Prometheus 6

This is one of those "back myself into a corner" posts because I promised to say something about the topic a while ago.

Steve Gilliard links to this in Salon:

"Isn't she a little young?"
A new public service ad campaign in Virginia uses billboards and bar coasters to remind men that sex with a minor is against the law. But will it work?

What really worries the Virginia Department of Health is teen pregnancy and how it relates to sex with minors, technically called statutory rape. "The push for the campaign came from seeing the numbers of teens becoming pregnant by older men," Franklin says. "The campaign is aimed at reducing the number of young girls who have had children fathered by older men."

"Statutory rape is a significant public health problem nationwide," says Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "A large percentage of births from young women can be from older men." He cites several studies, including a 1997 study that indicated that at least half of all babies born nationally to minor women were fathered by adult men. "The fact that Virginia is trying to do something about this is commendable," Benjamin says.

It is estimated that in 2000 the state of Virginia "had a total of 104 births to 14- and 15-year-olds that the age of the fathers would have made their engaging in sex a felony," Franklin says. (The number can only be estimated because just 28 percent of mothers age 14 to 15 reported the age of the baby's father.)

And adds:

So what you have is a culture where sex with teen girls is not only encouraged, but deemed acceptable "if she looks old enough". It's the same game played in college, where freshmen women suddenly have all these male suitors or why graduate students are found attractive by professors. Men maybe attracted to women for any number of reasons, but someone chasing a teenager is looking for sex.

But it's often not noted how teen girls actively seek these adult boyfriends. Older men have always had a cachet with young women, and not just teenagers. And a lot of parents turn their heads when their teen daughters take up with men five, even ten years older than they are.

This is a public health issue and people treat it as personal foible. Besides the psychological damage created when these older men abandon them, there is the issue of the higher risk when these teenagers give birth and the burden they create on their families and the state because these men will not support them.

It isn't really aquestion of sex or the age of consent laws, because as the article states, we aren't talking about college students, but kids who are sleeping with men.

Also, the abstinance campaign ignores this, by assuming teen girls sleep with teen boys and we have imperical proof to the contrary. A 25 year man screwing a 17 year old girl is not interested in abstinance or anything like it.