State Tries New, Tougher Line on Teen Pregnancies

Confronting its failure to curb teenage pregnancy through sex education and counseling, the administration of Gov. Pete Wilson is turning to a tough, new tactic: greater enforcement of laws against men having sex with underage girls.

“The message to adult men is clear: Stay away from young girls and if you don’t, you’ll go to jail,” said San Diego County Dist. Atty. Paul Pfingst, whose office is taking an unusually aggressive approach to the new program.

The governor’s new strategy is provoked by the fact that the great majority of babies born to underage girls are fathered not by boys their own age but by adults.

Starting late last month, 16 counties--including Orange, Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura--began receiving about $150,000 each to pay for the investigation and criminal prosecution of men who have had sexual relations with underage girls. Emphasis is given to cases in which men have impregnated girls.

Statistics from 1994 show 28,065 babies were born to girls 17 and younger, giving California the highest per-capita rate of teenage pregnancy in the nation. In 78.6% of the cases, the fathers were older than 17 and thus, by law, adults.

“We’re not going to have any trouble finding guys to prosecute,” said Bill Schwartz, deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, noting that the county has 750,000 child support cases where mothers have asked prosecutors to compel the fathers of their children to assume financial responsibility.

In many such cases, Schwartz said, the mothers are underage and the fathers are adults. “We’re determined to deter the behavior that leads men to seduce young girls and also, in cases where it has happened, for them to support their children,” he said.

Under the charge of unlawful sexual intercourse, men can be prosecuted for either a misdemeanor or a felony depending on the age of the girl. The charge was once called statutory rape.

The goal of the new prosecution program is twofold: to force unwed fathers to pay child support as a condition of probation and to discourage men from having sex with girls who have not yet reached the age of consent, 18.

Different counties are planning different approaches. Most, like Orange County, plan to pursue cases only when the girl cooperates with the prosecution. Some do not foresee asking judges to impose jail terms.

San Diego County will prosecute even in cases in which the girl does not want to assist and, when appropriate, will ask for jail sentences. As a starter, prosecutor Pfingst plans to put a priority on cases where the girl is 13 or younger and cases where the age difference is eight years or greater.

“I want [jail] time,” Pfingst said. “I want real deterrence.”

Beyond the moral considerations of keeping adult men away from underage girls, Pfingst said he hopes that discouraging teenage pregnancy will break the cycle of educational failure, welfare dependency and delinquency that often engulfs the children of such brief, unstable unions.

In Orange County, girls 17 and younger gave birth to 1,730 babies in 1993, the last year for which the state has county figures. Of those, 76% were born to Latino girls, reflecting statewide figures that show birthrates among Latino girls far exceeding those of African American, white and Asian girls.

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Referrals for prosecution are expected to come from families and police officers. Also, some prosecutors will use their child support case files to find cases.

“We’re a small county,” said Jim Hollman, deputy district attorney in Tulare County (population 350,000), “and word gets around fast. When we prosecute a few of these guys, we think it’ll make a lot of guys think twice.”

John McTigue, chief deputy district attorney in Contra Costa County, expects to prosecute a large number of cases by using DNA to prove paternity. “Unlike the O.J. [Simpson] jury, most people here believe in DNA,” he said.

“We’ve had guys who say, ‘I didn’t think she was 15. I thought she was 16,’ ” said Victoria Dwinnells, deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County. “Some say they didn’t even know there was a law. We hope this gets the word out very quickly.”

Chuck Middleton, Orange County’s supervising deputy district attorney in the sexual assault and child abuse unit, said that, under the new program, his office will pursue prosecutions only when the girl cooperates.

“There are too many of these guys running around fathering children and then not providing support,” Middleton said. “We want to reduce the number of pregnancies and also the number of fathers not contributing to their children.”

Academic and social service experts on teenage pregnancy, while agreeing that something must be done to keep men from having sex with girls, took a wait-and-see attitude toward the new program.

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Gail Buckley, associate director of El Nido Family Centers in Los Angeles, said she is concerned that prosecution might be counterproductive because it could encourage men to flee, ending any chance for voluntary child support.

Jane Mauldon, assistant professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said: “I don’t think it is a bad idea but it’s probably going to be a weak deterrent because so few men will be caught in it.”

Mauldon said that a more comprehensive view of teenage pregnancy will have to consider that in many cases the girls invite sexual relations with men.

“It’s not always a case of men chasing young girls,” Mauldon said. “In some settings, girls get points for being seen as attractive to older men. The social and economic rewards for younger girls have to change.”

Last month, Wilson announced that he was ending his administration’s 3-year-old Education Now and Babies Later counseling and education program for teenagers because it had failed to stem the epidemic of teenage pregnancies. He promised to discuss teenage pregnancy in his State of the State Address on Monday. (Despite killing the much-heralded teenage pregnancy program, the state has other social service programs meant to discourage teenage pregnancy, as do many school districts.)

On Tuesday, the Assembly’s Public Safety Committee will consider a bill that would create additional criminal penalties for cases of illegal sex with a minor that results in pregnancy.

There have long been laws to prosecute men for having sex with girls. But with lean budgets and more pressing criminal matters, such as forcible rape and incest, cases of non-forcible sex between teenagers and adults are often not given priority, prosecutors said. By providing money specifically for such prosecutions, the state hopes to change that trend.

The new program, funded by the governor’s Office of Criminal Justice Planning, is called the Statutory Rape Vertical Prosecution Project. Vertical means that one prosecutor will stay with the case from beginning to end.