Is this rape?

why the hell was she drinkning?
It is considered rape.

How old was her partner? Was he also drunk? Sounds pretty sad altogether to me. She should probably get some counseling for alchohol abuse right now. I don’t know about the rape question—she clearly was a part of the decision, even if she was impaired at the time.

Yes.

My understanding of the law is that you cannot consent if you’re drunk.

It’s an interesting topic- filled with moral gray area, I think.

In college, they warned us that a girl saying “yes” doesn’t matter if she’s drunk. Same goes for a girl that is underage.

So either way, it is rape.

underage = statutory.

Yea, it is

Why are you asking? Are you the girl?

Or the guy?

lol. I’m a friend of both the guy and the girl. Their situation got me buzzed….

@poodoodoll Does she feel like she was raped? Personally, I think that’s more important than the law in this type of situation.

I personally don’t think it is but if she or her parents ever wanted to press charges, they could. That’s important to note. If her parents don’t like the guy, they can press charges on him.

And I agree with @poodoodoll . It does matter how she feels afterwards too.

If she was drunk then she did not consent to having sex. This guy wasn’t drunk…I feel like this guy took advantage of an underage drunk girl for his pleasure. You don’t even have to ask if it’s rape or not. It obviously is statutory rape and they could press charges!

If the girl is underage it is statuatory rape… depends on the guy’s age also.

She was drunk on purpose which seems to me like she thought if she got drunk she’d have sex. I don’t think so

Who knows; none of us were there. Maybe she got drunk fully intending to sleep with the guy. Maybe the guy wasn’t that up for it and she convinced him. Who knows. If she feels like she was raped, then that’s all that matters. What was her take on the situation, or do you not know?

I’m assuming the age difference isn’t that big – is it?

Well…. she doesn’t want to press charges, she’d rather have it a secret yet she keeps on telling everybody that she was raped by the guy in question.

The boy on the other hand spreads rumors that the girl wanted to do it with him.

Does she drink with an intention to get involve in such activity ? If so I don’t think its rape.

@poodoodoll, and why are you friends with such mental midgets?

like said many times above underage=statutory rape .
But if she went out and planned to have sex . all i can say is she asked for sex why cry rape .

Did she consent? I’ve never heard that a drunk person cannot consent, that’s news to me.

If he’s older than 18, then it’d be statutory rape, but it’s not rape unless she says it was forced.

Other than that, it’s morally wrong because a man should not take advantage of a woman when she is drunk…he should have waited for her to be sober. But, even in those words..it doesn’t make it rape.

It doesn’t matter if she got drunk on purpose or even that she got drunk, she is under age 18 (or whatever it is in your state) and therefore assumed to be incompetent to give consent. It would be better for the boy if he was intoxicated because then, at least, he could have a shot at “diminished capacity” as a defense. That, however, would still be a long shot.

If she were over 14 and the boy was less than 3 years older than her, it would only be a misdemeanor. If he is more than three years older, it is a “wobbler.” And if he is more than 10 years older, it is a felony. But since she is under 14, child molestation statutes apply. He is facing 3, 6 or 10 years, depending on whether he is under 3 years older, over than 3 years older, or over 10 years older. Because she is so young, the outrage factor will likely get him a sentence in the higher range in any case.

The parents don’t have to press charges; this is a crime against the state, and they are fanatical about prosecuting these cases to the hilt. Anyone who has knowledge of the crime can turn the boy in and it is out of the parent’s hands. If that happens, it is a very bad deal for both the girl and the boy. If she takes the witness stand she will be cross-examined and mortified. They may not take her word for it if she says “nothing happened.”

If he goes to prison it will destroy him for life. He will go to prison as a “child molester” and it could get killed or severely beaten. He will have a very rough time of it in prison, because the guards take a dim view of “Chesters” and will put him in harm’s way. He will have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. His face will be on the Internet, and can be pulled up by anyone checking out where sex offenders live in their neighborhood. When he paroles they may make him wear an ankle bracelet, and if he strays within 1000 feet of a school, he could go back for another year. He could end up serving more time on parole violations than he did on his sentence.

So, if he has out-of-state relatives, this would be a good time to visit them. Better yet, out-of-the-country relatives. At the very least, the boy’s family should consult a lawyer experienced in these matters. If you know about this, chances are a lot of other people do too by now and it only takes one to tell a teacher or counselor at school, and they face penalties if they don’t report it. The laws against this sort of thing have gotten insanely punitive over the last 20 years. He will not get a sympathetic hearing from anybody. Anything he says can and will be used against him; even hearsay, because he is a minor.

@poodoodoll If your friend has no intention of pressing charges and wants to keep the event a secret, what the hell is she doing going around telling people she was raped? If she really feels like she was taken advantage of, she should handle it with the law. If she’s looking for some high school drama to spice up her life, I encourage you to show her @MontyZuma‘s post.

Rape is not a joke, it’s not high school gossip. It’s incredibly serious, and I hope both your friends all fully aware of the implications of all their actions.

Wait, is she under 14??

Also, the rule is 4 years (in my state of PA) not three years, for what is legal.

She was 15 when it happened.

how old was the boy? I thought I read that she was younger.

Every state’s laws differ but normally the rule of thumb is that the girl has to say no and make it clear she is unwilling to have sex before it’s considered rape. But age makes a difference. If this guy was over 18 that’s a different story.

and the boy was 18.

@babygalll Just because she was drunk and the guy wasn’t doesn’t make it rape. It is a very serious thing but I know a lot of girls who slept with a guy while drunk, got a bad reputation the next day from it, and decided maybe it’d look better if she claimed it was rape. Rape is a big deal. I hope girls think twice before just throwing the term around so loosely.

The boy was 18? Then I’d say he could be in some trouble. Especially if the girl’s parents press charges. She’s underage. Intoxicated or not, it’s a big no no.

Which state are you in? There are also statute of limitations on rape cases, I think unless the victim was a child.

@ItalianPrincess1217 Legally, “underage” means she is non compus mentus not mentally competent to consent, and that is rape. It does not matter if she was a willing or even eager participant in the deal. The age differences are close enough and they are both old enough that they might not prosecute if no one complains. It does not matter that he is over 18; it only matters if he is more than 3 years older than her.

@MontyZuma And does that apply for every state?

Not totally sure (the ages vary, and the number of years may vary) but the concept of “underage” and incompetence=rape is pretty much the same throughout the US.

@MontyZuma Good to know. I was always under the impression that unless the girl was under 18 and the boy was 18 or older, the number of years between them had no bearing. I learn something new everyday.

@ItalianPrincess1217 It does still matter; the greater the age difference the worse they throw the book at you.

It sure is. BURN the bastard!

She was 15 and got drunk? I would think that if she went to the police about it, they’d also slap something on her for underage drinking.

@ChazMaz Not cool, Chaz, not cool. It’s a status crime, not actual rape.

A status crime?
It is a crime that you even said that.

She was drunk, he was not.
Women are not meat. An opportunity waiting to pounce on.

As much as No means NO. You should have the self control to know when NO should be used without being told. Sometimes No means NO even if she wants to. She thinking it is love and you just want to get laid. Go home and jerk off.

What is not cool is thinking that women are pussy. And so what…. She was drunk. Her bad for putting herself into a situation that ended up with her being raped. That is punishment she will have to endure the rest of her life.

While you boys are reminiscing about that easy lay.

I am 45. I have been around the block too many times. I have seen and experienced things I would not wish on my enemies to experience.

I am by no means a prude. There are things I have done with the ladies, and there have been many, that you would think impossible.

But I have always had respect, it is always about respect. In my youth I will admit to crossing over that gray line of No means No and what it means to that person that I was about to violate.

Things I will always remember, thankfully it never went too far. It is called self control and if you do not have control over it. Do not have sex.

Through the years I have heard countless stories of rape from people close to me. From the she was easy because she was drunk to kidnappings and gang raped for days.
It is disgusting, selfish, inhumane, not to mention SICK.

When you decide to use another person because they are available to you, especially not clear of mind, due to drugs or just not right. Wrong place at the wrong time does not give you the right to rape someone.

You are nothing more then a narcissistic abuser. A rapist! Grow up you lazy child.

I have no respect for individuals like that and it is a shame that taking advantage of a woman sexually is considered a “status crime.”

Makes it hard sometimes being proud to be a man.

@ChazMaz Me thinks thou doth protest too much.

Your flippant remark about “burning” this boy is way out of place given what we know about the situation. If this kid gets turned in and he goes to prison as a sex offender, thanks to you, his life will be totally ruined and miserable. I find it extremely irresponsible for you to inject your emotional baggage into this volatile situation.

Don’t you think that if a woman had been raped, as we commonly understand the term, she would know it? Don’t you think she would have run crying to her family or friends, or gone to an emergency room to receive treatment and/or counselling? And don’t you think somebody would have called the police? The very fact that she and her friends find the situation is so ambiguous that have to ask us if this is rape, pretty much tells us that it probably isn’t, at least not in anything other than in a technical statutory sense.

Is there any indication in the information given that the girl was an unwilling participant in the sex? No. Is there any indication that she ever said No? Again No. Is there any evidence that he used any force, threat of force, coercion, or violence? No. Do we know if he psychologically abused her? No. Was she kidnapped or gang raped? No.

Was she taken advantage of? Yes. Did the boy exercise poor judgement? Definitely. But was this rape? And should we “burn” the boy because of it? I don’t think so. If the girl herself isn’t sure she’s been raped, and there is no mention of force, coercion or pressure, how can you be so sure it was rape? If she had been a few years older this question wouldn’t have even come up. But since she is underage, it does. And that is the very definition of a status offense.

“In my youth I will admit to crossing over that gray line of No means No and what it means to that person that I was about to violate.”

In other words, you admit to rape yourself. At least the boy in this story, so far as we know, didn’t continue having sex after she said No. That makes you more of a rapist than he. Do you think you would be a better man today if someone in a public forum had said “BURN him!” and precipitated sending you to prison?

Suddenly it becomes pretty clear where all this talk about “respect” women being “just meat” or “pussy” comes from. You are really talking about yourself here, since you have absolutely no basis for drawing such a conclusion about him. You say you’ve heard “countless” stories of rape from people close to you? Really? How did you manage that? Do you live in the Congo or something? And where do you get lazy child? If that isn’t pure psychological projection, I don’t know what is.

Anyway, I don’t think its cool to go around shouting “BURN him!” in a situation where people could actually ruin someone’s life, and especially not when you, by your own admission, are guilty of an even worse sin. Instigating the punishment of other people for what are essentially your sins is not going to make it easier for you to feel proud as a man.

[mod says] Flame off please.

“thou doth protest too much.”
Its all about standing up, or sitting down. I prefer to stand. You will learn you get through life by standing up for your actions. Not making excuses.

“If this kid gets turned in and he goes to prison as a sex offender, thanks to you, his life will be totally ruined and miserable.”
No, he will have no one to blame but himself.

“at least not in anything other than in a technical statutory sense.”
Hope my opinion is not keeping you from partying? Sounds to me you do not like your idea of fun to be exposed for what it really is.

“Was she taken advantage of? Yes. Did the boy exercise poor judgment? Definitely. But was this rape?”
YES. Plane and simple. Again, it sounds to be you are trying to justify your own actions.

“In other words, you admit to rape yourself.”
No, if you read it I knew when to stop. Meaning, as much as I wanted to (have sex with her) and could have.
I knew better. Ya need to re-read. Besides you know what I meant, but it was a good attempt at re-direction.

“Do you think you would be a better man today if someone in a public forum had said “BURN him!” and precipitated sending you to prison?”
A better man today? If I was a rapist, and burned. It would be a better world. Not about me being a better man. It’s about preventing it from happening to anyone else.

“Really? How did you manage that? Do you live in the Congo or something?”
What bubble do you live in? You need to get out, out from in front of your playstation. It is a beautiful world out there.
But, it will bite you one the ass when you do not pay attention. You apparently have plenty to learn. Hence the term “lazy boy”. And, it was not directed to you. But I can see you seeing it that way.

“If that isn’t pure psychological projection, I don’t know what is.”
Like I said, you have plenty to learn still.

“Anyway, I don’t think its cool to go around shouting “BURN him!” ”
This is a forum. Not a court of law. A place to allow to express how you feel and what you think. No one is going to burn anyone. You do know that?
That would make Fluther a very powerful.

“especially not when you, by your own admission, are guilty of an even worse sin.”
Well, you are allowed your opinion as I am. But you need to do a better job of reading,
and don’t take it too emotional or personal.

Rape is wrong, no matter how you justify it being right. Or as you call it, “a status crime” or a “technical statutory sense.”

@ChazMaz There’s only one problem here: It wasn’t rape. The girl didn’t say No, There is no force, no threat of force, no coercion, no seizing her and having intercourse with her against her will.

@MontyZuma Not saying no is not the same thing as saying yes. She was drunk, and therefore unable to consent. It was rape.

@MacBean No it isn’t rape in the sense we normally understand the term, and here’s why.

The legal standard for rape by intoxication is that the person has to be so drunk that they are literally incapable of giving consent. In other words, they have to be so out of it that they do not know that they are having sex; (i.e., they are passed out or nearly so); or they are too drunk to be able to say No at any point during the encounter. That’s pretty darned drunk. In addition, for it to be rape, the boy would have to have known, or reasonably should have known, that she was incapable of giving consent due to her intoxication and went away anyhow. We don’t know if she was anywhere near that intoxicated, and we don’t know what his motives are, although his friends say that he believed that she wanted sex.

From what we do know, it doesn’t seem likely that she was too drunk to consent. First of all, her friends describe her as having had sex “under the influence of alcohol,” not drunk. Second, had she been raped, one would expect her to at least be upset about the matter—upset enough to go to an emergency room and/or the authorities. Instead, she runs breathlessly to her friends with the juicy bit of gossip that she’s been “raped.”

But apparently she shows so little outrage and sense of violation and so little interest in having the boy brought to justice, that her friends don’‘t really buy it, and so they ask us. Conspicuously absent from the information they provide is any element of coercion; so we can reasonably assume that there isn’t any. One has to wonder how someone can be raped and not feel violated and victimized, or any of the other emotions typically associated with rape.

Now, as it happens, in most jurisdictions in the U.S. anyone under age 18 is considered mentally incompetent, and therefore legally incompetent to give consent. These same states have no trouble trying kids as adults, but when it comes to sex they are assumed to be incompetent. Anyway, that is the meaning of statutory rape, as distinct from date rape, or rape as it is commonly understood as taking sex by coercion or violence. If this girl were living in Canada, Denmark or Alabama, there would be no statutory problem at all.

In my view, this is not sufficient grounds to destroy a person’s life, especially since we don’t have enough information to burn anyone.

@MontyZuma I got to a point in your reply where I became so disgusted that I’m not even going to honor the rest of it by skimming. I just have this to add, based on what I did read:

.
”Second, had she been raped, one would expect her to at least be upset about the matter—upset enough to go to an emergency room and/or the authorities.”

This is patently untrue. Sometimes women are not sure if they’ve been raped when they most certainly have been, and it’s because of people like you who say things like that.

I was just listening to the audio commentary tracks for season two of Mad Men the other day, and the actress who plays Joan mentioned that people say things to her about “the episode where Joan sort of got raped.” There was no “sort of” about it. But, again, people with these absolutely asinine ideas about what constitutes rape make women think it’s their fault when they’re taken advantage of.

@MacBean I am sorry to have so offended your noble sensibilities that you couldn’t read my argument in its entirety, but if you had any idea about how severe the penalties for rape actually are nowadays, it might give you some pause to consider the wisdom of creating a category of crime in which the victim feels no sense of victimization. Consider also how subjective feeling “taken advantage of” can be, and how easy it is to come by after the fact, to say nothing of false accusations.

Think of the Jerry Springer show, and of the prospect of giving the women there power to send any man who has intercourse with them to prison for years on end, just so they can have some drama in their lives. That’s why “feeling taken advantage of” isn’t legally rape.

I’m not defending what the boy did; in fact, I deplore it. But, what I deplore more is the willingness of some men to blithely convict others on legally insufficient evidence, and to throw away the lives of other simply to show how noble they are. In one reliable study (Kanin) found that 41% of the rape allegations he studied were recanted. Of those, 50% were made in the ffor the purposes of attention-seeking and sympathy.

@MontyZuma ”...but if you had any idea about how severe the penalties for rape actually are nowadays…”

I’m quite familiar with the penalties for sex crimes, thanks, and I’m completely aware of how unfair they can be. For example, the guy I know who is now a registered sex offender because he stopped to pee on a bush while walking drunkenly home from a bar and someone with ~delicate sensibilities~ was offended. Everyone just assumes “registered sex offender” means “child molester,” and so he gets a lot of shit that he completely does not deserve.

On the other hand, I also know two other registered sex offenders, both guys I went to high school with. One had “consensual” sex with a 12-year-old boy, and the other forcibly raped a 14-year-old girl. Both are on probation. Neither served any jail time. Real severe, huh?

@MontyZuma This is clearly between you and MacBean but I’m 110% with you on this one. I’ve read all your posts and agree. Rape is serious and girl’s tend to throw it around rather loosely without truly thinking of the consequences the man will suffer.

@MacBean I know people too. I have a friend whose son is serving a 15 year sentence for a rape he didn’t do. He picked up a girl in a bar and took her home and had consensual sex with her. Her sister and parents were home at the time. None of this came to light until the next day when the first girl (who, it turns out is mentally ill) got in trouble for bringing a man home and having intercourse in their parent’s home. Then the girl claimed she was raped, and her sister backed her up saying he had raped her too. No evidence of rape was sought or found regarding the second girl; nonetheless, he was sent away on the perjured testimony of the two girls.

The sister who wasn’t raped has since recanted, explaining how the two girls had concocted the story in order to get out of trouble with their parents. This fellow has had 10 years ripped from his life so far. He has lost the use of one hand because he was tortured in prison and he has been severely traumatized. You would think that in light of the new evidence he would be exonerated, or at least get a new trial. Well, as it happens, this guy is the sort of prisoner who files complaints on guards who mistreat prisoners. They retaliate by bouncing him from prison to prison, losing his paperwork along the way, and causing him to miss court deadlines. And there is also the $500 court filing fee, and the requirement that he submit 20 copies of his papers, all of which are extremely difficult given the fact that if he is lucky enough to have a job at all, he only makes around 19 cents an hour.

I also used to work for a government program that dealt with exclusively sex offenders; so I am privy to literally hundreds of cases involving sex offenses of all kinds. I find it absolutely inconceivable that anyone could “forcibly” rape a 14 year-old or anyone else after 1990 and not go to prison as a result. The only cases where intercourse with a minor would result in probation (at least in California) are in incest offenses where the probation department has looked into the matter and has determined that the prognosis is good that the offender will not reoffend if he receives counselling.

Other than that, the political climate is one of “hang ‘em high” for sex offenders.

@ItalianPrincess1217 Thank you princess.

@MontyZuma After your use of the term “absolutely inconceivable,” I started to doubt my memory, so I went back and looked at the information on the two guys I went to high school with.

The first one got six months probation for having sex with an 11-year-old boy.

The second got 42 months in state prison for forcibly raping a 14-year-old girl.

What adequate punishments.~

@MacBean I assume by your sarcasm that you don’t think these sentences are adequate. Do you have any idea what a year in prison is like? If I surmise correctly that you live in Indiana, your prisons there are some of the worst—so bad, in fact, that they are on several human rights watch lists.

Three and a half years (42 mos) is at the lower end of the statutory range, no doubt reflecting the amount of force used and the fact that it was his first offense. So it is certainly legally adequate. In California, the prosecutors have gotten the Legislature to water down “force and violence” so that a simple disparity of size between adult and child now counts as “force and violence.” It is possible that “forcible” in this instance is something considerably less than what the term ordinarily means.

Six month probation for having sex with an 11 year-old boy does seem awfully light for a non-incest offense, even with all the sex offender registration, pubic notification, and the lifetime of humiliation that goes with it. If this is not an incest case, its got to be a plea agreement. If so, then case against him must have been pretty weak. Given how willing some people are to believe the worst, even an innocent man would think twice about entrusting his fate to the vagaries of a jury trial.

In California our current governor and the one before him have both proposed a “one-strike” law for sex offenses, to give you an idea of how hysterical people can get about sex offenses, and the benefits to politicians who pander to this sentiment.

@MontyZuma No, I don’t think three and a half years in prison is an adequate sentence for a 20-year-old person who had sex with a 14-year-old one. Even if the 14-year-old thought they were consenting. And I also don’t know what a year in prison is like, but even with your information about some of them being on human rights watch lists… Well, I think people who take advantage of children like that are subhuman, so…

Also, I’m in NY. What made you think IN?

And, taking advantage of your knowledge here, in the case with the 11-year-old boy, he’s listed as a “non-stranger.” So it could be an incest case. How exactly would that affect things legally?

@MacBean I don’t want to sound like I am condoning adults having sex with 14 year-olds, but I would like to point out that 14 year-olds vary enormously in maturity, particularly if they grow up in a society that expects them to be mature at that age. I count about 40 countries in the world where the age of consent is 13 or 14. And these are not backward third-world countries as you might expect, but places like Germany, Austria, Denmark, Canada, China, Italy, Russia and Mexico.

If 14 year-olds are immature in our society, it is because shelter them from the world of adults and adult responsibilities, and because we expect them to be immature. Most of the people who have ever lived in the history of mankind were married and having children by the age of 14. Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, seduced Julius Caesar at the age of 14 and bore him a son. Mary, mother of Jesus, was 14 when she married Joseph, who was in his 20s at the time. Cleopatra and Mary were not exceptions; they were mature at age 14 because people in those societies went to work as soon as they could carry a bucket. Moreover, most people slept in the same room, so there were no mysteries about the adult world, least of all sex. I mention this to point out how broad a brush you use when you paint someone subhuman for having sex with a 14 year-old.

The reason I asked if you had any idea how much a year in prison is, its because one year in prison is a much bigger deal than you think it is. In Europe and Scandinavia, three years is considered a stiff sentence, and their prisons are much more humane than ours. For example, Hitler’s confidant Albert Speer, was sentenced to only 20 years for his war crimes. The US is much harsher in its punishments of most things than other countries, and it doesn’t really deter crime in the slightest.

As for your friend being listed as a “non-stranger,” that means it was either a relative (possibly a cousin) or someone living in the same household, or possibly a neighbor acquaintance who was around enough to become close. I don’t know enough about each state’s classification system to say for sure, but it could include incest offenders. Incest offenders very seldom offend again once the authorities intervene. Offenders who go after strangers are another story. They have the highest risk of reoffense, and it is one of the criteria they look for in determining whether the offender is a Sexually Violent Predator. Legally, molestation is molestation whether it is incest or not. But if it is incest, they treat it more lightly because the prognosis is so much better if they do.

I saw that you listed Indiana in your profile and thought I would take a 50–50 chance between it and Albany.

There seems to be a really huge stir in this topic. My friend (the girl in question) told us that she got really drunk to the point of unconsciousness that she wasn’t aware what was going on around her. That was when the boy took her to his house and did the dirty deed.

Well, then, that changes everything. It is rape.

That does change everything. It’s rape. Please support your friend, and suggest she find help, report it, etc.