Conceptualizing Consent: How Prosecutors Identify Sexual Victimization in Statutory Rape Cases

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-131
Author(s):  
Jamie L. Small
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sexual Victimization ◽  
Sexual Contact ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Adolescent Sexuality ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
Sexually Mature

ABSTRACTIn the wake of rape law reforms, lack of sexual consent emerged as a key element that defined sexual contact as criminal. Its presence modified the requirement of force or threat of violence, and it gained traction in campaigns to eradicate sexual assault. Little is known, however, about how prosecutors assess consent. In this article, I use the case of statutory rape to better understand the legal construction of sexual consent. By focusing on an age-based class of individuals who are sexually mature but still under the age of consent, I show how legal actors identify sexual victimization among youth. Drawing on interviews with forty-three prosecutors, I analyze prosecutorial decision making during the investigation, charging, and trial phases. I find that sexual consent is not simply a dichotomous legal category but rather a sociological process. Prosecutors define sexual victimization based on informal ideas about normative adolescent sexuality, reproducing social hierarchies based on age, gender, and sexual identity.

scholarly journals Harm, Responsibility, Age, and Consent

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Carpenter ◽  
Erin O’Brien ◽  
Sharon Hayes ◽  
Jodi Death
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Adolescent Sexuality ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Sexual Relations ◽  
Cultural Scripts ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Legal Responses ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity

This article explores the contradictory ways in which adolescents just under the age of consent are represented in illegal sexual relations with both men and women who are over the age of consent. We are specifically interested in exploring the ways in which the gender of the adolescent and the adult affect public discourse, legal responses, and social perceptions of the harm of sexual relations. We argue that the development of an indiscriminate legal and policy narrative of child sexual abuse that increasingly includes all aspects of adolescent sexuality “erases” an adolescent subjectivity. By exploring the nuanced ways in which the historical construction of childhood as sexually innocent intersects with current cultural scripts of femininity and masculinity, this article hopes to add to the small but growing literature on the issue of sexual consent, sexual ethics, and sexual citizenship for young people.

Campus Sexual Assault: A Systematic Review of Prevalence Research From 2000 to 2015

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Fedina ◽  
Jennifer Lynne Holmes ◽  
Bethany L. Backes
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Sexual Coercion ◽  
Sexual Victimization ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sexual Contact ◽  
College Campuses ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Campus Sexual Assault ◽  
Study Designs ◽  
Unwanted Sexual Contact

Sexual assault is a pervasive problem on university and college campuses in the United States that has garnered growing national attention, particularly in the past year. This is the first study to systematically review and synthesize prevalence findings from studies on campus sexual assault (CSA) published since 2000 ( n = 34). The range of prevalence findings for specific forms of sexual victimization on college campuses (i.e., forcible rape, unwanted sexual contact, incapacitated rape, sexual coercion, and studies’ broad definitions of CSA/rape) is provided, and methodological strengths and limitations in the empirical body of research on CSA are discussed. Prevalence findings, research design, methodology, sampling techniques, and measures, including the forms of sexual victimization measured, are presented and evaluated across studies. Findings suggest that unwanted sexual contact appears to be most prevalent on college campuses, including sexual coercion, followed by incapacitated rape, and completed or attempted forcible rape. Additionally, several studies measured broad constructs of sexual assault that typically include combined forms of college-based sexual victimization (i.e., forcible completed or attempted rape, unwanted sexual contact, and/or sexual coercion). Extensive variability exists within findings for each type of sexual victimization measured, including those that broadly measure sexual assault, which is largely explained by differences in sampling strategies and overall study designs as well as measures of sexual assault used in studies. Implications for findings and recommendations for future research on the prevalence of college-based sexual victimization are provided.

My Little Girl Wife

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas L. Syrett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The United States ◽  
Child Marriage ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Age Of Consent ◽  
Minor Children ◽  
Meaningful Category

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

scholarly journals Attitudes, Rape and Law Reform in South Africa

2009 ◽  
Vol 73 (5) ◽  
pp. 414-429 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charnelle van der Bijl ◽  
Philip N. S. Rumney
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Judicial Decision Making ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
Justice Process ◽  
Criminal Justice Process ◽  
The Impact

In the last decade South Africa has undergone an extensive process of sexual offence law reform. This process has attempted, amongst other things, to address deficiencies in the criminal justice response to rape and has also recognised some of the limits to the impact of legal reform. These limits are partly defined by rape supportive attitudes and myths that appear to influence decision-making at all points in the criminal justice process. In South Africa, and many other jurisdictions, evidence suggests that police, prosecutorial and judicial decision-making is influenced, in part, by a range of social attitudes that misconstrue sexual violence, as well as serve to undermine the credibility of complainants. This article examines the impact of myths, social definitions of rape on rape law reform in South Africa and the points at which these reforms are likely to be undermined by social attitudes and what potentially might be done to address this problem.

Rape Trial Studies: Handle with Care

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-35
Author(s):  
Jeremy Gans
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Law Reform ◽  
Rape Law ◽  
Rape Trial ◽  
Rape Trials ◽  
The Law ◽  
Fact Finding

The notion that the issue of the accused's honest belief about consent has little effect on the outcome of most rape trials has gained considerable acceptance amongst some rape law reformers. The acceptance of this claim can be partly traced to the Law Reform Commission of Victoria's study of rape prosecutions in 1991. However, properly considered, the study provides no support for this assertion. This is because of two limitations to the study: the merely cursory analysis of pre-trial decision making and the lack of plausible assessment of the jury's approach to its fact-finding task. Properly understood, the study's findings suggest a reform of the trial judge's direction to the jury, a possibility ignored in the Law Reform Commission's report. This paper argues that law reformers should pay more attention to such limitations when considering empirical research into rape prosecutions.

scholarly journals Does the onset of trends towards convergence within the differentiation of the global system confirm the general assumptions about the development of territorial and social hierarchies?

Geografie ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 119 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hampl
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
World Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Global System ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Developed Countries

We are currently witnessing a significant turn in the evolution of the global system. The long term rise in the dominance of the “West” has been recently not only halted, but if fact reversed. Within the last two decades, close to a fifth of the world’s GDP has been transferred from the core to the semiperiphery, and increasingly also the periphery, of the global system. The hierarchic manner of the asymmetric geographic distribution of the world’s economy and population, and its transformation, remains a significant subject of scientific research and a key issue within the decision-making sphere of world politics. However, the discrepancy between the hierarchical differentiation of states and civilizations in terms of their size on one hand and their development (wealth) on the other remains an important issue. The degree of this discrepancy (or lack of) depends on the scale on which the differentiation is examined. At the macroregional level, it remains very pronounced, while it decreases in significance on the mezoregional and microregional levels – within the developed countries, a relative correspondence exists between both types of hierarchy. This article therefore intends to delineate the basic types of hierarchical differentiation to discuss the causal mechanisms of their formation and prospective change.

scholarly journals Edad sexual y exclusión de la responsabilidad penal. Fundamentos del Derecho anglosajón

2021 ◽  
pp. 67
Author(s):  
Amparo Martinez Guerra
Keyword(s):  
Sex Offenders ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
Common Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
Sexual Consent ◽  
Statutory Rape ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The One

En los últimos años, la protección de menores frente comportamientos de abuso y explotación sexual ha sido una de las preocupaciones principales en los sistemas legales de Derecho continental y anglosajón. La respuesta de los Legisladores penales ha sido la elevación de la edad de consentimiento sexual de los menores de edad. Sin embargo, la medida provoca problemas interpretativos de índole constitucional que no pueden ser obviados. Por un lado, la posible afectación del derecho fundamental a la privacidad de los propios menores (desarrollo de su sexualidad). Por otro, la proporcionalidad de la sanción penal prevista para ese tipo de delitos, así como los efectos de la inscripción en los Registros de Delincuentes sexuales. En España, la modificación de la LO 1/2015, de 30 de marzo, elevó la edad de consentimiento sexual a los 16 años. La reforma también incluyó el nuevo art. 183 quáter, que permite al Tribunal eximir de responsabilidad penal cuando autor y víctima sean “próximos por edad y grado de desarrollo o madurez”. En los sistemas penales anglosajones esta cláusula, denominada “cláusula de escape” o “cláusula Romeo y Julieta”, es una de las piezas centrales del delito del statutory rape o delito de violación definido por estatuto. Este artículo examina los orígenes, configuración y el fundamento de la exclusión de la responsabilidad penal por “cercanía en edad o desarrollo” en los Estados Unidos de América (sistemas federal y estatal), Reino Unido e Irlanda del Norte, República de Irlanda y Canadá. El artículo analiza también la jurisprudencia más importante al respecto y los problemas constitucionales derivados de las nuevas las edades de consentimiento.In recent years the protection of minors against sexual abuse and exploitation has been one of the main concerns in the Civil and Common Law legal systems. The response of the Criminal Legislators has been the raise of the age of sexual consent of minors. However, this measure causes constitutional problems that cannot be ignored. On the one hand, the conflict with the minor fundamental right of privacy (development of the sexuality). On the other hand, the proportionality of the criminal sanction provided for such crimes, as well as the effects of the registration in the Sex Offenders Registry. In Spain, the amendment introduced by the Organic Law 1/2015, of March 30, raised the age of sexual consent to 16 years. The Law created the new article 183 quater in the Criminal Code to allow the Court to exempt from criminal responsibility when the defendant and the victim are «close in age and development or maturity». In Common Law criminal systems that clause, called «escape clause» or «Romeo and Juliet clause» is one of the central pieces of the statutory rape. This article examines the origins, the elements and the rationale of the exclusion of criminal responsibility for «close in age and development» in the United States of America (federal and state law), the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, Ireland and Canada. The article analyses the most important case-law regarding the constitutional problems arising from the new ages of consent. 

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