If You are Easily Offended or Cannot Think Abstractly, Do Not Read This.

Statutory Rape. I've had numerous conversations about this topic in my life. Mainly because guys are so afraid of unwittingly committing it. I'll preface this post by saying I hold rape as one of the worst crimes that can possibly be committed. Statutory rape is different, strictly because it can happen with no intent. And that is what I find so interesting and where the irony comes in.

There is a lot of irony contained within the sphere of statutory rape law. Statutory rape law is an interesting topic, to say the least. I'm sure a lawyer or law student could inform me of my ignorance, but, statutory rape law is the only law I know of where you do not have to be cognizant of the act you are committing to be guilty nor have the intent to commit a criminal act. If unwitting statutory rape isn't at the top of the list of "guy's worst nightmares" it has to be in the top 3.

I'm definitively not saying that there are no guys out there guilty of knowingly committing acts of pedophilia. In those cases, jail isn't even far enough as a punishment. The rub is that philosophically, biologically, socially, culturally, legally, and humanly aspects of the situation are not completely in tune with each other on the subject.

Consider this scenario inspired by a friend of mine (in conversation, not act):

A bar (in California, where the age of consent is 18) allows a 17 year old girl under the age of 21 into its establishment because she has a fake id.
The 17 year old girl is knowingly entering an establishment against the law.
A guy who is a legal patron of the bar is attracted to her and assumes that she is over the age of 21 because she is in a bar, and sleeps with her.

In this scenario, who is the most likely to go to jail?

There are a lot of ironic points here, but there is one that I find really interesting. The severity of punishment is inversely related to the burden of knowledge of each party.

The girl is the only one committing an illegal act with full knowledge of the fact (regardless of whether there should be a drinking age of 21 in the first place). Yet she would see the lightest punishment if "caught" and be thrown out of the bar and, perhaps in the worst case, stripped of her fake id.

The bar is supposed to have a legal duty as a business to be looking out for illegal entry to their bar. They have legally accepted this responsibility by choosing to create a business in which this stipulation must be followed. If they fail to uphold this social contract, they are fined. In the worst case scenario, they may be shut down after an excessive amount of failures.

The guy, in this particular hypothetical, is guilty of the horrible crime of being attracted to and acting on an attraction to a girl that is sexually mature at the age of 17, in a place of business who have accepted the social responsibility of keeping people under the age of 21 out of their establishment. He has every reason to believe that she is over 21 and is given no reason to doubt it. This man goes to jail and registers as a sex offender for the rest of his life if caught once. That is ironic.

In conversations about the topic, some have said that the guy should ask the girl's age. Here is where some more irony is injected into the situation. Would she really be honest with him if he does? And the best part is that even IF he asks AND she says 23, he'd still be guilty in the eyes of the law. The real ironic point is that he's supposed to ask her how old she is but asking a woman her age is one of the most taboo questions in our society.

Ironic.