with me to help me find out why I was so vunerable to abusive relationships. That was a part of it.
Looking back, I think he’d have taken me to a dark place whether I wanted to go or not, overpowered me, and done “the deed”. His intent was to get his way. It was date rape, which is successfully prosecuted. What are your opinions on date rape/marital rape astro? Do you think that it’s “absurd” that people, including legislators, feel that such things are, indeed a form of rape? He said “I must not love him, because if I did, then I’d do this with him.” he also said he’d go find someone who would “love him” if I didn’t. 10 things about date rape Pay particular attention to numbers 2 and 10, then apologize for calling my statements as to what happened “absurd”. :mad:
I’ll sacrifice the romance novel industry if it leads to a drop in rape. All I am asking for is that we bring the law of sexual assault into line with other laws. Getting drunk at a fraternity party and having your wallet stolen because you are so ripped you show everyone your wad of cash does not alter the fact you have been robbed. It’s really tough to gain a conviction where a girl gets drunk and is raped at a fraternity party.
Per the list you’ve cited it’s mostly pretty standard stuff except for item 2
So, according to the list you’ve cited, we’re getting to the point with these definitional issues where it’s “rape” if the guy tells you “he won’t like you” unless you have sex with him, and you agree to have sex with him so he’ll “like you”.
While interesting from an etymological perspective, this insanely inflated envelope of what constitutes “rape” almost makes me wonder would not be rape in the everyday scrum of sexual relationships between men and women. Counselors, academics and (pretty much anyone) can try to re-assign the contextual boundaries of a definition beyond the limits of common sense, and there are always people that will glom onto that expanded definition with psychic barnacle glue.
This characterization of a “rape” occurring if a girl has sex with a boy so he won’t “not like her” or some similar manipulative nonsense, is absolutely, positively asinine, and is an obscene attempt to balloon the definition of a real word with real victims into a huge tent that will cover practically any situation.