The Statutory Rape Debate:

national | gender and sexuality | opinion/analysis Wednesday November 01, 2006 15:16 by S. Fabian sybilfabian at yahoo dot com

Youth, Adults and Sexuality

Authoritative feminist analysis of issues around statutory rape.

The Statutory Rape Debate: Youth, Adults, and Sexuality

Statutory rape is a booby-trapped issue to begin with: a terrain densely mined with the most highly-charged emotions possible. It has everything: sex, violence, injustice, gender relations, our children's safety or exploitation, religious controversies, imprisonment; not to mention a world of knee-jerk reactions beyond our conscious control or even awareness, connected to our own childhoods, our own sexuality, our own most compelling and potentially painful experiences.

Lawmakers in particular are liable to be blinded by "fight or flight syndrome," in this dangerous territory which only experts can hope to approach intelligently, and where no one can avoid deeply offending somebody somewhere. It has us, figuratively and literally, by the short and curlies.

This is just the heady mix made to order for anyone intent on slipping unusual new measures into the criminal code, while we're all too delirious to read with utmost comprehension. It speaks volumes about how far gone we already are, when we're informed that future victims will have to be interrogated about the style of their clothes; suggesting that the new law will designate statutory rape as the official punishment for Dress Code Violations Against the State. I know the Fashion Police are out there, but this were going too far; particularly while the ideal of womanhood which corporate entertainment media shoves down the throats of world youth often resembles nothing so much as a hardened prostitute's "lap dancing" act. Taken together, these powerful adult voices bombard the young and impressionable with confusing messages indeed.

Barring indecent exposure, we all have the right to walk, look, smile, dress any way at all, any where, and at any hour of the day or night; because that is certainly no crime. The biggest challenge for we adults in this is: are we capable of rising above the waist long enough to think clearly about the needs of children and youth; or more difficult still, to really listen to their perspective?

We must all be young once
Before going further, a word about this writer's expertise here is called for: I was 14 years old in 1970. That is to say, I grew up on what I now affectionately refer to as the front lines of the Sexual Revolution. (Women above 40 may remember that as the time when we won the right to say yes, but lost the right to say no.)

Having lived through an introduction to sexuality which I wouldn't wish on anyone (although, thank God, not so awful as some have suffered,) I cast my vote most firmly that to call anything "consent" between a minor and an adult is something that neither the law, the seducers, nor even the minors themselves can be in any position to judge.

Examples from my own life are pertinent. I was fortunate. Unlike one in four little girls and grown women, no one raped me. My wild companions, young and otherwise, I now thank for that with all my prayers every day of my life. Just the same, it was wrong for grown men to try to seduce me, without the slightest thought of its effect on my young life. But no one had ever taught them why it was wrong. Someone had, however, taught them to look on my kind as "fair game."

Sex was easily passed off as "the thing to do," simply because anyone who resisted would be ridiculed by their peers as hopelessly un-hip, immature, "out of it," etc. This is a sure-fire technique for foisting unsought sexual acts on adolescents, which has never waned in its popularity and effectiveness. No one could have persuaded me at the time that I was manipulated. In that I was tragically deceived.

But all this was long after my timely, natural cries for guidance and information about sexuality had been repulsed by an adult conspiracy of silence in church, school, and parents; which moulded me unfailingly into an ideal prey. (But then, I was raised Catholic.)

Gender violence and youth exploitation
Others were not so lucky. What our social institutions are structured to conceal is that gender relations of any kind can be a very dangerous proposition indeed for the young and female. Battering and date rape are common, and often only as the most dramatic demonstrations of abusive relationships based on intimidation. One in every two wives will suffer physical violence from her husband sometime in her married life. Domestic violence is the number one cause of hospital emergency visits by women in the USA. Half of all women murdered there die within six months of leaving an abusive spouse. Three quarters of all homeless women and children are fleeing domestic abuse. That is to say, the violence by an intimate member of their household was of sufficient severity to render the shelterless street, and exposure to anything that can set upon them there, as the lesser evil.

The issue of statutory rape cannot be segregated from this larger picture of the endemic, ubiquitous, coercive violence throughout our gender relations. It is certainly interesting that the Justice Department's fiasco on this question has come so closely accompanied by certain gardí announcements that, if men commit random violence in the street, the answer is for women to stay indoors. (That is, the victims, not the offenders, should change their behaviour.)

The press’ performance
There is an unacknowledged and primitive mentality underlying much of the statutory rape debate: an assumption that the sexual impulses of adult males are sacrosanct, to the extent that everything must be sacrificed on their altar, and any act in their name, however heinous, is justified.

Much of the steamy confusion might be cleared up by distributing some of that sanctimoniousness more evenly among all parties concerned. In back-handed references to minors at risk, the daily papers have seemed to insinuate that, if a young person has a sexuality at all, then statutory rape is okay (they "asked for it," "deserved it," etc.) This double-standard, exalting the sexual needs of one class while trampling others', is characteristic of the abuser's mentality in all types of sexual assault.

The esteemed gentlemen of the press seem never to have heard that yes, like everyone else, all adolescents have a sexuality (as they themselves might say, "Like, duh!") And that this is precisely the reason why adults must be restrained from interfering with it.

Puberty is necessary
For each and every one of us, the ages between 12 and 18 represent a most critical process: the ultimate unfolding of childhood into maturity. All aspects of our physical and spiritual development then attain their full form, which will largely define our entire subsequent life. It is also a volatile time, which not all adolescents survive. It is not entertainment for adults.

A young person's sexual life belongs to themselves alone. Whatever restraints or persuasions adults wish to impose, all the king's horses and men, the thickest, highest stone walls, all the beatings, burnings and hangings of the Sexual Dark Ages have ever failed to alter the fact that it is ultimately for each person themselves to choose when and with whom to share it.

All we can hope, for the physical and emotional health of ourselves and our society, is that it will be an informed choice, freely made; without duress or undue influence which is inevitable in any transaction between unequal parties.

A new approach is needed
All that said, imprisonment is certainly a failed paradigm for dealing with sexual exploitation of children and youth. We have before us here a marvellous opportunity to address that failure. Laws could be made more fair, such as in allowing that an offender who is no more than 5 years older than the youth in question, and therefore more like a peer, should be treated differently than a 40-year-old who seeks out a 14-year-old. Public education programs, such as we've recently seen in driver safety and drinking issues, and including comparably well-produced, deeply affecting and high-exposure television spots, might go much further toward preserving youth's sexual health than any threat of imprisonment has ever done.

We have discovered, the hard way, along the terrain, that food is necessary to the general health and stability of society, because people would simply rather be shot than starve. Human sexual drive is of a comparably compelling nature, and likewise connected to survival instinct (in this case, survival of the species.) A part, if you will, of the Divine Plan: its own intrinsic nature the only example we have of the Creator’s verifiable handwriting on this. It cannot be legislated away, but only understood, and accommodated with proper respect for the basic human needs of all: not only those of a particular age, gender or class.

Without sweeping changes in our approach to the problem, adults will continue to exploit youth because they can, in a social landscape which raises more barriers than bridges to consensual relations with other adults. And youth will submit to be exploited, even without force or intimidation, because grown-ups can persuade them to, and if this is the only source of sex education their elders will offer them.

We must navigate the jungle of hysterical emotion, hypocritical superstition and cynical tittering to address the sexual health of society as a whole. We need to talk about these issues until we can do so without blushing and stammering. We need to discuss them with other adults. We need to become educated, and provide education, about how to discuss them with children, so as to serve their needs, rather than ours.

Which will be impossible until our general sexual health affords us the equilibrium to consider something other than pressing, unfulfilled needs of our own, for just a moment.