aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Statutory rape reform: Stop locking up kids for being kids!
Police Chief James Strillacci says he’s upset that a young man he and his wife tried to help allegedly took advantage of their generosity.
West Hartford police Thursday arrested an 18-year-old man on charges that he had sex with a 15-year-old girl last month in Strillacci’s Robin Road apartment while the chief and his wife, Elisabeth, were asleep.
You may recall that sitting with a random group of six Georgia college-age kids last year, it emerged that two of them had high school friends who were charged as sex-offenders. The details they recounted revealed that their fellow students were normal healthy kids acting in normal healthy ways and they were not, the kids knew, sex-offenders at all.
We’re told that here in Georgia we have 1,100 kids locked up as sex offenders. Locking up kids and branding them sex offenders in the name of protecting them is a truly sad and sorry state of affairs. Something must be done about it.
Last week writing in Slate, William Saletan made some concrete proposals. Says he, it’s time to abandon the myth of the “age of consent.”
He begins by walking us through the history - “The original age of consent, codified in English common law and later adopted by the American colonies, ranged from 10 to 12” - then points out that as the age of consent has gone up, the age of puberty has gone down:
Having sex at 12 is a bad idea. But if you’re pubescent, it might be, in part, your bad idea. Conversely, having sex with a 12-year-old, when you’re 20, is scummy. But it doesn’t necessarily make you the kind of predator who has to be locked up. A guy who goes after 5-year-old girls is deeply pathological. A guy who goes after a womanly body that happens to be 13 years old is failing to regulate a natural attraction. That doesn’t excuse him. But it does justify treating him differently.
He goes on to look at research that finds differences in the age of physical, cognitive and emotional readiness and in that finds the beginnings of a logical scheme for regulating teen sex:
First comes the age at which your brain wants sex and your body signals to others that you’re ready for it. Then comes the age of cognitive competence. Then comes the age of emotional competence. Each of these thresholds should affect our expectations, and the expectations should apply to the older party in a relationship as well as to the younger one. The older you get, the higher the standard to which you should be held responsible.
The lowest standard is whether the partner you’re targeting is sexually developed as an object. If her body is childlike, you’re seriously twisted. But if it’s womanly, and you’re too young to think straight, maybe we’ll cut you some slack.
The next standard is whether your target is intellectually developed as a subject. We’re not talking about her body anymore; we’re talking about her mind. When you were younger, we cut you slack for thinking only about boobs. But now we expect you to think about whether she’s old enough to judge the physical and emotional risks of messing around. The same standards apply, in reverse, if you’re a woman.
It’s possible that you’ll think about these things but fail to restrain yourself. If you’re emotionally immature, we’ll take that into consideration. But once you cross the third line, the age of self-regulatory competence, we’ll throw the book at you.
Saletan sees “Age-span” provisions in the law as a good start, but Connecticut has one and in the case above we find this heart-rendering shortcoming:
An exception to the law makes the sex legal if the birthdates of the two teens are within a certain span. On Monday, a revised version of that law increased the allowable age gap from two to three years.
Armstrong, according to the affidavit, is three years and 15 days older than the girl.
Saletan’s proposal needs to be discussed, considered, codified and made into law:
I’d draw the object line at 12, the cognitive line at 16, and the self-regulatory line at 25. I’d lock up anyone who went after a 5-year-old. I’d come down hard on a 38-year-old who married a 15-year-old. And if I ran a college, I’d discipline professors for sleeping with freshmen. When you’re 35, “she’s legal” isn’t good enough.
What I wouldn’t do is slap a mandatory sentence on a 17-year-old, even if his nominal girlfriend were 12. I know the idea of sex at that age is hard to stomach. I wish our sexual, cognitive, and emotional maturation converged in a magic moment we could call the age of consent. But they don’t.
Via Gideon, “Taken advantage of [the police chief’s] generosity? By having sex with his girlfriend? Huh? He’s an 18-year old boy with a girlfriend. What did you expect?”
