Granted, puberty begins well before 16, but 12 year olds are not prohibited from being in a relationship with others similar in age. The law should stay as it is. 14 year olds can continue to go out with 16 year olds, but adults should not have access to kids below a certain age.

Funny this would even be discussed at all. And raised on a feminist site too. The implication is that women cannot live within the rules set out for everyone, regardless of gender. A negative thing but not surprising coming from feminists and their legacy of entitlement.

But it also points out that women, not men, make and set the social rules. Men may enact the rules, but women demand them.

As another letter writer noted, it is hard to arrive at a universal definition of "harm". What may traumatize one person (young or not) may not even register with another.

And while these relationships may or may not be abusive, they are inherently unequal. In the case of teachers, the imbalance of power is so large that, even if the age of consent were lowered, these relationships should still be prosecutable, much like a psychiatrist who sleeps with his or her adult patients. It is the power element that makes it dangerous.

Statutory rape laws are the way that we as a society set limits on acceptable behavior. I think that close-age caveats are needed--in Ohio, the age of consent is 16 if the partner is within 4 years, so the college freshman won't be prosecuted for sleeping with the high school senior boyfriend she left behind. However, as a Salon story this year pointed out, such caveats may not apply to homosexual relationships, and statutory rape laws can become bludgeons.

What's needed is a frank conversation in this country about sex and children, about what really matters to us. When my god-brother truned 14 and got a serious girlfriend, I took him to buy condoms because my vested interest is in him living long enough to regret any mistakes he may make and not have a child to remind him of them.

A letter from Fred B. Ithurburn of Yuba City to the Daily Journal, a legal profession paper in California (I swear this is 100% true):

The Daily Journal reported a case of a 62-year-old lawyer suing a nun for awening him when he was 2 to 4 years old by fondling his testicles and orally copulating him...This trauma apparently caused him to be unhappy in life, and psychological counseling helped him to gain a new understanding. His multiple marriages, alcohol abuse, addiction and unhappiness in life, he was persuaded, resulted in the need for money damges to compensate him for what the nun took from him.

I, too, experienced similar acts from teenage girls at age 4 and have treasured the memories for 68 years of happy times. I have never had psychological counseling to awaken me to my wrong thinking...

I'm trying to think of a pithy comment to go with the quote, but I got nothing.

I don't think there's a heterosexual male out there who hasn't fantasized about his smokin' hot English/Science/History teacher. But I have felt that there's a sort of professional responsibility that a teacher has to not cross the line and blur the relationship. It's a question of boundaries in my view. One poster brings up the issue of maturity, and I get it. The teacher is presumably the mature adult, the student, however fetching, is not mature enough to get the consequences about driving fast on the highway, let alone relationships like this one. We had a situation like this in our state. A pretty Social Studies teacher got up close and way too personal with a student who was of consenting age. She was not charged with a crime, but she did lose her teaching license. So her career is over. No one knows what the final consequences to the young man will be.

I'm not in any way qualified to judge this in moral terms, but the reality seems rather tragic.

I think that a boundary was crossed that should not have been because of developmental as well as professional issues. Kids are always testing the boundaries. It's what they do. As adults, we need to teach kids what the boundaries are and why we observe them. It's a sign of respect and maturity which clearly these teachers did not possess. It should be noted that these women were married. Being unhappily married is one thing, but taking up with teenagers? What's up with that?

Our bodies mature way before our brains do.

Most kids hit puberty in the early teens nowadays (or earlier!), but our brains do not finish maturing until the early 20s. Teens may be sexually mature, but they don't have the experience or maturity to make decisions about their bodies--and they don't even have the chemical brain capacity! Until our brains fully mature in the early 20s, we are not fully mature. Of couse, we can't make kids wait til they're 21, but we can define the age of consent as the same as the age of majority.

As everyone else here said, the same rules should apply equally to men and women, boys and girls. duh

Perhaps there could be degrees (just like there's first degree murder, 2nd degrees, etc.) depending on the age of the victim--because it IS much worse to take advantage of a 5 year old than a 15 year old. So the younger the child is, the higher the degree of crime and the more severe the sentence.

I think a much more interesting question is not if male predators and female predators should be treated the same under the law (of course! talk about an uneccessarily devisive question! trying to create conflict where none exists!)-- is WhY this sudden spate of grown women seducing teen-age boys? Where is this coming from? Or was it always as prevelent (relative to man/girl?) and only now are people willing to talk about it? before it was too bizarre to admit to? I think it's increaing and I wonder why?