Playitloudforme wrote: He ass-raped a little girl after drugging her up with qualudes & booze. Buh-bye.
Not disagreeing with anything you've said, but I think this highlights why sex crimes involving teenagers gets really hard, really fast. She wasn't a
little girl, she was thirteen. Thirteen year olds vary wildly when it comes to maturity, physically, mentally and emotionally. When I was twelve I routinely got hit on by guys who assumed I was eighteen (and who freaked out when I said I was twelve.) Physically mature, sure. Mentally mature - absolutely; I was smarter than pretty much everyone I knew, including most adults, and while I had a lot of friends my own age, I had been more than capable of holding my own in adult company for several years. Emotionally mature? Not in the slightest and was totally freaked by every single sexual comment and advance made to me; that stopped only because I had to learn to deal with it.
At thirteen I had 2 classmates, one of them a good friend, who were sexually active and in a normal, healthy, adult way (i.e. consensual, and not as a misplaced need for affection.) I looked older than both of them, mentally I was years ahead, but emotionally they were a lot more grown up than I was. At 18, I still had friends who were emotionally children. At 19, one of my male friends finally had that last growth spurt and went from being 5'3" to being 6'1" and stopped looking like a 10 year old (he didn't finish growing and bulking out until he was 24.)
My great-grandfather at 13 was a sailor and the main source of income for his family. My grandmother left school at 14 to go work full time. Both of them, in their time, were considered to be adults with adult responsibilities. Most people today say 18 is an adult, but for some crimes the US tries children as young as 10 as though they were adults. Some 12 year olds are more mature in every way than some 50 year olds.
So it gets really, really tricky when kids are at that 'in-between' stage. I'm not saying what he did was ok - the moment drugs and booze got involved, he lost any case in my eyes; consensual sex does not include using anything that will lower your 'partner's' inhibitions or affect their decision making. But I am saying, we have to accept that this was not a child - she was physically mature enough to be modelling for a (supposed) fashion magazine, and she was in a very grown up situation before the incident occured. She was underage, and she did not consent - both good reasons to throw the book at him. But this isn't the same as someone raping a 9 year old. Not saying it's ok, just saying it's different.