The investigation was long, embarrassing and ultimately fruitless. With frustration, a Massachusetts district attorney announced early last month that without cooperation from the alleged victim, a teenage baby sitter, he could not bring charges of statutory rape against a member of this country's most prominent political family, 39-year-old heating-oil executive Michael Kennedy.
But even in dropping the inquest, authorities managed to focus attention on a crime that seemed to have wandered out of an earlier era, a time when young women were known as jail bait. If accusations that he had sex with the baby sitter before she turned 16 served to tarnish Kennedy, they also reminded the public that a generation or more of sexual latitude did not wipe statutory rape laws off the books.
On the contrary, specialists say that after a lengthy period of relative dormancy, proscriptions set into place thousands of years ago with the Code of Hammurabi are returning. Motives for reviving these old regulations span the gamut from welfare reform to concern about teen pregnancy to a general angst about the oversexualization of this country's young people--and reactions to the resurrection of statutory rape laws range just as broadly.
Some of the same factions that urged repeal of statutory rape laws in the sexually relaxed 1970s now view their enforcement as proof that America is moving toward more vigilant child protection policies in the 1990s; in an odd way, radical feminism and puritanism have become surprise allies on this issue. Many liberals and conservatives also find themselves in accord that sex between 14-year-olds and 40-year-olds is cause for legal opprobrium.
Especially in California, statutory rape is being pursued with new vigor--and with a new agenda. "It's a huge national topic now," said Mike Carrington, whose Office of Criminal Justice Planning oversees Gov. Pete Wilson's stepped-up campaign to encourage prosecutions.
Fifty-three counties are participating in the 18-month-old Statutory Rape Vertical Prosecution Program, with a budget of $8.4 million. The prosecutions have been spotlighted as a key component of the governor's Partnership for Responsible Parenting Initiative, Carrington said, adding: "California is the only state with this kind of an initiative at this time--although it's about to be copied all over the place. I've never had so much interest in a single program from other states before. It's wild."
Under the program, Carrington said, 667 men around the state have been found guilty of unlawful sex with a minor--a conviction rate of "nearly 100%." The effort is so aggressive that in some counties, investigators cull family support records to locate cases in which a young teenage mother has named a much-older man as the father of her baby.
Thousands more cases "are in the pipeline," Carrington added, noting that before the initiative, "you'd be hard-pressed to find such a case. The district attorneys didn't have the time, they didn't have the resources"--and, he conceded, there wasn't much interest.
California's original statutory rape law dates from 1872, but the current regulation was enacted in 1970. Refinements, such as changes in reporting procedures, have continued steadily.
California is among 14 states where the so-called age of consent, when a person can legally agree to engage in sex, is 18. In five states the age of consent is 17; it is 16 in 27 states and the District of Columbia; 15 in two states. Hawaii and Pennsylvania have the country's lowest age of consent, 14.
While "statutory rape" is widely accepted as a form of legal shorthand to describe sex between an adult and a minor, many states use terms such as "unlawful sexual conduct" instead. Universally, statutory rape laws are gender-neutral. But in fact, older women are seldom charged with engaging in relationships with young males. When an adult man is accused of having sex with a young male, the case generally is pursued under the rubric of child sexual abuse.
In California, it is a crime to have sex with anyone younger than 18 unless the two people are married to one another. An unmarried minor in California cannot legally consent to sex. If the two people are within three years of age of one another, the crime is a misdemeanor in California. With more than a three-year age difference, the adult perpetrator in California can be charged with a felony and may receive a prison sentence of up to four years.
Authorities were reluctant to provide names in these cases, which involve facts that are not public record.
