Teen sex and adult insanity

11-14-2010 Michigan:

Girl was lightning rod for peers' fear

Incredibly, detractors continue to heap online invective on a 14-year-old Huron High School freshman who hanged herself last week after a local TV broadcast publicizing her sexual assault complaint against a fellow Huron High student triggered a vicious pushback by the defendant's supporters.

Samantha Kelly's grieving mother, June Justice, says her daughter's Nov. 8 suicide was precipitated by peers enraged at Sam's decision to press charges against 18-year-old Joseph Tarnopolski. Justice's description of the abuse her daughter endured in her final weeks is stomach-turning, and I'm horrified that it has continued in the wake of Samantha's death.

There's no excuse for such posthumous defamation. But after watching the legislators, courts and prosecutors grapple clumsily with the conundrum of teenage sex for more than a decade, I think I understand the fear and rage behind the backlash.

A history of ambivalence

Managing teen sexuality has never been easy -- not for policymakers or parents, and certainly not for teenagers themselves.

Romanticized in fiction and film, celebrated in music videos, exploited by advertisers, and forbidden by religious and temporal authorities, it persists as a fact no parent can afford to ignore. The hazards of sex with (or between) underage peers -- from emotional devastation and social ostracism to unwanted pregnancy and physical reprisals by enraged parents or siblings -- have always been formidable for teens of either gender.

But within the last decade or so, the stakes for Michigan teenagers unlucky enough to face criminal prosecution for sexual liaisons with willing but underage partners have grown insanely high.

The reaction 18-year-old Joseph Tarnopolski tweeted upon learning that he would likely face felony prosecution for an awkward but seemingly consensual sexual encounter with Sam Kelly two days earlier -- All girls are, are liars and backstabbers! he railed in a Sept. 28 post to his then-handful of Twitter followers. Way to ruin my life -- was callous and devoid of remorse for his own bad judgment.

But it was an accurate forecast of the life-altering consequences certain to arise from any conviction for uncoerced sex with an underage partner.

Once prosecutors had established Samantha's age and the fact of their sexual encounter -- an encounter Joseph had already admitted in a handwritten statement to police that matched Samantha's own handwritten account in virtually every detail -- he faced an indeterminate prison term and 25 years on Michigan's public Sex Offender Registry, where colleges, would-be employers, prospective landlords and new acquaintances would find his name and photograph listed among rapists and child predators until he was in his 40s. That was disproportionate on its face -- harsher and more enduring than the penalty Joseph would face for assaulting a stranger with a tire iron.

All or nothing

This is the all-or-nothing lunacy of Michigan's posture toward teenage sex partners -- a legal scheme in which any teen who has yet to reach her 16th birthday is considered a hapless victim devoid of responsibility (unless, of course, her partner is a similarly underage male, in which case both parties are criminally liable).

Anyone who has been around teenagers readily understands how arbitrary this boundary between perpetrator and victim is. Some 14-year-old girls are sexually savvy; others are shockingly naïve. Some 18-year-old boys are predatory; and some lack the maturity, or at least the superficial sophistication, of the younger women competing for their attention.

Most teens, like Samantha Kelly and Joe Tarnopolski, fall somewhere on the continuum between these extremes -- neither wholly innocent nor terribly corrupt, vacillating at any given moment between curiosity and anxiety, caution and recklessness.

But Michigan law admits no such distinctions, and allows no reasoned allocation of culpability for a shared moment of sexual impulsivity. In the eyes of police and prosecutors, the partner 15 or younger is 100% victim, the partner 16 or older 100% felon.

A sense of vulnerability

It is hardly surprising that upperclassmen who had attended school with Tarnopolski for four years reacted skeptically, even defensively, to his two-dimensional depiction as a predatory lothario. Some likely recalled illicit liaisons of their own and over-identified powerfully with their classmate's sudden vulnerability.

Police and prosecutors may have designated Samantha the victim, but in the realpolitik of Huron High, the practical judgment of her peers trumped that arbitrary legal distinction. Whatever Joseph's obligations under Michigan statute, many Huron High students regarded Samantha's decision to report her sexual encounter to police as an egregious, even dangerous, betrayal of trust.

Poor Samantha: If only she had known how little their derision had to do with her . If only she had understood that the real cause of their anger and fear was the irrationality of adult law.

They weren't mad at of you, Samantha; they were mad at us grown-ups, and scared of adult confusion about teenage sex.

They were wrong to take their anger out on you. But they were right to be scared of what grown-ups can do. ..Source.. Brian Dickerson