Opinion ID: 1797530
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Can Children & Young Adolescents Consent to Sex?

Text: Given the grave risks at stake here, I think this Court must look very very carefully at the notion of children and young adolescents consenting to sex. And I think any careful examination of this question reveals it to be a slippery slope of the worst magnitude. If T.W. is read as abrogating Florida law on the age of consent apart from the facts of that case then countless other legal problems immediately arise. Such a loose reading of T.W. potentially would mean that children of a young age could enter into contracts even if they lack the experience or means to do so; could marry at a very young age without parental or judicial consent; could purchase and consume tobacco and alcoholic beverages; could attend adult movies and purchase pornography; and much else. Nothing in T.W. supports these troubling scenarios. Moreover, even those who sincerely argue that T.W. authorizes minors to consent to sex surely must concede that some minimum age exists at which a minor simply is incapable of consenting. I cannot believe, for example, that any responsible adult seriously thinks a six-year-old legally could consent to sex. Children of that age always lack the experience and mental capacity to understand the harm that may flow from decisions of this type. They may unwittingly consent to something that can ruin their lives, jeopardize their health, or cause emotional scars that will never leave them. I think most concerned adults and experts in the field would agree that this lack of prudent foresight continues in youths well into the teen years. Moreover, well established law makes it necessarily irrelevant whether the underage persons in this or any other case had sufficient maturity to consent to sex. If the legislature or this Court created a maturity exception to the present statute, I think the statute then would be subject to a serious challenge on grounds of constitutional vagueness. Maturity is a concept about which even experts strongly disagree, and conceptions of maturity differ widely in the general population. The difficulty of defining maturity, for example, has been noted in the context of teens seeking judicially approved abortions. Katherine M. Waters, Judicial Consent to Abort: Assessing a Minor's Maturity, 54 Geo.Wash.L.Rev. 90, 109-17 (1985). The difficulty is magnified a thousandfold in the present context: Here, the courts would be required to deal not only with the actual maturity of the minor as gauged by a judge, but also with the defendant's perception of the youngster's maturity and the degree to which the statute reasonably has put the defendant on notice that the specific sexual act was illegal. Determining maturity in this setting can only be an insurmountable problem: At each level of the analysis it involves subjective impressions and poorly definable terminology  difficulties greatly enhanced by the constitutional rigors imposed on criminal laws. A maturity exception thus would enfeeble the statute. A defendant could argue that the statute provides insufficient notice of the proscribed conduct, thereby rendering it facially void for vagueness. See State v. Ferrari, 398 So.2d 804, 807 (Fla. 1981) (statute is unconstitutionally vague if persons of reasonable intelligence must guess what conduct is proscribed). A court then could be constitutionally required to accept that argument under federal or Florida law and strike the entire statute. In that way, a maturity exception could result in all minors  even those of very tender age  receiving no protection whatsoever from the statute. I therefore think the legislature is both reasonable and prudent in creating a bright-line cut-off at a specific age. There most probably is no better way of eliminating the vagueness problem. In other words, the legislature has acted pursuant to its authority to protect children and young adolescents when it set the age of consent for present purposes at sixteen. The legislature, I believe, can choose any age within a range that bears a clear relationship to the objectives the legislature is advancing. Some reasonable age of consent must be established because of the obvious vulnerabilities of most youngsters and the impossibility of legally defining maturity for allegedly precocious teens in this context. Because an age of consent is necessary, there is no good reason why the legislature cannot set it at sixteen for present purposes, which clearly is reasonable in light of the available psychological and medical literature. Furthermore, the concept that children and young adolescents can consent to sexual activity is highly problematic on a purely psychological level: It ultimately rests on the mistaken assumption that children and young adolescents think the same way adults do and thus can make a meaningful choice in sexual matters. Because of this assumption, some adults erroneously conclude that a young person who did not actively resist or who seemed to have agreed to sex has consented  a notion that uncritically accepts the same general excuses many molesters offer for their misconduct. In this way the victim is given the blame. A widely-cited psychological study strongly indicates how wrongheaded these notions are. In 1983, Dr. Roland C. Summitt [7] described how young people of either gender can be entrapped in continuing sexual exploitation that may seem to be consensual from an adult perspective, but that is not actually so when the psychological differences of children and young adolescents are taken into account. Youngsters suffering exploitation, Summitt said, commonly fail to disclose the sexual activity for a variety of reasons, including fear of the abuser and shame. These children or adolescents typically are overwhelmed by helplessness and thus may effectively be coerced into accommodating the abuser's sexual demands, partly because they may believe they must do whatever an adult tells them. Sexually exploited youths often fail to make any disclosure of their victimization for long periods of time, which erroneously leads some adults to believe that the children or adolescents consented: In actuality, they commonly are afraid, have been threatened, lack the vocabulary to even describe what has happened, or are simply too ashamed to tell anyone. Children or young adolescents also may be directly or inadvertently pressured into retracting claims of sexual exploitation they have made, leading some adults to believe the youngsters are unreliable. Roland C. Summitt, The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome, 7 Child Abuse & Neglect 177 (1983). In other words, what may appear to an adult to be consent or accommodation actually can be the desperate reaction of a young person who genuinely feels trapped, intimidated, and helpless. [8] Another expert has noted an analogous though slightly different problem peculiar to sexual exploitation of young males. In this context, too, scientific study indicates that any focus on consent misses the point: In many cases, the duration and nature of sexual encounters between a male child and his perpetrator bear the external trappings of consensual contact. Like a veil, the notion of consent conceals the underlying coercion and manipulation experienced by the victim. Loss of control, or being overpowered, a familiar theme of girls and women who have been sexually abused, may be emotionally inaccessible or inapplicable to male victims. The dynamic of vulnerability lies outside the emotional vocabulary of many normal males. Mic Hunter, supra, at 77. In many cases, the boys may view themselves as somehow being guilty for what has happened: They cannot concede that they were victims who had lost control of a disturbing situation  something many boys view as unmasculine. Id. at 79. For this reason, there may be serious under-reporting of abuse directed at young males. Id. at 91. In light of the foregoing, I cannot see how the state's interest in preventing sexual exploitation early in life is anything less than compelling. This is not a case about anyone imposing a particular view of morality on others; rather, it is a case about what psychological science, sound policy, and constitutional law show to be essential for the protection of our young people. Beyond any question, the statute at issue here is a valid exercise of the state's powers.