Teen Sex and the Case of the Missing Double Standard
Posted By jss on March 23, 2009
Boy.
The Daily Beast carried a post on Thursday, March 19 headlined:
The Teen Rape Double Standard
which more or less nationalized a Sheboygan, Wisconsin story that was a tale of two teen-agers: A 17-year-old boy who faced up to 40 years in prison for having sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend; and a 17-year-old girl who faced lesser charges and only perhaps nine months in jail for having sex with her 14-year-old boyfriend.
The cases were being prosecuted by the same district attorney. The arrests happened in January.
Girl.
After appearing in The Beast, the story traveled far and wide. On the 20th, it hit Broadsheet at Salon.com, with a slightly different angle. Headline:
It’s only rape if the victim’s a girl?
Juicy stuff. And there’s a lot of interesting commentary about the case. Is sex between teen-agers a criminal matter? (Hardly ever, IMNSHO.) Is there a double standard? Sure there is.
There’s a journalism problem, though, and it should have been caught early on; except that these things often are NOT caught, these days, when “reporting” means, “I read this somewhere and now I’m going to spin it my way.”
Because the two teens, the boy and the girl, were sentenced before The Beast raised the double-standard question. And guess what? They got similar sentences. Neither is doing jail time.
17-year-olds get probation in separate underage sex cases
Ooops.
I wonder how many blogs are going to back up over this story …
… and look at what actually happened, in the end. Things actually evened out in court. No one went to jail. The teens involved are, presumably, back at the mercy of their parents.
Nothing to see here. Please move along.
But The Beast has had fair warning of all of this for days. Buried in the comments section on the “double standard” post are a few sentences from “BaldLaw” …
Folks,
I represented Alan in this case. I can tell you that on Tuesday, March 17, Alan plead No Contest to one count of 4th Degree Sexual Assault, a misdemeanor. The same judge who sentenced Ms. Guthrie sentenced Alan to roughly the same punishment that he gave to Ms. Guthrie.
My question to the couple of you who question my position on the criminal charges issued to high school kids having sex is, did you not have sex in high school? I was in high school from 1974 ’til 1978. I had sex in high school. Most everyone I knew in high school had sex. While I agree that we, as a society, shouldn’t encourage teen sex, I vehemently disagree that we should criminalize the behavior. With so many apt comments on this matter, from both sides, I encourage everyone to think about the overriding issue. State laws are making criminals out of kids who do the same things that the lawmakers, and their predecessors have done for quite some time. And let’s be honest … abstinence-only education simply does not work.So, what’s the answer? Create a huge number of high school convicts — some tagged as sex offenders? Or deal with teen sex from a more pragmatic standpoint? We need to review laws that criminalize voluntary conduct by persons close in age. We can discuss the particulars, but at the bottom line, we should not be making criminals out of high school kids who have consensual sex.
So the most sensible thing ever said about this whole sorry case, opined by one of the people closest to it and in the best position to know what happened … well, no one talked to him about it.
I understand how it happens. But that doesn’t make it right.
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"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2010, of a book by the same name.
Don’t most people have sex for the first time when they are teenagers?
When I was 17 I fucked a 15 yr old boy, and man I’d be PISSED if I got busted for that. Cuz it was awful, and that was punishment enough. That was the only 15 yr old I fucked.