In previous posts I explored both our cultural obsession with and horror about sex. Together they have paradoxically generated great sexual freedom and draconian laws. In the most recent post I listed several (largely unintended) negative consequences of this situation. These may be summarized as follows.
1. Legal age of consent is out of sync with normal sexual development and adolescents are given conflicting and many confusing messages about sexual behavior. For example, they can generally consent to abortion and obtain birth control at age 12 but cannot consent to sex until 16 or 18 (depending on the state). As a result, many are being convicted of felonies for developmentally normal behaviors and having to register as sex offenders for the remainder of their lives.
2. Pre-pubescent children are being ostracized (and occasionally even criminalized) for sexual behavior that is often normal or at worst, an annoying means of attention seeking.
3. Mandatory child abuse reporting laws, originally designed to protect children have been expanded to identifying offenders, making it virtually impossible for them to enter treatment on their own initiative without first suffering severe legal consequences.
4. Under the guise of “protecting our communities,” without a shred of empirical support and in spite of significant empirical evidence to the contrary, sex offenders who served their sentences are being forced to leave their homes (and sometimes families) because they live too close to a schools, playgrounds or parks. In most instances destabilizing these men is patently unfair and in some cases it tends to make them more rather than less dangerous.
Today, we’ll examine the first of these consequences in greater detail.
Beginning with puberty (average age around 12), sexual thoughts and urges become increasingly stronger and more frequent. Exploring, expressing and learning to manage sexuality is one of the most important developmental tasks of the teenage years and occasional behavior based on poor judgment is obviously inevitable. But the age of consent, which varies somewhat from state to state, is out of sync with normal sexual development in every state. Consequently, adolescents are increasingly being charged with felonies for ordinary, consensual and developmentally normal behaviors. Consider the situation reported by Pamela Manson of the Salt Lake City Tribune
Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old Ogden girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.
The girl was put in this odd position because she was found guilty of violating a state law that prohibits sex with someone under age 14. She also was the victim in the case against her boyfriend, who was found guilty of the same violation by engaging in sexual activity with her.
Clearly, normal adolescent sexual behaviors have been classified as illegal activities, often labeled “deviant” and therefore worthy of punishment and treatment.
Before we start labeling sexually active teens as deviant, it would be helpful to know what is considered “normal” sexual behavior for adolescents. The dictionary definition of “deviant” is:
deviating or departing from the norm; characterized by deviation: deviant social behavior. Or a person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behavior [syn: pervert]
According to the Child Trends Data Bank:
- Among young people ages 15 to 24 in 2002, 13 percent of females and 5 percent of males reported that their first sexual experience occurred at age 15 or younger with an individual who was three or more years older
- In 2002, approximately 25% of teens ages 15 to 19 who had not had sexual intercourse, engaged in oral sex with an opposite sex partner .
- In 2005 47% of high school students had experienced sexual intercourse. The percentage of students who are sexually experienced increases by grade. In 2005, 34 percent of ninth graders had ever had sexual intercourse, compared with 63 percent of twelfth graders.
Age of Consent Laws were
originally written to protect children from forced prostitution. Even 1890’s
reformers recognized that prosecuting post-pubescent teenagers was not only
senseless but undermined the intention of protective legislation (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_4_35/ai_88583554)
The Society (for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Children) concerned itself only with those under the age of
sixteen years, arguing that by that age the onset of puberty would have
occurred, bringing with it the physical strength and "higher intelligence
and greater strength of will" that distinguished adults from children.
When campaigns by other purity reformers succeeded in raising the age of consent to eighteen years, Elbridge Gerry, the NYSPCC President, complained that the age was now set beyond the time when "a girl became a woman." Not only would it be impossible to obtain any convictions in cases that involved the sixteen and seventeen year old girls, he lamented, but the effort to prosecute such cases would undermine the legitimacy of the law, making it more difficult to win convictions in cases involving girls under the age of sixteen (late 19th Century).
But now these same laws are being used to criminalize virtually all teenage sexuality. One can certainly argue that engaging in sex is not good for teens because it risks unwanted pregnancy, STD’s, and social/emotional entanglements they may have difficulty managing. However for all the reasons Eldrige Gerry foresaw and some he didn’t, criminalizing the behavior is one of the worst possible strategies for protecting them. Do we REALLY want to prosecute the 14 year old Utah girl and make her into a life-long registered sex offender? Is she THAT dangerous?
Criminalizing normative teenage sexual behavior has the unfortunate outcome of placing sexually active teens on the same sex offender registry as predatory pedophiles. For example,18 year old Joshua Lunsford, the brother of Jessica Lunsford, for whom Jessica’s Laws are named, was recently arrested for “unlawful sexual conduct” with a 14 year old. If convicted, he will be required to register under the same laws as John Couey – his sister’s murderer.
Or, ponder the fate of Genalow Wilson, who at age 17 had consensual oral sex with his 15 year old girlfriend. For this “felony” he is presently serving 10 years without possibility of parole in a Georgia prison.
What makes this case more absurd is that if Mr. Wilson and the young woman had sexual intercourse, he would have been guilty only of a misdemeanor and not required to register as a sex offender, thanks to a provision in the law meant to avoid just this type of draconian punishment for consensual youthful indiscretions, the “Romeo and Juliet” exception. (Free Genalow Wilson)
As Wilson's trial was unfolding, a 27- year old teacher was being found guilty just down the hall with a 17 year old student the kind of crime for which child molestation statues were written.She got three years of probation and 90 days in jail. http://www.miamiherald.com/285/story/60572.html
Our culture sensationalizes sex for profit … whether we are selling clothing, toys television shows or 24/7 infotainment. One problem with this is that it’s a kind of “addiction”. Over time we become increasingly numbed to content that once excited us, so we demand more and better. Maintaining viewer interest requires the media to constantly find new things to alarm us. The end result has been moral panic about all sexual misbehavior. (If we were meth addicts instead of sexual infotainment addicts, we’d be “tweaking” at this point.)
Moral panics have been described as a condition, episode, person or group of persons, which emerge to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. These threats are designed in a sensationalized fashion by the media as well as other agents of social control, including politicians, law enforcement and religious leaders, with the intention of establishing meaningful parameters for acceptable societal behavior.)
Moral panics then, are those processes whereby members of a society and culture become 'morally sensitized' to the challenges and menaces posed to 'their' accepted values and ways of life, by the activities of groups defined as deviant. The process underscores the importance of the mass media in providing, maintaining and 'policing' the available frameworks and definitions of deviance, which structure both public awareness of, and attitudes towards, social problems."
So who are WE in the matter? We have become complacent and satisfied with expressing our outrage without exploring how we contribute to it. Advertisers use sex to sell products because WE buy more them when they do. We watch “To Catch a Predator” and feel comforted to know that Chris Hanson and Perverted Justice have already exposed 200 potential child abusers. But the producers don’t ask us to consider what it says about human nature that so many men, even with the notoriety of the show, will seek out a sexual encounter with a teen. The audience would probably shrink away with the first mention that male sexual interest in teenage girls is normal or that research does not support that teens are always harmed by sexual experiences with an adult.
Movie legend Kirk Douglas became a willing victim of statutory rape when he lost his virginity to a school teacher aged just 15. In his forthcoming autobiography LET'S FACE IT - 90 YEARS OF LIVING, LOVING AND LEARNING, the veteran actor confesses he didn't realise (sic) his lover could face prison for their affair, but still doesn't regret a thing. Recalling the tryst he writes, "I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighbourhood (sic) filled with gangs... Under her guidance I became a different person. I am eternally grateful. "By today's standards she would have gone to jail. I had no idea we were doing something wrong. Did she?"
But that conversation is not popular and
not widely engaged in, at least openly. The blueprint for ”To Catch a
Predator”, for the politics around sexual crimes, for the exceedingly harsh
penalties for sexual misbehavior is in the message that it we need to watch out
for “them” not “us.”. As long as we language the dialogue in this fashion we
will continue down the path of creating more victims than we protect. Just ask
Genalaw Wilson, Josh Lundsford, and a 14-year old girl in Utah who we are "protecting" by withholding her name while ruining her life.
At a criminal defense seminar I attended a few years ago, I was told that the average age of first menstruation in this country is now just nine years of age. Therefore I suspect that boys are also maturing somewhat sooner as well. That implies an even longer period of time before reaching the age of consent than paragraph 1 talks about.
Posted by: Greg Jones | May 31, 2007 at 11:20 AM
The average age of puberty (for girls) has dipped. That would refer to the development of breasts, pubic hair, change in body shape. I have not found any similar studies for boys. There have been numerous hypotheses for this change - one being hormones that find their way into our milk.
"In 1997, a landmark study of 17,000 girls found that the average starting age of puberty had dipped a year from previous studies of Caucasian girls, to 9.7 years.
African-American girls hit puberty even earlier, at an average age of about 8, said Marcia Herman-Giddens, principal author of that study and a professor at the University of North at Carolina Chapel Hill.Herman-Giddens is the author of an article published in the journal Pediatrics several years ago asserting that while the average age of the onset of menstruation -- 12.88 years -- has not changed in white American girls, it has dropped by several months from 12.52 years to 12.16 years in African-American girls in the last 30 years"
(http://www.mindfully.org/Health/Early-Onset-Puberty.htm
Posted by: niki delson | May 31, 2007 at 11:59 AM
I'm not sure that I see your point. Are you arguing that it's somehow all right and "normal" for young teenagers to be having sex? I think quite a bit of this country (myself included) would disagree about that. There is nothing normal about 12 year olds having sex, certainly not with older partners. If anything it shows the problem with our overly sexualized culture - teenage promiscuity is something we should try to prevent, not encourage.
Are we actually prosecuting people for sexual activity with people the same age? I don't see evidence of that. But it is a fact that an 18 year old is MUCH more mature than a 14 or 15 year old. Disparaties that large preclude consent - it's simply not possible, any more than for someone who is drunk or otherwise incapacitated. While perhaps not as bad as some other sexual crimes, taking advantage of younger teens like that certainly merits punishment. If the offenders are adults, and the victims are not, I don't really see the problem here. They would get the full penalty if they shot someone - why not for taking advantage of younger kids? I think there are a lot of cases where 18 year olds are not mature enough to make responsible decisions. But our law does not.
Posted by: jvarisco | June 01, 2007 at 05:30 AM
Are you arguing that it's somehow all right and "normal" for young teenagers to be having sex?
You are fusing "normal" (that is a statistical term) with "alright" - (that is a moral term.) What is moral is relative to time, place culture etc. For example, there are indigenous cultures where puberty marks the beginning of a child's entry into adulthood including their sexual life. It was not that long ago that our grandparents married at 16 and started their families.
Yes, we are prosecuting children who are the same age .. examples cited in the article were the case in Utah, and Genalow Wilson - He was 17 his girlfriend 15.
I have been involved in numerous cases where the teenagers were less than 2 years apart. The girl though younger was developmentally equal to her partner. She was as willing as her partner. He was prosecuted.
Posted by: niki delson | June 01, 2007 at 03:28 PM
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/viewArticle.asp?articleID=28524
Sex! We are obsessed, stimulating ourselves through the media, exposing ourselves to non stop sexual images, using sex to sell everything from shaving cream to children’s underwear. We are also horrified by our concerns with sexual abuse, child molesters, Sexually transmitted diseases and a belief that sexually expression in childhood may lead to sexual misbehavior in adolescence and adult sexual offending. Our obsession with and horror about sex, have paradoxically generated both great sexual freedom and draconian laws which unfortunately have several (largely unintended) negative consequences. These may be summarized as follows:
1. Legal age of consent is out of sync with normal sexual development and adolescents are given conflicting and many confusing messages about sexual behavior. For example, they can generally consent to abortion and obtain birth control at age 12 but cannot consent to sex until 16 or 18 (depending on the state). As a result, many are being convicted of felonies for developmentally normal behaviors and having to register as sex offenders for the remainder of their lives.
2. Pre-pubescent children are being ostracized (and occasionally even criminalized) for sexual behavior that is often normal or at worst, an annoying means of attention seeking.
3. Mandatory child abuse reporting laws, originally designed to protect children have been expanded to identifying offenders, making it virtually impossible for them to enter treatment on their own initiative without first suffering severe legal consequences.
4. Under the guise of “protecting our communities,” without a shred of empirical support and in spite of significant empirical evidence to the contrary, sex offenders who served their sentences are being forced to leave their homes (and sometimes families) because they live too close to a schools, playgrounds or parks. In most instances destabilizing these men is patently unfair and in some cases it tends to make them more rather than less dangerous.
In this article I will examine the first of these consequences in greater detail.
Beginning with puberty (average age around 12), sexual thoughts and urges become increasingly stronger and more frequent. Exploring, expressing and learning to manage sexuality is one of the most important developmental tasks of the teenage years and occasional behavior based on poor judgment is obviously inevitable. But the age of consent, which varies somewhat from state to state, is out of sync with normal sexual development in every state. Consequently, adolescents are increasingly being charged with felonies for ordinary, consensual and developmentally normal behaviors. Consider the situation reported by Pamela Manson of the Salt Lake City Tribune (http://sadlynormal.wordpress.com/2006/12/06/ut-teen-both-a-perpetrator-and-victim-of-sex-offense-presents-legal-puzzle/ )
Utah Supreme Court justices acknowledged Tuesday that they were struggling to wrap their minds around the concept that a 13-year-old Ogden girl could be both an offender and a victim for the same act - in this case, having consensual sex with her 12-year-old boyfriend.
The girl was put in this odd position because she was found guilty of violating a state law that prohibits sex with someone under age 14. She also was the victim in the case against her boyfriend, who was found guilty of the same violation by engaging in sexual activity with her.
Clearly, normal adolescent sexual behaviors have been classified as illegal activities, often labeled “deviant” and therefore worthy of punishment and treatment.
Before we start labeling sexually active teens as deviant, it would be helpful to know what is considered “normal” sexual behavior for adolescents. The dictionary definition of “deviant” is:
deviating or departing from the norm; characterized by deviation: deviant social behavior.ORa person whose behavior deviates from what is acceptable especially in sexual behavior [syn: pervert]
According to the Child Trends Data Bank: (http://www.childtrendsdatabank.org/childbearing.cfm)
1. Among young people ages 15 to 24 in 2002, 13 percent of females and 5 percent of males reported that their first sexual experience occurred at age 15 or younger with an individual who was three or more years older
2. In 2002, approximately 25% of teens ages 15 to 19 who had not had sexual intercourse, engaged in oral sex with an opposite sex partner.
3. In 2005 47% of high school students had experienced sexual intercourse. The percentage of students who are sexually experienced increases by grade. In 2005, 34 percent of ninth graders had ever had sexual intercourse, compared with 63 percent of twelfth graders.
Age of Consent Laws were originally written to protect children from forced prostitution. Even 1890’s reformers recognized that prosecuting post-pubescent teenagers was not only senseless but undermined the intention of protective legislation (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_4_35/ai_88583554)
The Society (for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) concerned itself only with those under the age of sixteen years, arguing that by that age the onset of puberty would have occurred, bringing with it the physical strength and "higher intelligence and greater strength of will" that distinguished adults from children.
When campaigns by other purity reformers succeeded in raising the age of consent to eighteen years, Elbridge Gerry, the NYSPCC President, complained that the age was now set beyond the time when "a girl became a woman." Not only would it be impossible to obtain any convictions in cases that involved the sixteen and seventeen year old girls, he lamented, but the effort to prosecute such cases would undermine the legitimacy of the law, making it more difficult to win convictions in cases involving girls under the age of sixteen (late 19th Century).
But now these same laws are being used to criminalize virtually all teenage sexuality. One can certainly argue that engaging in sex is not good for teens because it risks unwanted pregnancy, STD’s, and social/emotional entanglements they may have difficulty managing. However for all the reasons Eldrige Gerry foresaw and some he didn’t, criminalizing the behavior is one of the worst possible strategies for protecting them. Do we REALLY want to prosecute the 14 year old Utah girl and make her into a life-long registered sex offender? Is she THAT dangerous?
Criminalizing normative teenage sexual behavior has the unfortunate outcome of placing sexually active teens on the same sex offender registry as predatory pedophiles. For example,18 year old Joshua Lunsford, the brother of Jessica Lunsford, for whom Jessica’s Laws are named, was recently arrested (http://www.moraloutrage.net/article.php?story=20070527141858433) for “unlawful sexual conduct” with a 14 year old. If convicted, he will be required to register under the same laws as John Couey – his sister’s murderer.
Or, ponder the fate of Genalow Wilson, who at age 17 had consensual oral sex with his 15 year old girlfriend. For this “felony” he is presently serving 10 years without possibility of parole in a Georgia prison.
What makes this case more absurd is that if Mr. Wilson and the young woman had sexual intercourse, he would have been guilty only of a misdemeanor and not required to register as a sex offender, thanks to a provision in the law meant to avoid just this type of draconian punishment for consensual youthful indiscretions, the “Romeo and Juliet” exception. (Free Genalow Wilson)( http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/opinion/21thu4.html?ex=1324357200&en=51de6bd7030c60c0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland)
As Wilson's trial was unfolding, a 27-year-old teacher was being found guilty just down the hall of sex with a 17-year-old student -- the kind of crime for which child molestation statutes were written. She got three years of probation and 90 days in jail. http://www.miamiherald.com/285/story/60572.html
Our culture sensationalizes sex for profit … whether we are selling clothing, toys television shows or 24/7 infotainment. One problem with this is that it’s a kind of “addiction”. Over time we become increasingly numbed to content that once excited us, so we demand more and better. Maintaining viewer interest requires the media to constantly find new things to alarm us. The end result has been moral panic about all sexual misbehavior. (If we were meth addicts instead of sexual infotainment addicts, we’d be “tweaking” at this point.)
Moral panics (http://www.state.nj.us/corrections/REU/pdf/Moral_Panic.pdf) have been described as a condition, episode, person or group of persons, which emerge to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. These threats are designed in a sensationalized fashion by the media as well as other agents of social control, including politicians, law enforcement and religious leaders, with the intention of establishing meaningful parameters for acceptable societal behavior.)
Moral panics (http://www.mediaknowall.com/violence/moralpanicnotes.html)then, are those processes whereby members of a society and culture become 'morally sensitized' to the challenges and menaces posed to 'their' accepted values and ways of life, by the activities of groups defined as deviant. The process underscores the importance of the mass media in providing, maintaining and 'policing' the available frameworks and definitions of deviance, which structure both public awareness of, and attitudes towards, social problems."
So who are WE in the matter? We have become complacent and satisfied with expressing our outrage without exploring how we contribute to it. Advertisers use sex to sell products because WE buy more them when they do. We watch “To Catch a Predator” and feel comforted to know that Chris Hanson and Perverted Justice have already exposed 200 potential child abusers. But the producers don’t ask us to consider what it says about human nature that so many men, even with the notoriety of the show, will seek out a sexual encounter with a teen. The audience would probably shrink away with the first mention that male sexual interest in teenage girls is normal or that research does not support that teens are always harmed by sexual experiences with an adult.
Movie legend Kirk Douglas (http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/article/douglas%20was%20willing%20victim%20of%20statutory%20rape_1019967)became a willing victim of statutory rape when he lost his virginity to a school teacher aged just 15. In his forthcoming autobiography LET'S FACE IT - 90 YEARS OF LIVING, LOVING AND LEARNING, the veteran actor confesses he didn't realise (sic) his lover could face prison for their affair, but still doesn't regret a thing. Recalling the tryst he writes, "I had been a ragamuffin kid of 15 coping with a neighbourhood (sic) filled with gangs... Under her guidance I became a different person. I am eternally grateful. "By today's standards she would have gone to jail. I had no idea we were doing something wrong. Did she?"
But that conversation is not popular and not widely engaged in, at least openly. The blueprint for ”To Catch a Predator”, for the politics around sexual crimes, for the exceedingly harsh penalties for sexual misbehavior is in the message that it we need to watch out for “them” not “us.”. As long as we language the dialogue in this fashion we will continue down the path of creating more victims than we protect. Just ask Genalaw Wilson, Josh Lundsford, and a 14-year old girl in Utah who we are “protecting” by withholding her name while ruining her life.
Posted by: ZMan | June 02, 2007 at 01:44 PM
This is a SHAME !!! Remember what you were doing when you were 17 years old.. Remember this could be you if the law had been in place 30 years ago.
Posted by: Sondra Smith | June 14, 2007 at 09:07 AM
I think it is tragic that our country is continuing to prosecute and ruin the lives of our young people in this manner. Our children under 18 aren't allowed to sign and be held accountable for a credit card or car because they do not understand the consequences. They are not allowed to vote, buy cigarettes, or even vote for the people creating the laws that are potentially destroying their lives. Yet they are supposed to understand that having a consensual relationship with another student at their high school is illegal just because of a year or two age difference. We are holding them accountable for laws that were intended to protect our youth from predators. The heart of the law is not being followed, instead prosecutors are taking cases they can win, and are creating a mockery of our sex offender system. I don't want to see two teenagers that were experimenting when I look up sex offenders. I want to see who the real threats are to my children. What a waste of our time and money, what a waste of youths future.
At some point - we should say this is enough. We should enact legislation, that continues to protect our youth from predators, yet protects our young people from vicious and vengeful prosecution.
Posted by: Jeannette | June 20, 2007 at 04:29 PM