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Near the end of the school year, a 38 year old teacher was arrested in the suburbs of Chicago, charged with having sex with a former student (who is 16 years old). In addition to the inappropriate sexual relationship, the teacher also supposedly supplied marijuana to the gang in which the student belonged, and possibly even joined the gang. After the arrest, the teacher was allowed to return to the home in which the teacher's spouse and two young daughters resided.
There were two things that immediately struck me about this case. First, that the teacher is female and the student is male. I suppose that there are enough salacious details about the case that it would have garnered media attention if the teacher were male and the student female, but it often seems to me that women who deviate into these types of illegally (and morally reprehensible) relationships garner more media attention than the men who do because it violates our socialized idea of sexuality and sexual predators. Mary Kay Letourneau captured national coverage because it was deemed so unusual for a woman to have an affair with a boy. Pathetically, men desiring young girls is practically a norm, particularly the way girls are increasingly sexualized at younger ages in popular culture.
The second thing I thought about was what the consequences would be for the teacher if the tables were turned. If the teacher were male, would he be released into the open arms of his wife and two young daughters? I doubt it, although I could be wrong. Therein lies a more complicated legal understanding and gender bias in statutory rape laws.
In a 2006 article in the Fordham Urban Law Journal, coyly titled "No penis, no problem?" Kay L. Levine comprehensively examined the gender bias inherent in statutory rape laws:
Is the female statutory rapist a new breed of criminal, and the boy a new type of victim? One might think so, given the gendered history of the statutory rape law itself and the academic legal literature on the issue. Legal scholars writing for the past fifty years--a time period that brackets the Supreme Court's decision in Michael M. v. Superior Court of Sonoma Count (7)--implicitly and nearly universally assume that statutory rape defendants are male and their victims female. (8) Moreover, gendered assumptions about the statutory rape drama seem to comport with the obvious facts of life. Society is, after all, dominated by unwritten scripts that tell males and females how to behave sexually and how to respond to stress or fear, (9) and these schemas tend to illuminate acts of male perpetration and female victimization while keeping underground the existence of female-perpetrated abuse and male victimization. (10)
Scientists working in the fields of psychiatry and psychology, however, have uncovered evidence that tells a different story. They have found a surprisingly high percentage of female sex abusers in the population and have documented an extensive array of child sexual abuse committed by women against boys, abuse that includes rape, child molestation, and even incest. (11) In so doing, they have started to identify the motivations that underlie this behavior and to assess boys' experience of sexual victimization, which, contrary to popular belief, can be every bit as traumatic as that suffered by girls. (12)
...Given the scientific data, legal scholars must resist the temptation to rely on the highly gendered notions of age-differential sexual experiences that have animated scholarship in the past. We can and should use studies of female sexual abusers to inform our understanding of female-perpetrated statutory rape and to suggest ways to alter the criminal justice system's responses to both victims and defendants involved in these crimes. To continue to pretend that women are not capable of seducing or manipulating boys to have sex, or to conclude that women who behave this way are too rare to merit attention, will enslave us to the unfortunate habits and stereotypes of the past and cause us to abandon an entire class of victims who deserve better.
The article goes on to explain how defining statutory rape as applying only to girls exploits and reinforces several gender stereotypes: that young women are innately chaste and pure, thus incapable of sexuality; that men are animals who need to be deterred from "corrupting" young women; that boys are entitled to sexual pursuits that girls can't possibly consent to since they can't understand the consequences of their actions; that young men in consensual relationships are automatically
