The Teen Rape Double Standard

Your email has been sent.

Thanks for recommending The Daily Beast!

X Close

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall pointed out that even though both the boy and girls involved were under the age of consent, “the boy was the only child charged with statutory rape, or any offense, as a result of the incidents alleged, and he was the only male among the four children.” Furthermore, she added, “the district attorney affirmatively declined to bring charges against the female children where the facts described by the girls could be viewed as contravening those same laws by them.”

While Suzanne Goldberg, who teaches sexuality and gender law at Columbia Law School, acknowledged that “every case has to be dealt with individually,” she said she believes “a state would be inclined to punish young men more harshly than young women because young men are often seen as aggressors in adolescent sexual contact.”

According to Dr. Klein, however, the double standard emerged from the historical treatment of women as the property of men. “Women were not considered to be sexually autonomous beings,” he said. “Their sexuality was never considered to be a weapon. It was never considered that it could damage somebody else’s property. But men have the ability to damage another man’s property with their sexuality by violating their daughter or by violating their wife. So just bring that system of thinking forward into the present day and you get 17-year-old boys that are still considered to have the potential of damaging something with their sexuality, while it’s much harder for people to imagine a 17-year-old girl causing harm with her sexuality.”

That seems to be what District Attorney Haasch had in mind when he charged Alan and Norma. There is nothing in the record to explain why Alan should be treated so severely. The difference in age between Norma and her boyfriend, for example, is actually greater than that between Alan and his girlfriend. Although both perpetrators were 17 and both victims 14 at the time of the alleged abuse, Norma is two years and 11 months older than her boyfriend, whereas Alan is two years and four months older than his girlfriend. Court records also show that Alan admitted to having had sex with his girlfriend “two or three times,” while Norma said she and her boyfriend had sex “somewhere between 10 and 15 times, but she was not exactly sure.”

Alan’s 19 year-old sister, Kathy Jepsen, has a simple explanation for the charges. “It’s bullshit [is] what it really comes to,” she said in an email, adding that “our court system is messed up in Sheboygan.” Asked if she believes young men deserve harsher punishment, she responded: “No, I don’t believe that; we should all take responsibility for what we do, whether you’re a boy or girl. We are all human, but where the law is concerned we are not equal. They should change that.”

According to Kathy, Alan's girlfriend told him she was 16. The criminal complaint against Alan confirms this, and reveals that his girlfriend lied to the police, as well. She was at Alan and Kathy’s apartment at the time of the arrest, and told the officers twice that she was 16. One of them “then advised [his girlfriend] that if she was not truthful with the officer, she possibly would be arrested for obstructing if she lied about her age, at which point [his girlfriend] looked down at her feet, looked back at the officer, and said she was 14. Immediately when the defendant [Alan] learned of this, his body tensed up and he got a scowl on his face.”

At that point, said Kathy, “I was pissed off and wanted to hit her, but there were three cops in my apartment, so I couldn’t.”

View as Single Page