Enforcing "statutory rape"?

Public Interest, Summer, 1998 by Michael W. Lynch

Landry and Forrest's study was fact based, containing little of what can be interpreted as political spin. Yet looking back, it is clear that others at the Guttmacher Institute and their allies in the field of teen-pregnancy prevention originally welcomed these data as a justification for expanded government programs - programs that would provide outreach to these disenfranchised and misguided men who were impregnating young girls. What they got out of a Republican-dominated Congress and Republican-dominated statehouses, however, was stepped-up emphasis on putting such men in jail. Delaware, Florida, Georgia, and California recently revived efforts to enforce statutory-rape laws. Lawmakers in other states, including Pennsylvania and Texas, are pushing proposals to do so.

It was the empirical findings on pregnant minors with older partners that reinvigorated statutory-rape-law enforcement. In order to arrest the states' rush to the courts, it became imperative for Landry and Forrest's colleagues at the Guttmacher Institute, and their political allies elsewhere, to discredit these statistics. In the spring of 1997, a group of Urban Institute researchers published an article in the Guttmacher Institute's Family Planning Perspectives to recast the data. In "Age Differences Between Minors Who Give Birth and Their Adult Partners," the authors, Laura Duberstein Lindberg, Freya L. Sonenstein, Leighton Ku, and Gladys Martinez, note that there is a big difference between a 19- or even an 18-year-old having a baby with a 20- or 21-year-old man and a 14-year-old having a baby with the same man.

"While a 25-year-old man fathering a child with a 15-year-old would probably meet with social disapproval," Lindberg et al. argue, "the same might not be true for a couple consisting of a 21-year-old and an 18-year-old, particularly if they were married." They then note that women aged 18 to 19 account for nearly two-thirds of teen pregnancies (62 percent), and these pregnancies cannot be the result of statutory rape, even if the father was an adult. As a result, statutory-rape laws can affect only a bit more than one-third of all teenage births. Of the remaining 38 percent, Lindberg et al. report that roughly 21 percent meet the definition for statutory rape, which is typically a minor girl at least five years younger than her partner.

Motherhood and the new math

Lindberg and company's main empirical conclusion, which has been amplified in another study, is that "overall, among births to 15-19-year-olds in 1988, only 8% involved unmarried women aged 15-17 and men who were at least five years older." From this, the authors derive a major policy conclusion:

New state and federal initiatives that emphasize the vigorous enforcement of statutory-rape laws are unlikely to be the magic bullet to reduce rates of adolescent childbearing, since the number of births that result from acts covered by such laws is small. Policymakers need to pay attention to broader means of reducing teenage childbearing, such as sexuality education, youth development and contraceptive services.