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In recent years, adolescent sexuality and statutory rape have been constructed as leading inexorably to teen pregnancy and welfare dependency-manipulative older males impregnate young vulnerable females, who then give birth and apply for public assistance. While these connections are tenuous at best, millions of dollars have been allocated by the federal government and some state governments to step up statutory rape prosecutions. Such prosecutions are touted by policymakers as a means to protect young mothers, even as they have otherwise reduced financial and other supports to those same women. To explore this policy initiative from its conception through its implementation, I examine the discourses surrounding the federal welfare reform bill in 1996, and undertake a case study of one state which has greatly increased its statutory rape prosecutions as a means of decreasing its public assistance costs. I argue that conflating adolescent sexuality with non-marital reproduction and with poverty, as both an economic and moral affront to "traditional" American sensibilities, furthers a conservative agenda vis-a-vis gender, race, class, and sexuality. Further, the focus on, and panic over, the simplified and divisive moral undermines discussion and action on broader economic, political, social, and cultural inequalities.
Keywords: gender / moral panic / sexuality / statutory rape / teen pregnancy / welfare
What's toxic about teenage pregnancy is that it combines a threat to the public purse with a threat to morality.
-Kristin Luker (1996, 43)
Introduction
Since 1996, ten states' have revised their statutory rape laws to target sexual activity resulting in pregnancy. The intent of the policy, say public officials, prosecutors, pressure groups, and parents who support the targeting, is to protect young and vulnerable girls from further abuse, and to deter predatory men from having sex with teens. In turn,. fewer unmarried teens will get pregnant, the welfare rolls will be reduced, and the government will spend less money on public assistance.
But the connection between statutory rape prosecutions and a reduction in the number of people who need public assistance seems rather tenuous. First, while about 70 percent of U.S. teenagers report having had sexual intercourse in high school (Alan Guttmacher Institute 19992); a probable fraction of that figure represent prosecutable statutory rape cases in which the female is underage and becomes pregnant...