aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Age of consent: young love as sex crime
Frank and Nikki Rodriguez are married with four children. He is on the Texas State Sex Offender registry because the couple had sex when he was 19 and she was 15, below the age of consent in the state. [...]
Twelve years ago, Frank Rodriguez pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a child.
Faced with two to 20 years in prison on the charge, he signed a plea bargain that gave him seven years probation. He was told he must never be near children. That meant he couldn’t be any place where children gather, like playgrounds or parks, which made it tough to find work.
It’s a story we’ve heard all too many times before. What’s the crime here? Still, he’s a registered sex offender for life. And still, the lawmaker defends the law saying, “it’s the law.” As if that’s some kind of rational justification when we know the laws don’t work, residency restrictions don’t work, judges need leeway in teen sex cases, and parents need to start talking to their kids about sex.
What’s particularly striking about the Texas case highlighted in the 20/20 piece is that the girl’s mom knew about the boy, took the girl to the birth control clinic, then brought in the police. She regrets that now:
“If I would have known that the seriousness of what I was doing I would not have filed charges,” she said. “I love Frank and he is good to my grandbabies and he is good to my daughter, and it just breaks my heart that for the rest of his life he’s gonna be labeled a sex offender.”
I am struck that people think the police are there to be the enforcers of their private disputes. I have my nephew living with me now. His parents divorced when he was very young and throughout his life both his mother and his father would call the police on one another to try to enforce this or that provision of their animosity on the other. My nephew now wants to act that out in my home. I fight against it.
The law is a blunt force instrument of last resort; a fuse that once lit can’t be stopped. All of us are too quick to use it. These are difficult problems that we don’t know how to handle so it’s easier to hand them off to someone else. Unfortunately, it seems elected officials are all too happy to go there (cops, on the other had, are put in the uncomfortable situation of having to walk into the middle of it and deal).
If the legal solutions are bad—and to date, they have been—those we have seen from the media are even worse (Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator” is just one egregious example). So into that now 20/20 weighs in with a viewer poll asking how old we think the age of consent should be. They promise a follow up next week.
Much as I might hope they’d shed some light, I’m not optimistic. The question, as phrased, is too simplistic for the age we live in as I learned from William Saletan who writes for Slate in this piece on rethinking the age of consent.
He begins by walking us through some history—“The original age of consent, codified in English common law and later adopted by the American colonies, ranged from 10 to 12”—and 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 looks 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.
I sent the piece to the 20/20 producers. Let’s see what they come up with next week.
