Author ORCID Identifier

0000-0002-9422-232X

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2009

Keywords

Statutory rape, Adolescent boys, News reports, Female sex offenders

Abstract

This article describes the origins, design, and implications of a new study exploring female-perpetrated statutory rape against ado­lescent boys in the United States. In contrast to both legal frame­works, which typically regard statutory rape as a male-on-female phenomenon, and existing literature from the fields of psychology and psychiatry derived from clinical samples and sex offender reg­istries, this study examines the incidence of female-perpetrated stat­utory rape using data from electronic news reports covering the period 1990-2008. In this short article, the author explains the ad­vantages of her approach over those taken by prior scholars, in terms of the size of the data set and the scope of coverage, as well as her decision to focus on statutory rape exclusively, rather than on female sex abuse more generally. The article also discusses the projected implications of the study for understanding not only the crime of statutory rape, but also the gender assumptions implicit in conven­tional works on this topic.

First Page

361

Publication Title

William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law

Download

Share

COinS