An eighteen-year-old male student’s sexual encounter with a fifteen-year-old female student at St. Paul’s School has led to his being sentenced to one year in jail, followed by five years of probation, and registered for life as a sex offender. Both feel their lives are destroyed. Our fascination with the secret sex rites of the New Hampshire prep school put Owen Labrie’s bespectacled face in all the papers. But the deeper pity and fear the case inspired revolved around a basic question we increasingly project onto the bodies of our young: What makes sex rape?
Based on an incident in a campus mechanical room, Labrie was charged with an array of crimes and convicted of five. The three most serious charges were “aggravated felonious sexual assault,” corresponding to penetration with a finger, penis, or mouth. For a conviction, the prosecution needed to prove that the accuser had shown, by speech or conduct, that she did not freely consent, and that the accused knew or should have known she was not consenting. But the jury acquitted him of these charges, meaning that it did not regard the acts as lacking consent.
[For more of this story, written by Jeannie Suk, go to http://www.newyorker.com/news/...w-definition-of-rape]
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