Teenage Sex

Finally I can write about something in the news and to which I have a personal connection (it's not what you think!) and that is guaranteed to bring some search traffic.

I went to a prestigious (or substitute your own adjective) private high school in the Boston area that just made headlines for expelling five members of the hockey team. The offense? The boys, age 16 to 18, all engaged in a consensual sexual act in the locker room with a 15 year old female student. Apparently there was some bragging and the administration eventually caught on.

An op-ed piece by Joan Vennochi in today's Boston Globe looks at the legal implications of the situation. In Massachusetts, anyone under 16 cannot consent to sex, so anywone engaging in sex with a 15 year-old is committing statutory rape, as simple as that. The premise of the law is that children are unable to make a good decision about sex, which is absolutely right. The problem with the law is that in reality, kids don't magically gain this ability when they turn 16. A 16 year-old with a woody is perhaps the stupidest creature on earth, dumber than a bug flying into the light of the bug zapper.

The law as written makes no distinction between this dumb 16 year-old and a 45 year-old sexual predator. That's where those in authority need to exercise careful judgment in how forcefully to apply the law. It remains to be seen how this will play out with the prosecuters, but the school administrators, in expelling the five, failed to show any understanding of the situation beyond the black-and-white legal framework and the fear of being perceived as soft on discipline.

Immediate expulsion would be warranted if the case involved assault or explicit coercion, but that's not what happened here according to published accounts. By rushing to the zero-tolerance bandwagon, the Academy abandoned its obligation to help these 6 kids and their classmates grow to become responsible young adults. By expelling five and sending the sixth into exile, the Academy chose to turn away from the unpleasant reality of teenage sex instead of facing it head on. The sex isn't going to go away, yet now the administration has sent a message to the student body: We don't trust you. And you shouldn't trust us. Be paranoid.

The larger problem isn't that teenagers are having sex. It's that the school isn't helping students figure out how and a what age sex should fit into their lives. The fact that these six students have such a warped idea of sex and relationships shows me that the Academy is not educating its students in the art of life. That's something they need even more than U.S. History and Calculus.