Source: mensdaily
Helen Smith
2009-03-23 at 10:09 am · Filed under Ask Dr. Helen
Reader James (thanks!) emailed a post at Slate that referred to this article from the Daily Beast on “The Teen Rape Double Standard:”
After a 17-year-old boy had sex with his 14-year-old girlfriend, he was charged with a felony for statutory rape. When a 17-year-old girl in the same town committed the same crime, she was charged with far less. Was the boy the victim of gender bias?…
The cases caught the attention of the local press, generating a heated debate over whether Alan is being given harsher treatment simply because he is a boy. “After all,” said Purnell, “this isn’t one district attorney in Tennessee and one in New York deciding how to charge these cases. This wasn’t even one district attorney in one county in Wisconsin and another county in Wisconsin. No, this was the same guy who charged these two cases.”
The district attorney’s office refused to comment, but experts say it would not be far-fetched to assume that Alan has been the victim of bias. According to Dr. Marty Klein, author of America’s War on Sex, “the double standard is not unusual. It is unusual to find such an extraordinarily clear example of it, but the philosophy behind the phenomenon is very common.”
The post from Slate was a response to this article and made the ridiculous argument that cases like this that charge a teen with a felony are okay as long as he is male because he is an aggressor just by lieu of his gender:
Diaz-Duran asks if the “boy was a victim of gender bias.” Certainly it seems that his gender influenced the charge. But maybe that’s as it should be. Yes, a 17-year-old female is capable of causing harm to an innocent 14-year-old with her sexuality, just as is her male counterpart. But men tend to be bigger, stronger, and have more parts that they can force into you. That’s a crucial difference, and one that explains to some extent why rape laws would (and should) treat the sexes differently.
Okay, two can play at this game. Experts are always talking about how much more mature teen girls are than boys. If one can use biology as an excuse, then why not use psychology also? Shouldn’t a much more mature girl of 17 be held more liable from a psychological standpoint than a boy of 14 since boys are said to lag behind girls socially and emotionally? Isn’t it probable that better skills in this area would translate into better persuasion skills to get younger boys to have sex with them? And yes, many young men are harmed by girls and women who force or persuade them against their better wishes to have sex with them.
But I don’t believe that sex with one’s boyfriend or girlfriend in the teen years is akin to rape, if it is not forced. It is just adolescent sex. But, if the cases are to be charged as rape (and I do not believe they should be)–then they should be tried in a fair manner. Using sex as a basis for charging a person with a felony is a slippery slope to go down. The truth is, currently, boys and men are being punished in our society for their gender as payback by feminists and their enablers, and no one cares except for their families, the men and boys who are harmed by this, and a few good men and women.
