FL teen "sex criminal" for consensual relationship

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I suppose that is a valid point.

If there is sexual activity, I don't think it would matter if they were 15 and 16. 15 is too considered too young to consent to sexual activity with anyone in Florida. A 16 year old having sex with a 15 year old would be a felony.

I think children should be strongly encouraged to attend sex education where the rules pertaining to age of consent are explicitly explained. If teenagers are going t have sex anyway, at least they can be more careful with whom they choose as partners.

Here in Australia (and possibly in Holland?) 16 yr olds living away from home and not attending school can sleep with whoever they like.

Such a silly condition for 16 year olds to have sex.

Indeed, I'm a little old fashioned in thinking they should wait till marriage, but I suspect raging hormones and freedom to party will mean virginity and saving oneself is a rare thing to find.

I know, except that statutes can also be challenged. As I said, 2 minors being charged with statutory rape of each other has actually been declared unconstitutional in South Africa and that's partly because it had the same ramifications for those involved as what this girl is now facing. Do you really think that she deserves to be labelled a sex offender for the rest of her life?

I don't necessarily believe in saving oneself for marriage but I would prefer it to be in the context of a committed relationship.

Remarkably similar to “16-year-olds can have sex as long as nobody can stop them”.



Not really. They’re only going to have it if they can.



The concept of waiting till marriage is ancient and comes from a time when people married much younger than they do today, so there wasn’t such a huge gap between their bodies becoming sexually mature and they finally being allowed to satisfy their urges. Besides, a woman wasn’t a free citizen, like she is today, but always depended on a man, so she was treated like merchandise, and her hymen was her security seal. This doesn’t make sense anymore. There’s a reason why male virginity was never prized nearly so much—more often than not, it was and still is an object of scorn.

Keeping some ancestral rules while the surrounding social circumstances change is bound to create an ever more strained scenario, where most people will sooner or later break the rules, except for the few individuals who can’t.



So don’t let them party with anyone of the opposite sex (unless they’re bi- or homosexual, of course)—problem solved!

I dont agree on that one. A 15 and a 16 year old are mentally for me equal, so there is no abuse of an mentally misadvantaged, by an mentally advantaged. (I dont mean dumb with it, simply that a grown up has more life experience, has more experience how to play with others feelings to acchieve what he/she wants and so on.) So I fully agree, that there are age limits, simply because a person with much experience on treating others can do much damage to a young teenager without any partnership experience. We also have similar age limits in my country. But to prevent that stuff like teenagers that are already having an relationship for two years, suddenly getting criminal because one of them is suddenly above an agelimit, there is additional a tolerance by law, that is I think about 24 months. So as example if one of the couple gets 18, and the other already is 16, it stays legal, because both of them only having 24 months age difference, and so it is seen as an relationship on equal terms.

So its still not 100% perfect, but at least it prevents classcomerades that have relationships getting criminal or such things. (Depending about what school you were before it is normal that you can have age differences about two years in a class.)

I don't think that under Florida law it suddenly became illegal because one was above the age limit. It was already illegal because the other was under 16. If the younger had been 16, then the older of the two could have been as old as 23.

So it wasn't illegal because the older was 18 but because the younger was not yet 16.

Personally I can't see anything particularly inappropriate about the girls' relationship. Teenagers are sexual; they form & dissolve relationships & engage in sexual acts. But as perplexing as it must be to observers in other countries, prosecutions of this type in the U.S. are actually fairly common. If the relationship is same-sex or interracial, & especially if the parents of the younger partner disapprove, then the older partner can expect to be singled out for prosecution. This case has eerie parallels with the case of Genarlow Wilson in Georgia, who was convicted in 2007 of "aggravated child molestation" for receiving oral sex from his 15-year-old girlfriend & sentenced to 10 years in prison.

The crux of this matter isn't really gay rights. Yes, most likely Kaitlyn was singled out because the relationship was same-sex. But it would have made no difference in the law if she were a he. What's outrageous here is the zeal with which police & prosecutors moved against her - wire-tapping her phone for months to fish for evidence to build a case against her, all at the behest of the younger girl's parents. But in the broader sense, what's truly outrageous is the manner in which laws ostensibly enacted to PROTECT teenagers from sexual predators are instead used to CRIMINALIZE TEENAGE SEXUALITY.

But like so much else in U.S. that involves politics & criminal justice, it's important to view this in the context of America's never-ending culture wars. The Christian conservative movement is quite powerful here. They're serious about outlawing abortion. Serious about repressing homosexuality. And serious about restoring teenage chastity. That latter objective might seem uphill or even quixotic in these times, given our sex-saturated culture & all that's available from Hollywood or on the internet. But laws like these & prosecutions like these are a powerful weapon in the culture warriors' arsenal. The goal is to shroud sex, especially gay sex, in fear & stigma, & to reinforce the message to teenagers that engaging in premarital or homosexual sex will have dire, lifelong consequences. The prosecutors clearly intend to make an example out of her.

It's heart-warming that the older girl's parents are offering her such unconditional support. But one has to think that they're giving her bad legal advice. In the U.S. criminal justice system, prosecutors hold almost all the cards. All the support she's received from inside the U.S. & abroad isn't going to make one whit of difference to power-drunk prosecutors. In this case, they've given her until Friday to accept the plea deal they've offered; otherwise the case will go to trial. And if it goes to trial she will most likely be convicted - after all, the letter of the law was violated. What is more, prosecutors could hit her with several other charges on top of what she already faces - sexual solicitation of a minor & contributing to the delinquency of a minor are 2 that come to mind. And if she is convicted she faces a lengthy prison sentence & lifetime sex-offender status. In the Wilson case, Georgia prosecutors offered him a plea deal & he refused it, believing himself guilty of no crime. He rolled the dice & lost - the jury convicted him & the judge handed down the 10-year sentence. Yes, technically a jury could invoke "nullification", but in practice that almost never happens. For all the expressions of outrage & support that this case has generated, I've seen just as many statements from people who advocate throwing the book at her. She can fight it if she chooses, but in the end she will almost certainly lose.

Nah, I think the only people who would have a problem are authoritarians like Fnord. That is, the same people who are having a problem with it now.


And how do you intend on stopping them? If you tell someone they can't go to boy-girl parties, but they want to, then they'll say their friend's party is single-sex even though it isn't, or sneak out of the house. Short of making sex a criminal offence (a stupid idea, for obvious reasons- no good would come and prisons would be overcrowded) you wouldn't be able to stop teenagers having sex. To be honest, I don't even see why you'd want to? Provide them with free condoms, tell them how to use them, and teach them the interpersonal skills that go with it (like the ability to say "no", even if that is to peer pressure, and a respect for relationships).

The United States has some of the most conservative attitudes towards sex in the Western world, and the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developed world. Contrast it with a nation like the Netherlands, where the age of consent is 13 but most people don't actually have sex until much later and teenage pregnancy is very low.

If it were a heterosexual couple, and the older one was the male, yes, pretty much, but I think it would be different if both were male.


That is most likely the case. If so, the parents are, not only imbeciles for thinking they can control their daughter's sexual orientation by denying, they also would be evil.

I have a question, does the age of consent in FL makes a distintion between heterosexual relationships and homosexual relationships? Because in some jurisdictions, they do.

That she is 18 is completely immaterial. What is material under Florida law is that the younger is under 16. It was just as illegal at the age of 17 as it is at 18.

I don’t, but this is beside the point. I’m talking about people who apparently would like to stop them, but act as if it were impossible.



So you don’t let them party unless you’re going to be present. Don’t let them go anywhere but in controlled environments where they’d never meet a potential sexual partner, or as much as a potential boyfriend or girlfriend. If you don’t have much time for overseeing them, that’s all the more a reason for not letting them party very often. This will also make it less likely for other youngsters to want anything to do with them, because they’d get fed up of seeing them so seldom outside school.



Guard it well and punish them effectively if they manage to break your rules. You can also keep them busy with housework, so, between it and studying, they don’t have much time for anything else, let alone if they’d have to fight you first.

This works even better if you manage to make them aware at an early age that education is in their own best interest, and then start taking big chunks of their time with random chores, so they struggle to meet deadlines with their homework and preparing exams in time. Make them feel like they can’t have their own plans, because they don’t know in advance how much time you’ll be taking from them, and they’ll be afraid of doing anything other than study or obey you, because that’d hurt their grades, and, remember, they’ve already given up any other personal goals in life. I can attest from firsthand experience that this works like a charm.

You could also warn them that if they attempt to have sex, you’ll deny them any education other than the legal bare minimum, so they reach adulthood having no useful skills whatsoever to make a living, and immediately kick them out when they turn 18. Oh, and no going out anymore, either, so they don’t develop many social skills and thus they’re even more dependent on you.



There are countries where sex outside marriage is always illegal (no need for an age of consent!), and I’m not sure they have overcrowded prisons. But this is a matter of the state meddling with private affairs. Parents can decide for themselves what to do about this.



Of course you would. There are simply so many things parents can do, I think it’s pretty much the other way round: if they have sex, it’s because you’ve helped them have it.



I wouldn’t. I don’t think preventing them from having sex is about doing them any good, but about satisfying a primal tendency to repress sexually those who depend on you. In the wild, being sexually mature used to mean you’re also ready to fend for yourself completely on your own. It’s also natural for alpha males of many species not to let lesser males approach the females. So those who want to keep their children sexually repressed for as long as possible should be consistent and not hesitate to be indeed repressive, especially in a society where they have more power than ever to do so, despite all the modern ideas about sexual freedom, because it used to be easier to stop depending on your parents at an earlier age.



It’s much easier not to have sex when you know your only option is not to have it I wonder what would happen if there were a completely reliable means to suppress the risk of unwanted pregnancies or contracting STDs when having sex. I’m sure there’d still be a strong opposition.

I don’t think it’d change matters much, because teenagers could already be widely enjoying such benefits: it could become customary to do STD tests openly before starting to have sex with a partner; there are probably ways to reversibly sterilize girls, so they can become fertile again many years later, once they’re ready to have children. It’s not widely happening, because the previous generation at large doesn’t want it.



How much later? Do you agree with the “put it off as long as possible” view after all?



Your sexual orientation is of no consequence when you can’t do anything that would depend on it.