She’s 13, He’s 20; Is It Love or Is It Abuse?

Thirteen-year-old Isabel Gomez and her 20-year-old boyfriend, Juan Pineda, called it love.

California law called it sexual abuse of a child.

Social workers, police, prosecutors and judges called it a problem.

When it comes to adult men impregnating teenage girls, there are plenty of opinions, but few easy answers.

Should social workers haul an underage girl into protective custody, charting a possible future for her as a single mother? Should prosecutors file charges against the man, launching him on a path to prison, when cases of domestic abuse and violent rape are already clogging the courts?

Marriage might have seemed the least likely outcome when Garden Grove police and social workers interrogated Gomez and Pineda, but that’s exactly what a Juvenile Court allowed.

Their marriage, and others like theirs, has sparked a heated debate among law enforcement officials and social workers over whether they should be tolerant of such relationships or strictly enforce laws defining child abuse and statutory rape.

With no overall policy on the matter, the Orange County Social Services Agency continues to handle these situations on a case-by-case basis, hoping its social workers will make the right decisions.

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When social workers first encountered Gomez, she was already pregnant and living with a man seven years her senior. It was an arrangement that needed to end immediately, according to the first social worker on the scene.

But that stance slowly changed as authorities looked further into the couple’s relationship and contemplated the pair’s future.

After a brief stay this summer at Orangewood Children’s Home, Gomez, a seventh-grader, appeared in court with her mother, pledging her commitment to Pineda and insisting that her life has improved by leaps since he stepped in.

Pineda, shaken by threats of arrest, swore to the sincerity of his love for his wife-to-be, and promised to care for their unborn child. They were married July 12 in a Santa Ana Boulevard storefront, and moved into a one-bedroom apartment they share with Pineda’s relatives.

That, according to Gomez’s mother, her attorney and a court record, beats the life she was living as recently as April--skipping school, abusing drugs and running with a 17-year-old gang member who struck her and dragged her under a school bus when he found out about Pineda.

“The social worker said I was too young,” said Gomez, surrounded by stuffed teddy bears and tigers in the room she shares with her husband. “Then, when my mom told her that Juan took me out of the gangs, everything changed. The social worker changed [her mind] too.”

Isabel Gomez’s childhood has been short, to be sure. The oldest of five children, she moved with her mother to California from Mexico City at age 2. By her own accounts, she began dating just seven years later, at age 9.

By the time she was 12, she was mixed up with the gang members in her former Anaheim barrio, forging her mother’s signatures on school-absence forms and running away for 15 days at a time.

“I told her I’d call the police on her, to put her in Juvenile Hall,” said Gomez’s mother, 29-year-old Maria Trujillo, who insists that since the marriage, “everything is much better.”

One April night, Trujillo did call police, giving officers a snapshot of her daughter so they could track her down. They found her on the streets of Huntington Beach. When officers brought her back home, her mother and stepfather asked police to give them another chance at controlling the impetuous girl.

Juan Pineda--a family friend who puts more than half of each paycheck toward his parents dream house in the Mexican state of Guerrero--entered the picture against this backdrop.

When he asked about Gomez, a distressed Trujillo first told him she was staying with an aunt. But when the girl disappeared from school one day, Trujillo went to Pineda and told him the truth--that Gomez was running with gang members.

“We went looking for her together,” the mother said. “After that, he would go to school to check on her, to watch over her. . . . He helped her a lot.”

Gomez said she likes her current life better. She and Pineda go to the movies, spend time hanging out at her mother’s place, and several times a week eat at a nearby restaurant, where Pineda is a busboy.

“He just talks to me real fine,” she said. “When I do something wrong, he just talks, he doesn’t scream.”

But Gomez’s mother still wonders how her daughter will make it as a wife and mother.

“She doesn’t know how to do anything for herself. I’ve always taken care of her,” Maria Trujillo said. “Her stepfather told me, ‘All she knows how to cook is an egg or some rice.’ ”

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Trujillo says she will be there to help. Already, she brings the couple food, because the refrigerator they recently purchased hasn’t yet been delivered. And Pineda knows how to cook because of his work at the restaurant.

“I told her she was too young, that he was too old for her and that being with him was a big responsibility,” the mother said.

She told Pineda the same when he came to visit the family and expressed his love for Gomez.

But the pregnancy changed the mother’s thinking. Gomez, who had left home to live with Pineda, had taken a home pregnancy test but kept the results to herself. Her mother found out only after she got a call from Gomez’s middle school when the girl visited the school nurse and reported morning sickness.

“Juan said he would be responsible for her,” Trujillo said.

But the decision was not theirs to make. School officials notified social workers, who interviewed the girl’s mother and learned she was living with Pineda.

Accompanied by police, the social worker went to Pineda’s apartment to investigate. Pineda admitted to them that he had been having sex with Gomez and that the baby she was carrying was his. He also told them that he knew what he was doing was wrong under the law, according to the social worker’s report on the case.

Believing that the girl was in an unhealthy situation, the social worker wanted to have her removed from Pineda’s home, forcibly if necessary. But officers at the scene were “reluctant to bring the child into protective custody” because she was being provided for by Pineda, and he was assuming responsibility for the unborn child, the social worker’s report states.

The police officer was quoted in the report as saying that “the minor was not at risk and that the minor was with her boyfriend voluntarily and that sex was consensual between the minor and the boyfriend.”

Police officials did not return phone calls for comment.

Gomez was nonetheless taken into custody by the social workers and placed temporarily in Orangewood. Police declined to arrest Pineda or refer the case to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution on the child abuse charges, according the social worker’s report.

Pineda said social workers still threatened him with arrest.

“I told them that I loved her, that I would take care of her,” Pineda said shyly in a recent interview. “We have a good life now. I just don’t want any more problems. I just want to be with her, and to work.”

Trujillo said her daughter was interviewed by a number of social workers during her short stay at Orangewood.

“They said, ‘If your boyfriend will marry you voluntarily, then it will be OK,’ ” she said. “He got married voluntarily. Nobody forced him.”

Pineda’s six cousins are all pregnant, as are his aunt and his mother, so there is plenty of talk about babies in Gomez’s life. One cousin married at 14 and gave birth at 15.

“They don’t try to scare me, they just try to help me,” Gomez, who is due in January, said of her new in-laws. “One of his cousins just had her baby and I ask her questions, because she’s young like me. She said it wouldn’t hurt that bad.”