Age of Consent and Statutory Rape
Excerpts on this page all come from Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine.
[…] statutory rape is not about sex the victim says she did not want. It is about sex she did want but which adults believe she only thought she wanted because she wasn’t old enough to know she did not want it.
The age of consent and statutory rape laws started to protect the virginity of girls, because virginity was associated with value and “virtue.” The virginity of girls would belong to their father until they were married. Girls were also thought to be desireless and easily prone to manipulation, they were believed to need protection from their incompetency to say “yes” or “no”—Much like young people on the whole are now. In the early 1990s, girls who did express desire and agency were charged with “precocious sexuality,” were shamed, and as punishment were sent to reform schools. Something parent’s (who were trying to use the court system to control their child) typically didn’t expect or desire.
Though it’s prevented in modern western culture due to our opinions and feelings about sex, historically (and presently, in other cultures) youths would observe adult sexual activity and engage in “sexual rehearsal play,” with peers, similar to other primates. As someone reaches puberty, the time when our bodies are biologically preparing to begin reproduction, sexual interest starts to increase. What makes key parts of our natural biological and sexual developmental processes harmful? I’ve yet to see any supporting evidence for innate harms, outside of religious values and over-generalizations that use actual sexual abuse and rape as a cover for all sexual activity, even willing and desired.
Not that long ago, children learning about sex through watching adults was standard even in America. Before the eighteenth century, children in America were considered to be “conceived and born in sin” and it was believed that through religion and socialization they were capable of salvation. The goal was for children to become more adultlike as soon as possible, so children would share beds with their parents and were allowed to witness sex so that they could learn from adults. In the nineteenth century the view swung to the opposite—The concept of “childhood innocence” was established and children were guarded from witnessing adult sexual activities to prevent them from learning, which became seen as “corruption.” Here’s a link to a book that covers that history.
In the late 1800s in London, poor and working-class youths had some sexual freedoms as a result of being out on their own. Without parents looking over them, they were freer to explore. Some teenagers also engaged in sex work to supplement their earnings. However, at this point, innocence was regarded a virtue, and becoming more adult was viewed as corruption. So this sexual freedom offended the values of adults, alongside more reasonable concerns about factory working conditions.
Then in 1885, the concept of the “white slaver” was born. “The Maiden Tribute of Babylon” was a series of newspaper articles covering the exploration of this newfound sexual freedom of youths—from the angle of fearmongering. Because it offended the morals of adults, it was spun in a purely negative light. The autonomy of the teenagers was not considered other than to argue it didn’t exist at all. The articles claimed an epidemic of child trafficking, in which victims were forced into prostitution and sold by their parents.
According to one historian, Judith Walkowitz, the claims made about this “white slavery” epidemic were fabrications of sensational journalism. Despite the lack of scientific data, following these articles, the age of consent rose from 13 to 16.
About a decade later in America, similar events unfolded as immigrants began pouring into cities. Prostitution increased, but child prostitution specifically was near nonexistent. One figure reported in New York suffragist press was multiplied tenfold from probable reality. In response to these fears of child prostitution, between 1886 and 1895, twenty-nine states raised the age of consent from as low as seven to as high as eighteen.
Teenagers had more sexual autonomy than today in the 1970s. Following Roe v. Wade in 1973, birth control was made more available to young and poor women, and this led to an influx of research and data on teenage sex, pregnancy, and abortion. The Alan Guttmacher Institute released Eleven Million Teenagers, in which they announced an epidemic of teen pregnancies. Though this wasn’t intended to be used to prevent all teenagers from having sex, that’s the angle religious and sex-negative conservatives took.
“Unwanted pregnancy is happening to our young women, not only among the poor and minority groups, but in all socioeconomic groups,” the president told Congress. “If I had a daughter, I would say [it was happening] to ‘our’ daughters.”
This was not accurate. First of all, unwanted pregnancy, for the most part, was not happening to the daughters of demographers, doctors, and Washington bureaucrats. Now as then, more than 80 percent of America’s teen mothers come from poor households. And even among these young women, there was no epidemic. Eleven million referred to the number of people under eighteen who had had intercourse at least once. Teen pregnancies actually numbered fewer than a million a year, and of those teen mothers, six in ten were legal adults, eighteen to nineteen years old.
In his July 1981 committee report on S. 1090, Denton quoted the statistics promulgated by the Guttmacher Institute (he was probably unaware the organization was named for one of history’s great champions of abortion rights). The senator declared that the government should address the “needs of pregnant adolescents” and proposed a prescription that the entire family-planning profession could applaud: more prevention.
But prevention of what? Poverty? Teen pregnancy? Unwed motherhood? Abortion? Denton claimed he could eradicate all of the above by preventing what he saw as the cause of them all: teen sex. In what would become the central maneuver in the conservative rhetoric of teen sexuality over the next decades, Denton collapsed four separate events—sex, pregnancy, birth, and abortion—into one “widespread problem.” He attributed “serious medical, social, and economic consequences” to all four and then wrapped them into one whopper: “the problem of premarital adolescent sexual relations.”
This “problem” had been exacerbated by a decade of social policy, which he and Hatch summed up in a letter to the New York Times as “$1.5 billion of taxpayers” money [spent] on “family planning.” Contraception and abortion, they reasoned, had led to teen sex, which led to pregnancy. The logical sleight of hand was impressive: contraception and abortion caused teen pregnancy.
But the real trouble, as the sponsors saw it, was not just adolescent sex. It was sex behind Mom and Dad’s backs. “The deep pocket of government has funded this intervention between parents and their children in schools and clinics for 10 years,” wrote Hatch and Denton. “[I]t is little wonder that problems of adolescent sexual activity grow worse.” In other words, clinics that offered confidential services to adolescents, as the Supreme Court had ordered in 1977, were ripping the family apart by promoting children’s liberation at the expense of a newly articulated subset of family values, “parental rights.” (Later, in conservative parlance, “parents” would become “families,” implying a harmonious and cooperative unit without gender or generational conflict.)
AFLA “was written expressly for the purpose of diverting [federal] money that would otherwise go to Planned Parenthood into groups with traditional values,” a Conservative Digest writer reported. “That noble purpose has certainly been fulfilled here. If it hadn’t been for the seed money provided by the government, ‘Sex Respect’ might still be just an idea sitting in a graduate student’s thesis.” Said former SIECUS spokesman Daniel Daley in 1997, “In those first years of AFLA, this money went directly from the government to Christian fundamentalist groups, who built the infrastructure of the organizations that are the most vehement opponents of comprehensive sexuality education today.”
“Unwanted pregnancy is happening to our young women, not only among the poor and minority groups, but in all socioeconomic groups”—Somehow, I doubt they asked if it was wanted. And, with access to abortion, it wouldn’t matter. Except that directly goes against their values, they don’t want teen (pre-marital) sex or abortions. So it was spun with the angle of “protecting the young,” but it was ideological and political.
In Orange County, California, after Governor Wilson’s program went into effect, state social service agency workers surreptitiously arranged marriages between their pregnant clients, some as young as thirteen, and the adult fathers of their babies, in order to prevent prosecution that would break up intact relationships. And among their intended beneficiaries, such laws met with near universal scorn. “Let’s say [the guy] goes to jail,” a teen mother in San Jose patiently explained to a reporter. “She’s not going to get any support. She’s going to end up on welfare.” Queried about the antifornication crusade, Gem County high school kids called it preposterously intrusive, not to mention futile in preventing future pregnancies. The students, half of whom had already had sex, proposed a less punitive strategy for ameliorating the pregnancy problem: in one survey 79 percent said they wanted better sex education.
In 1996, Gem County, Idaho, prosecuting attorney Douglas R. Varier went one step further: he criminalized all teen sex that resulted in pregnancy. Exhuming a 1921 law against fornication, or sex between unmarried persons, he charged a group of pregnant teens and their boyfriends.
Twenty years later, the Right has all but won the sex-education wars. In 1997, the U.S. Congress committed a quarter billion dollars over five years’ time to finance more education in chastity […] As part of the omnibus “welfare reform bill,” the government’s Maternal and Child Health Bureau extended grants to the states for programs whose “exclusive purpose [is] teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity.” In a country where only one in ten school-children receives more than forty hours of sex ed in any year, the regulations prohibit funded organizations from instructing kids about contraception or condoms except in terms of their failures […] Nonmarital sex, educators are required to tell children, “is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”
501 (b): Abstinence Education, of the Social Security Act of 1997. To receive money from Washington, states would have to match each federal dollar with two from their own coffers that might otherwise go to more catholic programs. Not only was the federal government encouraging abstinence-only; it was discouraging everything else.
If you want to read more about abstinence education I recommend reading the book yourself, or the excerpts I’ve compiled, but to summarize: Abstinence education doesn’t work, and actually probably gives young people the impression condoms don’t work, so they’re less likely to use condoms when they do have sex. In most of Europe, where they have comprehensive sex-ed, teen pregnancy rates have been lower than they are in America.
Unlike girls, boys were assumed to intrinsically want sex—and perhaps originally they were thought more mentally competent to say “yes” and “no”—so they were not originally covered in age of consent and statutory rape laws in America. Laws only somewhat recently (1981) expanded to boys, after the notion of sex in general being harmful to young people spread. This was in large part because feminists made a connection between sexual abuse (as in, any sexual contact between an adult and youth, regardless of the youth’s perspective) and rape. This later expanded to child protection workers who latched onto PTSD to explain negative psychological outcomes in regards to CSA.
The intent behind this connection to PTSD was to get people to take child sexual abuse more seriously, but there were flaws. Sexual abuse and rape can overlap but have very different psychological outcomes, CSA rarely fits the PTSD model—but rape does fit the model. Rape is, by nature, forceful and can arouse intense fear, sexual abuse is usually not forceful and rarely arouses much (or any) fear at all. This confusion hurts people who do experience sexual abuse as children, because they feel there’s something wrong with them for not resisting. Only recently have researchers been questioning that it might not the sexual stimuli with an adult that causes psychological harm, but the societal framing that instills guilt and shame.
Anyway, feminists believed CSA was epidemic, and that a “conspiracy of silence” was protecting male predators and allowing the sexual abuse of girls (and, to a lesser extent, boys), and as such heavily pushed the agenda that all adult/minor sexual contact was abuse. To deny this was to protect predatory men, so there was no room for considering any youth’s perspective. I think in part this is just the demonization of male sexuality, alongside the value of innocence being assumed an innate trait that makes sex exploitative and harmful.
Religious conservatives, who desired purity and preserving virginity, also played a role. An alliance between feminists and religious conservatives is what established the current narrative and laws regarding AMSC. It’s this alliance that still maintains the current attitudes and outlooks on this topic. It’s a very ugly pairing, as both sides claim to prioritize youths while speaking over them consistently while ignoring their experiences and perspectives.
There was no nuance here about the youths desires or perspectives. Nobody thought to ask, because adults prefer to control young people in line with their own worldviews—which, of course, they claim is really concern—because they believe young people are incompetent to choose. One can make a case for the developmental limitations of young children, but teenagers are clearly developmentally different. Like I covered on page 4, research has found adolescents competent to make informed choices at 11, and found no real differences between 16 year olds and adults.
This research is useful, but it’s also based in a society where we artificially stunt the intellectual growth of our young (read Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto). Who can really say how competent a young person might be in an environment that actively supports their intellectual development; one which allows them to take risks and pursue goals without helicopter-adults restricting their learning opportunities by demanding they rely on adult guidance at all turns.
Currently even consensual sexual acts between two children are often considered sexual abuse. In these cases, the older youth can be deemed a sex offender for life and forced into a treatment program (such programs are often abusive themselves), even if the sexual acts weren’t forceful or distressing to the younger party.
That is the end result of “sex is harmful to minors.” Young people are harmed, by adult society, for engaging in sex acts—Whether they do so with another youth or an adult. Their desires and mental well-being are secondary to control and punishment. In cases of statutory rape, it’s nearly always parents, not teenagers, that aim to persecute the adult. The desires and discomfort of the youth are not prioritized, because they are considered property of their parents. The formation of the law is to serve the parents, not the youths.
No other animal obsesses about restricting sexual expression the way humans do, and I believe this is because we deny our animal nature and get lost in cultural norms. We find comfort in the idea we’re in control as a species, that we’re smart and know what we’re doing, that we know where we’re going long-term—or that at least those in power do (they don’t)—or maybe that there’s some god looking down on us that thinks we’re special and is here to guide us.
Those are all false comforts. In trying to avoid our animal nature and be accepted, we cling to subjective values that shame parts of our nature. Sex is only one part of this. Nudity (displaying our own forms) is often illegal, so is relieving our bladders or bowels outside. Being considered messy is shameful, so is even having body hair! We’ve become disgusted by our natural state, because we’ve spent so long distancing from it and presenting a clean, artificial, image instead. Seeing the messy and authentic nature of others offends us, because it reminds us what we really are—something we strive to distance from.
This is made worse by our cultural norms. As a social species we fear rejection. And of course, we fear punishment too. We’ve built entire institutions that punish what would originally be considered natural behaviors, whether those behaviors are actually harmful or not. We punish those who don’t conform to our subjective values, both “victims” and “perpetrators.” If they question these values, they are wrong and must be reeducated. This is why statutory rape laws ignore research and perspectives, it’s about enforcing values.
Religious conservatives like to refer to a mythical golden age of purity and chastity. Mythical, because it has never existed. Sexual behavior we deem “deviant” now is not new. Those who believe in a society of “traditional values” also believe in punishing “degenerates,” who they feel represent the moral falling-apart of society.
I think the opposite is true. The first definition of “degenerate” in the American Heritage Dictionary is “morally corrupt or given to vice,” and of course, morals are subjective, and “giving in to vice” is not necessarily always bad—But the second definition is “Having declined, as in function or nature, from a former or original state.” And that is not subjective, it’s objectively correct. Humans are very far from our original state. How could you say we haven’t declined? Consider the rising rates of addiction, obesity, greed, mental health issues… And we’re controlled by governing bodies who care about managing us as numbers, rather than managing ourselves as individuals. We once lived in communities, and now we live in pens separate from one another. Most of our connections are shallow, because we wear social masks—We’re afraid of judgement, so we’re inauthentic. We’re scared of authenticity and sharing vulnerability with our own kind. We’re far from our natural state.
Looking at it this way, the restrictive moral values are the cause of our true “degeneration.”
The values we have now were invented and they threaten to restrict us more and more. They deny our animal nature and villainize it, after all, cross-species sex is common, and so is intergenerational sex between bonobos, who are some of our closest relatives. We internalize shame for appearances that are natural rather than the desired plastic. We conceal our skin with paste because it has natural blemishes. We hide scars. We shave body hair. We obsessively conform to the standards and values presented to us, because we fear rejection.
Why should our natural selves be considered worthy of rejection? And if someone would reject us for it, isn’t that their problem? This way of thinking was what the Cynics of Athens promoted. Diogenes, who is considered the icon of the Cynics, is know for his search of an “honest man” carrying a lantern in daylight. What he’s believed to have meant was an “authentic human being”—A human who does not wear a mask and pretend to be something other than the animal which they are. Embracing our animal nature was the message of the Cynics, which they believed would lead to true happiness.
I’m sure if there was a resurgence of Cynicism now, religious conservatives would consider them degenerates as well, for embracing animal nature and the “sexual deviance” that comes with it. After all, the Cynics had sex and defecated in public. They were called “the dogs of Athens,” a label they reclaimed and wore with pride. They would actually bark at people who were rude to them! They called themselves “the watchdogs of humanity” because they believed human’s had strayed from virtue by straying from their own nature.
I think we deny our animal nature because we fear it. We fear the lack of meaning we’ve come to know and direction and it gives us; the lack of control; the reminder of an uncertain mortality where no afterlife is promised. We rely on our established sense of meaning and our values to comfort those fears. Unfortunately, many of the values we cling to harm us by creating a more hostile and controlling society. There has to be balance. We can’t deny our nature entirely and also be truly happy in ourselves.
Controlling teenager’s expressions of sexuality is simply that—trying to control our nature. There’s no evidence of sex itself being harmful, so what gives some humans the right to control the autonomous decisions of other humans?
I’m sure the Cynics were far happier than people who fear change, natural expression, their own bodies, and as a result focus on trying to control others. And like I said elsewhere, religious conservatives tend to commit more sex crimes. The whole sexual repression thing doesn’t work well for them—It rebounds. This is consistent with the fact that as porn is made more available, sex crimes decrease, and that those who commit sex crimes generally consume less porn. Sexual repression has negative effects.
If our desires come from within, even without the access to stimuli, wiping all sexual stimuli (of any kind, “problematic” or not) will never eradicate the “deviance” that lives within us all.
Moving on to the negative impacts of statutory rape laws!
here’s another quote, from Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine:
Many psychologists believe that adults’ reactions even to certifiable sexual abuse can exacerbate the situation for the child, both in the short and in the long-term. “There is often as much harm done to the child by the system’s handling of the case as the trauma associated with the abuse,” the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect reported in 1978 […] When the youngster has had what she considers a relationship of love and consensual sex, it does no good to tell her she has been manipulated and victimized. “To send out the message that you’ve been ruined for life and this person was vile and they were pretending to care—that often does a lot of damage,” commented Fred Berlin, a psychiatrist at John Hopkins University and a well respected expert on treating sex offenders.
As I said before, both “victims” and “perpetrators” are punished by these laws. If a “victim” does not feel like a victim, then they’re told they’re too young (and stupid) to know how they feel or why they should feel that way (which is based on an established adult worldview). They’re gaslit about their experiences, they’re told they’re damaged forever, they’re told they weren’t cared about—regardless of how the relationship actually played out.
They may not want legal proceedings, they may feel embarrassed or ashamed having their relationship and sexuality aired out (they may even be shamed for it by peers or adults!), they may hurt because they feel bad seeing their lover suffer as well. And of course the forceful separation, if it was a loving partnership, is bound to cause psychological harm as well.
How much harm must come from being told your feelings don’t matter (because they aren’t real, or they’re meaningless because they’re “incorrect’), that your desires don’t matter, that you don’t own your own body, that you’re incapable of knowing how to make decisions, and that you were never cared about at all? This is a large focus of research into secondary harm for instances of AMSC. I linked it earlier, but I’ll link it again. The link goes to a sizable collection of research on secondary harm.
Another aspect of harm is that many charges of statutory rape come after a young woman is found pregnant. In charging and imprisoning the father, he is unable to pay child support or play an active role in the child’s life, or support the young mother in other ways. This will make things harder on the mother. Assuming a loving relationship, the unjust separation will hurt all the more.
Though our modern western society villainizes sympathizing with “sex offenders” especially any involved with youth, I’ll also say I don’t think its reasonable to punish people (legally or socially) for cases in which the “victim” does not even feel like a victim, nor desires any kind of prosecution. The extent of demonization is very disproportionate.
Sex crimes seem to elicit more outrage than even violent crimes do. I think this is because of our obsession with values centered around sex, and because I believe we attempt to suppress our own “deviance”—which I believe is species-wide. Before we had religious doctrines to follow, I think it’s safe to assume we were probably similar to Bonobos (chimps mate for reproduction primarily, but bonobos have all kinds of sex for pleasure and bonding), which would imply we’re all “sexual deviants” deep down. But that contradicts our sexually oppressive puritanical values. To suppress any chance of discovering our own deviance, we attack deviance instead to distance ourselves (internally and socially) from the perceived threat. Because if it’s in some humans, it has the potential to be in all humans, and who wants to be the outcast who defies the culture-based morals? Not many.
On the note of sex crimes and sexual abuse eliciting more outrage than other crimes and other forms of abuse, here is some research that has found childhood emotional abuse generally has more negative psychological effects than both child sexual abuse and physical child abuse combined. Some researchers also believe emotional abuse may be more common, because it’s vastly under-reported and under-recognized.
Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to start making wood chipper memes about emotionally abusive parents. Impacts of harm against young people is not the concern—it’s the confrontation and challenging of our established cultural values.