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Comments (6)
People need to be careful about language. It's not "an affair" or a "sexual relationship".
It's rape.
Posted by Ed Mechmann | September 4, 2009 9:29 AM
Just to be clear -- that was not a slap at Maximos, but at the news media, which repeatedly uses those terms to describe the rape of minor girls by adult men.
Posted by Ed Mechmann | September 4, 2009 9:31 AM
In England it is regarded as an affair. There was an infamous case a couple of years ago--I can't remember the girl's name--in England, where the child welfare people showed up at the girl's house only to collect her clothes for her and deliver them to her at the home of her 40-something-year-old school teacher, with whom she had decided to live. I believe she was 16 at the time. She rode the bus to school thereafter with the 14-year-old son of her lover, whose wife had left him when she found out about the goings-on with the teenage girl.
Posted by Lydia | September 4, 2009 9:58 AM
Ed, the law rightly provides that having sex with a girl too young cannot constitute consensual sex, and therefore the law treats it as rape.
Nevertheless, each jurisdiction sets its own defining boundary for that age. Many states have had 16 as the age, and in some places and times it has been 14. The boundary is not a hard, fast, fixed, objectively certain limit that is naturally obvious. It changes with culture.
It is undoubtedly the case that our culture is much more open to sex for young people than it was in the 1950's. I think that's a bad thing. However: there is something slightly ridiculous about claiming (for legal purposes, that is) that males and females are equal before the law, and then slapping a 17 year old boy with a statutory rape conviction when he has sex with a 17 year old girl, and not giving her the exact same treatment. And there is obviously something ridiculous culturally in giving a legal wink and hand-slap to two 17-year olds having (presumably consensual) sex, and then turning around and saying that an older man having sex with the same girl cannot possibly be consensual so it must be statutory rape.
I have little doubt that this man was in some sense pressuring the girl in a way that is entirely unbecoming both for a 40-year old, and for a teacher, and ESPECIALLY for her teacher. But that does not make it rape automatically. I would suggest that calling it rape is, at least possibly, not representative of the real facts. For one thing, do we have any knowledge of which party initiated the situation with something other than teacher/student form of relationship?
Posted by Tony | September 6, 2009 3:25 PM
You might be interested in this case where a Utah prosecutor charged a 12 year old and a 13 year old with raping each other.
At 17 she can drive, join the military with her parent's permission, is 1 year away from being at the age of majority, 1 year away from gaining the political power of the franchise, can be charged as an adult for any violent crime...
So are we saying that we trust a child to drive a 1 ton or more vehicle, wage war in the name of the United States, "become an adult" overnight, wield political power and be held accountable as a moral agent for the harm they inflict on others?
That sounds... an awful lot like what we'd expect from a young adult, not a child.
Posted by Mike T | September 10, 2009 2:54 PM
**The moment society admits that a teenager is a young adult capable of knowing and choosing good or evil, it must admit that either the restrictions on teenage sexuality are ridiculous or that the permissiveness toward adult sexuality is ridiculous. Something tells me that hell will freeze over before society concludes the latter, but c'est la vie...
Posted by Mike T | September 10, 2009 2:56 PM