Sexuality Reading Notes Week 8: Age of Consent

Sexuality Reading Notes Week 8 10/13 Age of Consent - When it comes to the age of consent laws, those enforcing them looked to control female sexuality rather than protect females - “Dependence as the core trait of children, ignoring the issue of sexual development” - “expected teenage girls to be indistinguishable from the younger girls at the center of prosecutions for that more heavily punished sex crime” referring to child rape - New York juries could not fit teenage girls into their ideas of childhood and thus did not give them the protection they would young girls - Victims of statutory rape were neither children nor adults, but an entirely separate group - Age of consent laws were created to protect girls from “vicious and designing men” who would lead girls into a life on the streets - By raising the age of consent laws to 18 you are ignoring the development of female sexuality - Prosecutors had to convince juries that the passive nature of the victim was not reflective of her consent, but rather her innocence and ignorance - Defense attornies would attempt to get victims to use “naughty” language such as Prick, Sexual intercourse, or connection. This language revealed that the girls understood what was happening and were therefore not innocent. - Children in immigrant and working-class homes were not viewed as being innocent, as they had already fallen into “degenerate habits and associations” - Victims of statutory rape were seen as sexual children, rather than just children - Girls who looked like adults were less likely to receive justice because the jurors could not see them as a child - immigrant working-class families could not provide birth certificates or other documents for proof of age, so NYC courts could physically inspect girls to determine the age - When girls describe the acts as “ruining” or having “ruined” them, juries believed them to speak like adults conveying that they knew of the consequences - Girls having sex outside of marriage, even in statutory rape cases made them impure and ruined physically and respectfully. - Because these men had “ruined” them, there was a push to get these men to marry their victims to save the victim's reputation as pure - When jury members saw signs of bad character such as extensive knowledge or experience of sex they would rule in the defendant's favor regardless of the evidence - If the accused were to marry the victim the case would usually be thrown out even though marriage is not a legal basis as a defense. - If a girl showed no bad character the men would be convicted usually on less serious charges - Rape of adult women would get less than half (28%) convictions compared to adults raping children (65%), demonstrating that jurors needed to see resistance from adult women to convict - If the age of consent was raised to 18, jurors would not see late teens as children - Men asked girls for their age prior to sex as jailbait was a common term in the media, there was a societal idea that statutory rape did exist, just that the courts were horrible at prosecuting it