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In reply to the discussion: EXCLUSIVE: Parents of underage victim in Kate Hunt's case defend actions [View all]primavera
(5,191 posts)And I don't offer my own experience as representative, only as one of many examples of situations in which age doesn't necessarily equate with level of power or influence in a relationship. To pick a more mainstream hypothetical, imagine a 16 year old who is particularly intelligent, precocious, assertive, and confident - no doubt there are many teenagers who might fit that description. That person seduces someone who is two years older, but is shyer, less self-confident, more vulnerable, a description that would also no doubt fit a great many teenagers. In such a scenario, the older person seduced by the younger person would nonetheless still technically guilty of statutory rape, even though it was the "victim" who manipulated the older person into the deed.
As for the question of who pays for child support for underage parents, that seems a different matter to me. Two 17 year olds, both of whom are equally beneath the legal age of consent, can - and do - have sex and have children just as easily as a 16 year old and an 18 year old. Who pays child support when the two 17 year olds have a child? I would suppose that the same approach should be applied to any situation involving an underage parent. But that's different than criminalizing sexual behavior that occurs naturally in young people whose difference in ages may be only slight and may not be reflective of their respective levels of maturity.
Mind you, I am not suggesting that I am comfortable with 40 year olds seducing minors. No adolescent can be considered the equal of a 40 year old, so there can be no equitable basis for mutual consent. But a 16 year old and an 18 year old? They could easily be equals in terms of their emotional, psychological, and intellectual development and thus share equal responsibility for a decision that is genuinely mutual. Criminalizing that sort of perhaps foolhardy, but nonetheless natural and normal, youthful sexual experimentation seems patently absurd to me.