The pros and cons of statutory rape laws
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Statutory rape is sex between an adult and a minor, while aggravated child molestation also involves an injury. At the time of his offense, Dixon was an 18-year-old high school football player who had sex with a 15-year-old female classmate. The aggravated child molestation statute mandates a ten-year minimum sentence, and Dixon challenges the harshness of the resulting penalty. The case has attracted claims of racism, because the victim was a white girl and the convict an outstanding African-American student with a football scholarship to Vanderbilt. One provocative underlying (though unstated) question that has contributed to the notoriety of this case is whether the law can legitimately send teenagers to prison for having sex with other teenagers, in the absence of force. Because every state has a statutory rape law in some form, this case presents a challenge to a long and continuing tradition of criminal laws that confine men for what could be consensual sex with minors who are close to the age of majority. Such liability is controversial in a number of ways, but it also has some benefits that are often overlooked by critics, thus leaving us with a difficult dilemma that admits of no easy answers. Statutory rape laws have a checkered past. A primary purpose was to guard the virginity of young maidens against seduction by unscrupulous cads. To give up one’s “virtue” to a man who was unwilling to pay with his hand in marriage was foolish and presumptively a product of youthful, poor judgment. Such laws had more to do with preserving female virginity than with the force and violence that define rape. One sign of this is the fact that a man could (and in some states still can) defend himself against statutory rape charges by proving that his victim was already sexually experienced prior to their encounter (and thus not subject to being corrupted by the defendant). Despite their unsavory beginnings, however, some feminists have favored these laws as well. Progressive women supported such statutes mainly as measures to help combat the sexual abuse of young girls. Though a statutory rape charge would not require proof of force or coercion, feminists observed, young girls were (and may continue to be) especially vulnerable to being raped by the adults in their lives. In one study, for example, seventy-four percent of women who had intercourse before age fourteen and sixty percent of those who had sex before age fifteen report having had a forced sexual experience. In addition, prosecutors attempting to prove rape in court have historically faced significant burdens, such as corroboration requirements premised on the complaining witness’s presumptive lack of credibility. For many years, legal thinkers like Eighteenth Century British Jurist Sir Matthew Hale were convinced that rape “is an accusation easily to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, though never so innocent.” Thus, rape law did not provide a reliable or efficacious vehicle for addressing most sexual violence, and it continues to be of limited utility for acquaintance rapes, as I discussed in an earlier column. For this reason too, feminists may have viewed statutory rape laws as a godsend. As long as there was sexual intercourse and an under-age victim, the jury could convict. And more importantly, that possibility itself might deter real sexual abuse. Source : edition.cnn.com |