new (?) definition of rape

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Sat Jan 7 04:21:31 UTC 2012


That's not a trivial question. But the interesting part is that some
states have lower age for legal marriage than the age of consent. BTW, I
was not responsible for that line--it came from an earlier post.

One more thing--David's initial post was undoubtedly in response to the
change in /Federal/ definition of rape, which has a fairly limited
application. One version of the story is here http://goo.gl/61V5a

> On Friday, the Justice Department did something it hasn’t done since
> 1929: it changed the definition of rape.
> For over 80 years, for the purposes of crime collection data, rape was
> defined as forcible male penile penetration of a female. This excluded
> a vast number of sexual crimes including oral and anal penetration, or
> instances when a victim was unable to give consent. The new definition
> makes up for these oversights. It also expands the definition to
> reflect that anyone -- male, female, or transgender -- can be a victim
> of rape.

The change has long been made at state level, but not in federal
reporting data. I am not even sure any laws had been changed. From the
story it seems more like they changed the statistical category
definition to match the predominant statutory definitions. So, likely,
there is a bit less here than meets the eye. Because the statistics are
collected by the DOJ, it makes it sound as if this is a law change,
which I don't think it is.

VS-)

On 1/6/2012 8:39 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 7:52 PM, Victor Steinbok<aardvark66 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> under the age of 13
> Is there a "United" state in which the age of consent is lower than fourteen?
>
> FWIW, there was a case on the Maury Show in which DNA-testing showed
> that a ten-year-old boy was indeed the father of the child born to a
> twelve-year-old girl.
>
> --
> -Wilson

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