Calling sex crimes ‘statutory rape’ or ‘molesting’ diminishes the severity of the offense

WENDY MURPHY: By any other name, it’s still rape
Calling sex crimes ‘statutory rape’ or ‘molesting’ diminishes the severity of the offense
The Patriot Ledger
Feb 23, 2008

QUINCY — Carl Stanley McGee, a top aide in Deval Patrick’s administration, was arrested recently in Florida and charged with committing a sex crime against a minor.

But newspaper stories about the case read less like crime than soft porn. Which raises the important question – how much is the media responsible for our failure to appreciate the seriousness of child sex abuse?

One Boston paper wrote that McGee, 38, was accused of “molesting” a 15-year-old boy and that he “performed oral sex” on the victim. I get the picture, but why no mention of the word “rape”? “Rape” is the proper term to describe any act that involves criminal sexual intrusion into the body – but it appears nowhere in the story.

The word “molest,” for most people, evokes an image of an unwanted hand landing somewhere around a child’s rear end. Indeed, the term literally means “to annoy” in a sexual manner. McGee’s victim was more than “annoyed.”

The word “molest” clouds the harsh truth and enables our brains to default to the least awful “pat on the fanny” interpretation. We can’t help it. It’s easier than envisioning the more gruesome reality of rape.

This is not good news for children. Soft peddling the harshness of child sex abuse only helps the offender.

And while we’re at it, let’s knock off the phrase “oral sex,” too. Calling rape oral sex is like saying a thief pleasantly withdrew your money. Sex is never rape. Rape is never sex. No matter what body parts are used.

Even when the word “rape” is used, it’s usually watered down by that sneaky misnomer “statutory” – as if the fact that the victim was a child was a mere technicality – or that a rule in a law book, rather than a human being, was victimized.

This is a widespread problem beyond our area. A respected writer at the New York Times wrote a column last week condemning the sex trafficking of children. But then he completely undermined the power of his piece by defining the offense as “statutory rape.”

And in a recent Philadelphia Daily News story, a teacher in his 30s was described as having been charged with multiple sexual offenses against a 14-year-old – a child he reportedly impregnated three different times. The perpetrator was accused of beating and threatening the child and forcibly causing vaginal and anal penetration. The Daily News summed up the crimes as “statutory rape.”

It’s time to stop the euphemisms, needless eroticism and hyper-technical legal lingo. We can’t begin to protect kids from sex predators if we don’t start telling the truth about what’s happening to them.

When the victim is under the age of consent, it isn’t “statutory rape”; it’s “rape of a child.” The whole point of having age-of-consent laws, whether for sex, alcohol, driving or smoking cigarettes, is to recognize that some people are, as a matter of law, too young to engage in certain dangerous behaviors. These laws also help protect vulnerable citizens from exploitation at the hands of more powerful adults.

It’s true that not all kids are the same and a small percentage of 15-year-olds might be capable of making more mature decisions. But we don’t make laws for the minority of children – we make laws to protect the interests of children as a class – and kids need protection from exploitation more than they need the “freedom” to have sex with adults.

Some reporters claim they use the term “statutory rape” to give context and to help the reader better understand the story. Nonsense. If modifiers were necessary to give clarity to the nature of the crime, we’d have lots of similar phrases like “parking lot rape,” “mall rape,” etc. But we don’t.
The truth is, we use the phrase “statutory rape” to soften the blow; to make rape of a child seem more like an accident than the serious felony that it is. This is the mantra of “progressives” who think all sex is a form of freedom. It isn’t. For abused kids, it’s more like slavery.

Some might find it harsh and even offensive to use graphic terms to describe the reality of child sex abuse.

But we need to call it what it is – not only because truth matters, but because it’s hard to know whether the legal system is treating crimes against children fairly if we’re not even sure what happened, and the story makes the fact that the victim was a child seem like a mere technicality.

Wendy Murphy is a leading victims rights advocate and network television legal analyst. She is an adjunct professor at New England School of Law and radio talk show host. She can be reached at wmurphy@faculty.nesl.edu