The U.S. Culture(s) thread

Not sure if this is a political or cultural question, but I have a question about American age of consent laws (also known at times as "statutory rape laws" i.e laws that govern how old one has to be for consensual sexual intercourse to be legal^note Not necessarily socially acceptable).

I know they tend to be fairly high by international standards (17 and 18 are not common in the Western world outside of the US, and 15 and 14 don't exist in the US as far as I know), but how common are the so called "close in age" exemptions (i.e exemptions when the intercourse occurred between people who are close in age)? I know that some states have them and some others don't.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

As you have already observed age of consent doesn't go below 16 depending on the state, and close-in-age exemptions are usually no more then 3-4 years, if they exist. More often then not, close in age laws only work to reduce the severity of the crime or allow for it to be used as a defense in court, and if the victim is 12 or under, or the accused 18 or older then there is pretty much never any defense.

edited 23rd Dec '16 5:48:50 AM by Mio

Why do the close on age laws just reduce the sentence? Is there really a point to punishing a 17-year-old for having sex with a 14-year-old if there's no demonstrable evidence of harm?

A quick check on a couple of places, including the Other Wiki, reveals a surprising plot twist: this is a very recent development.

A 1995 study which showed that a good number of teen pregnancies ^note specifically, half of pregnancies in 15 to 17 year-olds involved men who were 20+ led to a moral panic and a major crackdown on teen sex in general. Before that, almost no one actually prosecuted teenagers for getting down on other teenagers. Despite the language, the laws were mainly aimed at much older people (usually men) getting frisky with teens (again, usually girls, with this explicitly in a number of the laws for decades).

Much like "individualism", restricting "underage" sex is something the U.S. played lip service to while not really doing much about it. For reference, most of the current age of consent laws were done during the 1910s and 20s.

Expergiscēre cras, medior quam hodie. (Awaken tomorrow, better than today.)

Pretty much. 18 year olds aren't getting caught up in these laws for having a 16 year old boyfriend or something. It just doesn't happen.

edited 23rd Dec '16 8:09:24 AM by LeGarcon

Oh really when?

Huh. I am more used to Swiss law - which besides an age of consent of 16 has a full exemption for people within 3 years of age, although regular rape and incest laws and the like still apply - and German law - where the age of consent is 14, but with a fairly broad definition of "rape/sexual assault of a minor" presumably to catch all the actual cases.

Not so sure about your claim, Le Garcon - as was discussed in the politics and LGBT threads, Florida has been in the soup a few times for doing exactly that, and the Georgia supreme court did strike down a part of their law as they found such enforcement unconstitutional.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Yeah but that's the South where they teach crap like Abstinence Only sex ed. They'd make it illegal to have sex before marriage if they could.

These are anti pedophilia laws and to prevent adults from taking advantage of minors. That's how they're enforced in the civilized parts of the country.

Oh really when?

IIRC North Carolina has a clause pandering towards arranged marriages that allows it as long as the girl is 14 or over and they've been betrothed.

Dunno about North Carolina, but California has a similar such rule if I remember that right.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That's weird, I thought there was a federal minimum of 16...

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

As far as I know Congress has no authority to enact such legislation, except on federal lands. Criminal law is primarily a states level thing, unlike in Germany and Switzerland where it's part of federal law.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

So, I guess that "not common" is the answer to my question, and "most of these laws are old and have never been updated as serious problems have not arisen or are handwaved" the "why", yeah?

I'd think that California's law probably should be updated though, it looks fairly primitive to me. On pain on being struck down for violating the 4th amendment and the corresponding part of the state constitution, perhaps

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Pretty much.

Generally speaking, teenagers screwing around together isn't going to be prosecuted unless there's another factor involved. The most common one is probably parents (usually the girls', for obvious reasons) disapproving and threatening to report the "crime" to the police. A 17 year old and an 18 year old isn't going to turn any heads, though in high school some couples stop having sex (or at least pretend to) once one of them turns 18 out of an abundance of caution. Much more than that (16/18 or 17/19, for example) and some people are going to think it's inappropriate (even above and beyond the usual "sex is evil, you shouldn't have any except in the context of producing children after marriage" crowd), with the number of people disapproving increasing pretty sharply the wider the age gap.

Worth noting, as far as I'm aware statutory rape laws pretty much only apply to people above and below the age of consent. If the age of consent is 18, and a 17 year old is having sex with a 13 year old, that's not a statutory rape issue. At some point child abuse laws kick in, but there's no clear-cut boundary there as far as I'm aware. A 17 year old and a 7 year old is basically always going to be charged. A 17 year old and a 16 year old is basically never going to be charged. Between that is a gray area.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

If memory serves, one of the Florida cases I mentioned above did indeed involve parents disapproving and a bit of homophobia as well. Or maybe they were two separate cases that I am mentally merging...

17 and 13 strikes me as rather borderline, though. I think in Swiss law it'd be considered a violation of the age of consent law, but I am a bit rusty on it.

So, my overall impression is that the laws in many places (not all of them though, while I think mostly in terms of California and Florida in the current discussion other states are mor akin to Switzerland) only loosely reflect the actual practice.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

That's my point — in US law, so far as I'm aware, it only looks at whether both parties are above or below the age of consent (with a few years of windage, in some jurisdictions, so that a 17 year old and an 18 year old aren't breaking the law). Both above 18? Fine. Both below 18? Also fine, as far as statutory rape is concerned (though as I said, if one party is young enough, you start running into child abuse laws rather than statutory rape laws).

Pretty much, yeah. Laws vary considerably, but generally speaking, no one's going to care unless the the age difference is huge and/or someone (most likely the parents) complain.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

The age of consent is the earliest age at which you are legally considered capable of consenting to sexual activity. Two seventeen-year-olds screwing in a jurisdiction where the age of consent is 18 is technically illegal. This is why close-in-age (or their awful alternative name "Romeo and Juliet") laws exist, to offer leeway to normal expressions of teenage sexuality. They don't change the age of consent but add exemptions or affirmative defenses to the law, usually for those within three years of age.

So, like §187.2 in Switzerland (if I remember the subclause code right), which is a blanket exemption (of course, rape laws and the like still apply)

Now, talking about this, I was wondering about Texas. Seems like different sources have different ideas on what the AOC there is (Texas has also a homophobic "close in age" exemption that should be struck down by a court at some point). What is that about?

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

I can't tell you, because I looked it up and it seems to be, at least according to the letter of the law, the same as what the rest of the country has. The state age of consent is seventeen, and has a similar Romeo and Juliet law so that minors aren't penalized for being dumb hormonal teens. The homophobia and any laws that seem homophobic can be explained by the very conservative politics in this state, though, which is also not that unusual when compared to the rest of the country.

So... on this score we're not really out of lockstep with the rest of the US? You may have just gotten bad sources because I just looked at three and they all agreed the state age of consent is seventeen.

I'm going to point out that the vast majority of people in the US probably think the age of consent is eighteen thanks to pop cultural osmosis through California producing so much of our country's media, and as such the age of consent in that state gets memetically distributed. Plus it's the age when kids are expected to leave for college and take a step into adulthood.

The age of consent here is 17. The confusion is over the "Sexual Performance by a child" law, which basically means no sex scenes for a movie/TV/play character performed by someone under 18.

As for our close-in-age law: first things first it's an affirmative defense, not an outright exemption. Even with the defense there's still the possibility of conviction, albeit with lesser punishment. As written, the defense requires the older party to be "not more than three years older than the victim and of the opposite sex" (Texas Penal Code 21.11(b)(1)). What little searching I've done hasn't brought up any results for cases where the homophobic nature of the law came into play, but there's precendent for such laws being struck down with the Kansas Supreme Court's State v. Limon decision.

The folks on Wikipedia have had some disagreement on Texas. I am randomly guessing that apparently practice diverges from the text of the law so much that it's not always clear what the actual standard is.

And yes, I know about that which is specifically cited in SoCalization and California Doubling - because Hollywood is in that state, it uses the laws there and sometimes applies them when showing places with different laws. So I guess that if for whatever reason CA were to adopt an age of consent of 14 they'd start showing this as the normal thing. Although I suspect that people forgetting that age of consent and age of majority are two different things plays a major role as well.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Say, do states in the US issue license plates bearing the state flag? I am asking because I remember seeing a car this summer in Switzerland with a license plate in its hold that was clearly the California state flag.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Depends on the state. It's totally up to them what their license plate looks like.

Oh really when?

The default California plate doesn't have the state flag on it — it's just a plain white background and says "California" at the top. There may be a version that features the flag, though, I'm not sure.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

You can actually buy a plate with various pictures on it.