16. Patricia Donovan, "Can Statutory Rape Laws Be Effective in Preventing Adolescent Pregnancy?" Family Planning Perspectives (January/February 1997).

17. Elizabeth Gleick, "Putting the Jail in Jailbait," Time, January 29, 1996, 33.

18. Mireya Navarro, "Teen-Age Mothers Viewed as Abused Prey of Older Men," New York Times, May 19, 1996.

19. Phillips, "Recasting Consent," 84.

20. Donovan, "Can Statutory Rape Laws Be Effective?" See also: "Issues in Brief: and the Welfare Reform, Marriage, and Sexual Behavior," Alan Guttmacher Institute report, 2000; Kristin Luker, Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of Teenage Pregnancy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

21. Although teen pregnancy rates have declined to their lowest levels since the 1970s, experts attribute the change not to any crackdown on adult-teen sex but to increased contraception use, particularly condoms and long-lasting implants, by teenage women. Ayesha Rook, "Teen Pregnancy Down to 1970s Levels," Youth Today, November 1998, 7. Mike Males, original discoverer of the connection between adult-teen sex and teen pregnancy, has reviewed California's records and expressed regrets to me that the data have been used so punitively. He also admits that any implication of a direct causal relationship might have been ill-advised on his part. Interviews 1998 and 1999.

22. Elstein and Davis, "Sexual Relations between Adult Males and Young Teen Girls," 11.

23. Matt Lait, "Orange County Teen Wedding Policy Raises Stir," Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition, September 2, 1996, A1. Public-health researcher Laura Lindberg found that such liaisons are not as unstable as some may think. When she checked in with fifteen- to seventeen-year-old mothers with older partners thirty months after their babies' births, she found the couples were still close and still together. Laura Duberstein Lindberg et al., "Age Differences between Minors Who Give Birth and Their Adult Partners," Family Planning Perspectives 20 (March/April 1997): 20.

24. Brandon Bailey, "Teen Moms Question Governor's Proposal," San Jose Mercury News, January 14, 1996, 1B.

25. James Brooke, "An Old Law Chastises Pregnant Teen-Agers," New York Times, October 28, 1996, A10.

26. Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 5.

27. Like today, boys were afforded much greater license to play as they wished, especially if they were employed (though they also had to deliver their wages to the family cookie jar). Also like today, when a family did bring a son before the authorities on sex charges, it was usually for molesting younger sisters or stepsisters or, in a few cases, for suspected homosexuality. Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 178. Historian Ruth Alexander found similarly unsatisfactory outcomes for families in the cases she tracked from New York State in the 1930s and 1940s. When accusing parents found out that the mandatory sentence for sexual misconduct was three years, most were shocked. So while their girls were locked away in Bedford Hills, several hours' trip north of New York City, mothers inundated the wardens with letters pleading for reduced sentences and more humane treatment of their daughters. Interview with Alexander, July 1998.

28. Steven Schlossman and Stephanie Wallach, "The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era," Harvard Educational Review 48 (1978): 65-95.

29. Luker, Dubious Conceptions, 30, 212.

30. Interviews with Ricki Solinger and Ruth Alexander, July 1998.

31. Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 188.

32. The 1995 National Survey of Family Growth found that 43.1 percent of girls lost their virginity with a partner one to two years older, 26.8 percent with someone three to four years older, and 11.8 percent with a person five or more years older. The average teen girl's male lover is three years older than she. Moore, Driscoll, and Lindberg, "A Statistical Portrait of Adolescent Sex," 13. See also: Sharon Thompson, Going All the Way (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 217, 322.

33. Security classifications are in many cases similar to mandatory sentencing laws, which designate certain categories of crime (sex offenses and drug offenses among them) as more "dangerous," even if they are not more violent, than other crimes.

34. Divorce filings in author's possession. Not identified here to protect privacy.

35. National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect, Federal Register, part 2 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 23, 1978), 3244.

36. Frank Bruni, "In an Age of Consent, Defining Abuse by Adults," New York Times, November 9, 1997, "Week in Review," 3.

37. Allie C. Kilpatrick, Long-Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences: Myths, Mores, Menaces (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992).

38. Kilpatrick, Long-Range Effects of Child and Adolescent Sexual Experiences, 58, 90.

39. Letter, NAMBLA Bulletin, June 1994.

40. William E. Prendergast, Sexual Abuse of Children and Adolescents (New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1996), 26.

41. Bruce Rind and Philip Tromovitch, "A Meta-analytic review of findings from national samples on Psychological Correlates of Child Sexual Abuse," Journal of Sex Research (1997): 237-55.

42. Author interview with Lynn Phillips, January 1998.

43. Thompson, Going All the Way, 215-44.

44. I also asked the prominent sexologist and therapist Leonore Tiefer about these relationships. She said: "You have to take into account the subjectivity and the realm of experience of each individual young person. You can't explain this stuff with universals—with sociobiology or sociology. The power issues are not wiped out" by individual explanations, however; "they are complicated." Tiefer gave the example of Monica Lewinsky. "On one hand, you could say she's powerful: she got the leader of the free world to desire her. On the other, there is a certain powerlessness and displacement of ambition" onto the sexual conquest.

45. Phillips, "Recasting Consent," 87.

46. Martin J. Costello, Hating the Sin, Loving the Sinner: The Minneapolis Children's Theatre Company Adolescent Sexual Abuse Prosecutions (New York: Garland, 1991), 8-13.

47. Elstein and Davis, "Sexual Relations between Adult Men and Young Teen Girls," 19.

48. Most states allow youngsters to drive, and even to marry, before they may have unmarried sexual intercourse. In Massachusetts at this writing, a person can marry at twelve, but if someone who is not her husband inserts his finger into her vagina when she is fifteen, even with her express consent, he can be charged with statutory rape. Under a section of the state's legal code entitled "Crimes against Chastity, etc.," taking a picture of her naked seventeen-year-old buttocks will earn the photographer up to twenty years in prison. Massachusetts Family Law, Section 354 (1990); Massachusetts Criminal Law, Section 12: 16 (1992); Massachusetts General Laws, Section 373: 29A.

49. In 1993 in New Mexico it was thirteen; by 1998, it was seventeen; in Maine it went from fourteen to eighteen in the same years. "The Geography of Desire," Details (June 1993). See also Elstein and Davis, "Sexual Relations between Adult Males and Young Teen Girls." For a continual update of age of consent throughout the world, consult www.ageofconsent.com.