Teen Who Bragged About Threesome With Teachers Feels Really Bad

[DirkGently]

118. Well, no. It is not legally or literally the same as rape.

Statutory rape is a legal conceit wherein we collectively decide at what age a person is capable of giving meaningful consent. We make that distinction because in cases like this one, actual consent is given, but we presume it is invalid because of the minority of someone involved.

The law recognizes this distinction and has for a long time. An 18-year-old with a 17-yr-old may be excluded from the definition of statutory rape under "Romeo and Juliet" laws recognizing that the relative age of the parties makes the type of coercion presumed under the conceit of statutory rape inapplicable.

It's okay to do that -- we have to have a mechanism for recognizing that children cannot effectively "consent" to sex because of their state of development. At the same time though, the age of consent is a guess. We have moved the age around, mostly upward, over time.

But there is a distinction between a lack of actual consent and lack of consent we consider legally valid. To conflate the two as though they were exactlyl the same is just not possible.