Victims Over 18 Are Not Fair Game!

People don't take victims as seriously when they are over 18. A sexual assault carries the same emotional weight after the victim's 18th birthday as before it, even though criminal penalties are greatly reduced (or even eliminated). Attitudes about sex abuse, assault, and victims which are victim-supporting seem only to apply when someone is 17 years, 11 months, and 29 days or younger. It is possible for exploitation to occur without legal charges. Some of this is seen in domestic violence, where there are precursors to the DV, including unwanted sex.

Many times, sexual assault can't be proven when it's date rape, and the sexual abuse is an incident where there is unwanted penetration after other sexual contact. Legally, it's rape, point blank. But charges are not usually filed because of the prior relationship and consent to other contact. The only way, I see, for more convictions to cover these areas of "gray rape" is to strengthen rape laws to make currently legal conduct illegal. But if these laws are strengthened, then there will be men who are going to be labeled as rapists or sex offenders for unwanted, but consensual sex. Society will be trading the problem of sex offenders getting off for conduct which is illegal, but considered "gray rape," for "Yes means No."

There have been schemes proposed to deal with the low percentage of rape and sexual assault conviction rates. These schemes have a tendency to be either too broad and negate a woman's consent during certain inappropriate sexual activity, or too narrow and criminalize only forcible rape.

I believe that in some cases, consent between two adults is just as elusive as that between a grown man or woman and a child. This can occur if you have a CSA victim who hasn't recovered from her childhood sexual abuse, and a manipulative, controlling male partner. The power differential would not be the typical one between a man and a woman, but resemble that of the previous victimization and perpetrator.

If prison inmates and therapists are going to be held criminally liable for sex with patients or inmates, why aren't professors held criminally liable for sex with college students? Inmates and psych patients are also adults legally, as well as HS students over 18 where such conduct has been criminalized. So there is no reason NOT to criminalize professor/student sex, but just a reason to make such conduct a misdemeanor or "wobbler".

When child porn is produced, each picture is a crime scene. When adult porn is produced, each picture is exploitation of a person who thinks they aren't being victimized. The difference, in my opinion, between CP and AP, is the age of the victim being exploited and the illegality of the exploitation. Just because someone is going along with their own exploitation doesn't make it right.

People need to be as concerned and outraged when a woman is groped as when a teenage girl is approached. There was an incident last Sunday where male Jets fans are groping and pressuring women to bare their breasts. This happens every Jets home game. The police hassled the reporter who broke the story before it broke at news outlets this week. If they had been doing this to girls half or a third of the age the sexually harassed women were, this would never be tolerated. Traci Tapp was charged with offensive touching for sex with a young male student, Jason Eickmeyer. How many women were offensively touched and the police just let it go by at the Meadowlands? How quick would the arrests be if these women ages were halved?

The reason I'm trying to change attitudes is because attitudes lead to actions which lead to consequences. Females being treated as fair game once they turn 18 leads to a culture where society looks the other way with some rapes and other sexual assaults. This is how groping of women is tolerated at a sports stadium by people who would quickly investigate CSA. The law, by not investigating sexual assaults against victims over 18 as thoroughly as they would CSA where there is enough evidence, enables rapists ans sexual predators. This needs to change.