The Justification for Statutory Rape Laws

Statutory rape laws strike me as kind of weird. Even if a) the defendant can show that their partner deliberately concealed from them the fact that they were underage, or b) the defendant can show that their partner really, really, really wanted to have sex with them, i.e. it was extremely consensual in standard parlance, the defendant is still guilty. The only plausible rationale for this kind of strict liability is the idea that you don't want to put the burden of having to press charges on a minor, who might be easily intimidated or pressured out of wanting to do so. Some young girl can, for example, be pressured into saying that she consented when it actually was standard-order rape. And, of course, there's the fact that as the age of the minor involved approaches zero, it crosses a threshold at some point beyond which any claim of either a) or b) is just impossible. You can't not know that an eight-year-old is underage, and it's just true that an eight-year-old is not going to meaningfully consent to have sex. You've gotta draw a line somewhere, I guess, though as a matter of real-world psychology I think eighteen is a little too high. Then there's the idea that a teenager can be rather easily manipulated into "consenting" by an older, more experienced predator, and that we don't want to let that predator say "but she said yes!"

But that is not, apparently, anything related to the reason why we have statutory rape laws involving teenagers who might actually naturally want to have sex. The Supreme Court once overturned a statutory rape law that applied only against men who had sex with underage women, and applied even when the man was underage himself. Why did the state have such a law in the first place? Why, to prevent teenage pregnancy, of course! Why did the court strike the law down? Because it held that the unequal treatment of men and women was not even rationally related to the desire to prevent teenage pregnancy. The dissent (by right-wingers) argued that since women have the natural penalty of pregnancy that attaches to sex, but men don't, the law in question just "evened up" the incentives facing each gender.

Can I just say how seriously f@cked up all of that is? The sexual criminal code is not an instrument of social policy like that. The whole point of sex crimes is that they are not really sexual in nature but rather violent in nature, using sex as an instrument of violence. The ideas of statutory rape given above have nothing to do with that basic notion. We're imprisoning people and placing them on sex offender registries because we want to disincentivize teenage pregnancy? If we're so keen on preventing teenage pregnancy, why not require that all youngsters who have sex use some form of birth control? We don't find such laws for adults to be valid, but that's because we don't think the state has a valid interest in preventing people who want to get pregnant, or at least who want to take a reasonable risk of getting pregnant, from doing so, if those people are adults. If we think the state has an interest in preventing teenage pregnancy, in what way is a law against sex using birth control even remotely 'narrowly tailored' or 'minimally invasive'? Why are we even calling the crime in question rape, when it clearly is nothing of the sort?

That was kind of a rant, and I get that in many states the statutory rape laws may be designed to actually combat things like power-differential rape between people of different ages, or sexual abuse of genuine children. But if the best answer we can give for why we need to hold that fifteen-year-olds lack the ability to legitimately want to have sex is that the Council of Elders wishes they wouldn't have sex, because then they might get pregnant and Bad Things would happen, then it seems to me that all we've got is a massively disempowering, puritanical morals code.