◆ SpookStack

o_totake advantage of their intellectual} and emotional immaturity. Frequently the laws do achieve this purpose. But at other times they result in some strange i situations. For example, if a 21-year-old, | man has an affair with a 30-year-old: divorcée who works as a waitress in al tavern, society remains indifferent; if he, does so with a high-school girl of 16 or' . 1%, he is considered a corrupter of youth and in most states a statutory rapist. But the 30-year-old waitress may have. the mentality of a 12-year-old and no, more sense of socia] responsibility than | a 10-year-old, while the 17-year-old girl may be a mature, all-A student. I is difficult to draw an arbitrary line to establish sexual maturity at any point; but if a line must be drawn, we believe that there are many reasons for thinking it should be set at 16. The av- erage 16-year-old girl is biologically an ! adult; she is sexually mature, has de- veloped all the physical strength and coordination required for living in our m society, and has at least a basic knowl- & edge of the kind of behavior that society 5 expects. Until this century, in which Rev te oa a childhood has been prolonged by the $ vast expansion of high-school and col- i ees lege education, 16-year-olds were ac- oo, cepted as members of adult society, a and many girls married at 16. (One of the prisoners who aroused the most sympathy among the institute staff was a Mexican boy who had been convicted of statutory rape with a 16-year-old girl; he pointed out almost tearfully that his own mother was 16 when he was born.) Our feeling at the institute is that so-~ ciety makes a serious mistake in adopt- ing laws and attitudes that set teen- agers apart from the adult world; when we treat teen-agers like children, we en- courage them to behave like children, while in fact they are capable of acting dults—if we could only let them. . ‘ i ' Pett PRE AE CORNET entRan reece «tvpersonal opinion is that the sex laws should be rewritten so that any act between two mature people—as long as it is engaged in voluntarily and in private—would be legal. (This is also the recommendation of the Anglican Church, the American Law Institute and Britain’s Wolfenden Committee, and is the gist of the new sexual statutes quietly adopted by the state of Ilinois in 1961.) Such a law would be far more suited to our modern world—and would result in far fewer injustices—than the old-fashioned statutes now on the books. One of the great problems now is that society’s attitude toward sex and its sex laws are in open conflict. We live in a highly charged sexual atmosphere: the ever-present message of our literature, our movies and our advertisements is “Be sexual; find romance; get a mate.” But our laws say that all sexual be havior outside marriage is a crime. If early marriage were possible and desirable for everyone, perhaps the con- flict would be less acute. But the de- mands of our complex civilization delay the age of marriage, especially for the most intelligent and most sensitive of our young people, the ones who go to college. And we have never squarely faced the fact that some people do not really wish to get married; others, be- cause of personality quirks, really should never marry—they are foredoomed to Vf be bad husbands or wives, and would be even worse parents, Society makes n provision for the people unsuited for mar. : riage, nor does it exempt them from thy sexua] propaganda that surrounds us: They are constantly urged from all sides tolead a rich, full sex life—yet prohibited by law from doing so. Under laws such as I have suggested, and the state of Illinois has adopted, many of the men we interviewed would never have been in prison at all—includ- ing the substantial number who had been convicted on charges of statutory rape or “contributing to delinquency” involving girls over 16; of adultery with older women and of homosexual offenses involving no use of force. We realize that many Americans may be shocked by this recommendation, yet all these acts, in the opinion of the in- stitute staff, are crimes in name only. We feel that it is one thing to deplore the sexual behavior of adults on moral grounds or even grounds of good taste— but quite another to send them to prison and keep them there at an expense that is equal, in most cases, to the cost of providing a young man with the same number of years of a college edtcation. |