Statistically poverty, substance abuse, and dysfunctional families often correlate. Domestic abuse is in the mix too. No one can isolate one single cause, because the world doesn't work in the oversimplified way we'd like it to.
Imagine you're a girl in a poor abusive household. There's really not much you can do but pray for a better future. Then you hit puberty, and you become sexually attractive to the men in town. This may be the first power you have ever had.
Some peeps are endowed with the power to physically or psychologically dominate their peers with implied threats of violence. Others are gifted with natural leadership abilities. But not all. Then there's a group that is simply pretty and sexy.
If you are this poor young woman from an abusive family, and by chance, nature gives you a sexy body that men like, why wouldn't you start flirting with a man you treats you nicely and makes you feel loved? And wouldn't it be even better if the man had a job and a car?
Your way to get away from your hellish home on a Saturday night may literally be the vehicle owned by your new boyfriend, but your ticket to a better life could definitely seem like a serious relationship with a somewhat older man.
Young adults (aka teens) from poor families tend to have more unplanned pregnancies than their peers from rich families. There are many possible reasons for that. Better access to contraception being the most obvious one.
Young adults (aka teens) from rich families also have much better access to options for terminating an unplanned pregnancy than their poor counterparts. So statistically teenage mothers tend to be much less wealthy than older first time mothers.
There was a famous study done by Darroch in the 90s. (see above) It shows a lot of what I have outlined here. When California Gov Gray Davis saw the study, however, he ignored all the relevant data, and decided that the CAUSE of all these problems was statutory rape.
His plan was to get the cops & prosecutors to put more of the boyfriends with jobs & cars in prison as a way to solve the teen pregnancy problem. This was, of course, illogical to the point of batshit crazy. Smart people at the time pointed that out.
So people in the 90s screwed up. Big deal. Who cares?
The main issue here, is that Gov Davis's batshit stupid thinking went mainstream, and dominates our discourse to this day. Big TV personalities like Oprah picked it up and spread it generously.
The goofy myth based on contorted logic took on a life of its own. The general public, who never spend a lot of time digging into the research or thinking things thru, started to believe that the causation runs opposite to the reality.
That is to say, people now believe that teenage women dating men 10 years older than them causes them to be poor and show the symptoms of an abuse victim.
The obvious reality is that poverty and dysfunction is what led them to choose that partner in the first place.
Criminalizing a young woman's choice of boyfriend isn't the way to make her life happy and healthy. Incarcerating the father of a young woman's baby is one of the worst things you can do to her and her infant. We need to bring a little common sense back to this discussion.
I agree this definitely comes off weird and creepy. The angle shouldn’t be “stop locking up men for sleeping with girls,” it should be that we need to target young, poor women and girls to educate them on the dangers of predatory men. More than that, we need to somehow change thinking in men to instill, at the very least, some guilt about desiring younger girls.
In a perfect world, we would stop conditioning men to find the look of youth seductive. Everything about our beauty standards idealizes youthful qualities in women—from skin to height to vagina appearance to personalities…everything we grow up with is conditioning men to be attracted to young-looking women. And the language surrounding sexiness in women is coupled along with that—infantilizing descriptors like “panties” for example. So all of this taken into consideration, it’s so entrenched that instilling guilt around this is the best we could realistically hope for.
I dunno, given all of this and how much would need to change, not to mention how many of the things that need to change are actually that way by design (not to mention under the sphere of influence of private companies, therefore virtually impossible to change en masse)…it’s a pretty unfortunate situation. Realistically the best we can hope for is educating vulnerable girls, targeting aggressively targeting and eradicating abusive households, offering robust social programs to poor households with daughters (or just all poor households period), and teaching these patterns to younger men in the hopes that they can consciously make an effort to break their conditioning. But the ones capable of learning and changing aren’t really the problem in the first place.
sigh
Wow.
Completely ignore what somebody actually wrote. Make up some shit they didn't write, and respond to that.
You are a pathetic troll.