are often different from the common physical ailments of men. The same is true for mental and psychiatric ailments. But there is huge overlap - plenty of men with borderline personality disorder, or cognitive deficiences or devlopmental issues that mean they relate to teenagers better than they relate to women.

These women are not getting a free pass. They have served time, after guilty pleas. But I think their teenage boyfriends should be protected from them just as teenage girlfriends are from men who "relate to" them more readily than they "relate to" grown women. However, rather than thinking the "expert" quoted is wrong about these women, I mainly came away from the story wishing we could see the same kind of expertise about men's emotional states when they fall in love with teenagers and want to marry them.

I have worked with male sex offenders and would say that they are predominantly immature, childlike, and frequently not very intelligent either.

Probably the biggest difference is that female sex offenders are perceived as less likely to be a threat to society in the future,and their history of marrying the "victims" seems to bear this out.

It gets more complicated when you are talking about women who are teachers, because the public has a right to assume that they are of above average intellectual sophistication, so the naivety defense does seem, on the surface, less plausible. However I think that in truth they are usually pretty low functioning within the hierarchy of their profession and have many emotional problems.

When these cases occur and the women are sent to prison, there is usually a lot of media attention, so such cases must act as a deterrent to other women, though really you would think that any teacher would have enough sense not to have sex with pupils.

I doubt whether anyone professionally involved in the field would pay much attention to ABC News. These type of reports tend to be aimed at an audience of people with a mental age closer to that of the victims.

Both of my daughters have at one time or another dated men much older than themselves. All of them were punks who, it turned out, were terrified of strong women. None of these realtionships lasted of course because my daughters were looking for men who were stronger and more confident than their peers.

I have no doubt that women who date much younger men are also weak and frieghtened of grown up men. I know entirely too many women in their 30s and 40s who have had bad relationships for one reason or another and now have learned to limit their romances to men they think they can control.

Statutory rape, in men or women, is just a symptom of a much deeper problem. The perpetrator is often more to be pitied and probably is more in need of professional help than the "victim".

It's my unprofessional opinion that I read about male teachers being punished more severely than female teachers. My impression is that they draw about double or more, the sentence that women get in teacher/student sex cases.

Has anybody studied this aspect?

If not for teenage sex, none of us would be here today.

Think about that before judging these people as "sick."

The societal bias in this case is embodied in your first line: "Are women who get sexually involved with teens inherently different from men who prey on teens?" Even when posing the question of whether there is any difference, it presupposes there is by using neutral words for the women's actions while describing what men are doing as "preying."

I know there will be people on this thread who will quickly toss out the truism that "Men and women are different!", although whether this will be used to excuse men, excuse women, both, or neither, will depend on the writer. But, while they may be some statistically valid differences between men and women in this area, the truth is that no two men are exactly alike, and no two women are either.

Some men may go after teenage girls because they think of them as easy targets, or because it increases their sense of power to have sex with someone so young and vulnerable. But some male teachers may develop feelings for a student which is not very different from the feelings many men have for adult women - attraction, lust, infatuation. I hesitate to say "love," but it may not look much different from that.

Although the men's actions may be reprehensible and illegal, that doesn't mean the attraction is somehow incomprehensible. In many cultures (even the U.S. a century ago), such a pairing between, say, a 30-year-old man and a 17-year-old woman would be considered a perfectly reasonable match.

And some men are immature, and relate most easily to people younger than themselves. From what I've read, many of the Catholic priests who preyed on young boys were, themselves, emotionally immature when it came to personal relations and especially sex, since in many cases they were never permitted to go through the normal experiences of flirting, dating, or experiencing a long-term committed relationship with another human being (other than Jesus).

(I'm by no means excusing their actions. In these cases, both the age issue AND the power differential between a priest and a teen-age boy make these actions completely wrong.)

Women, too, may not all have the same motives for sex with underage partners. An emotionally immature women might indeed have feelings that look and feel like love for a teenage boy, who might reciprocate the feelings or just want to have sex. But an adult woman who has a sex-and-drugs party with several teenage boys may just be looking for new, "forbidden" activities - for a thrill, with no regard for the boys involved at all.

So I don't think we should use "the difference between men and women" as a standard when setting laws in this area, or when considering such crimes in the abstract. Because any two men who commit such crimes may be approaching them from very different sets of emotions. And the same is true for any two women. In some cases a man and a woman may be more similar in this regard than stereotypes would suggest.

If I don't sound sufficiently outraged about adults having sex with underage partners, it's only because I'm restricting myself to the question of differences between men and women in this regard. When I read about specific cases, regardless of the genders involved, I get outraged enough.