When Is a Child Not a Child?

As I left the writing workshop I help conduct at juvenile hall the other evening, I was thinking about another youth, the boy who fathered his teacher’s child. The teacher, Mary Kay LeTourneau, has been sent back to prison for violating the terms of her parole by seeing the 14-year-old boy whom she says she loves. The boy, whose identity is protected by privacy laws, says he loves her, too.

Yes, he says he loves her, but he is only 14. A 14-year-old is, by common definition, a child. He can’t know what love means in an adult context, because he is not an adult.

It is not to disparage the child that the law makes this distinction. It is to acknowledge that unless our law draws a bright line at some age, children of any age might be exploited by greedy capitalists in sweatshops, made to fight wars by desperate governments or sexually manipulated by predatory adults. That legal bright line also prohibits children from drinking in bars, entering into binding contracts and voting for president.

The boys I see in juvenile hall twice a week are writers. They also are killers, robbers and gang members--those whom gubernatorial candidate Al Checchi has in mind when he advocates the death penalty for 14-year-olds.

Most of these youngsters face “707 hearings,” juvenile legalese for the judicial process that allows the court to declare a minor charged with a serious crime as an adult for the purposes of punishment. In other words, they are defined as adults regardless of their age.

So why isn’t LeTourneau’s little lover considered an adult? Why does the law automatically assume he is too immature to engage in consensual sex, but mature enough, if he were one of my writer-criminals, to understand adult legal processes, to assist his counsel, to be prepared to pay consequences that now include the possibility of imprisonment for the rest of his life, and could, if politicians like Checchi have their way, include being put to death?

I can tell you that the youngsters who write from juvenile hall, whatever they did to get there, are still children--desperate, hurting, sometimes dangerous children.

As one young man who has already been declared an adult, writes: “It is very, very hard for me, knowing I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison. I know I did a really bad thing. I know I deserve to be locked up for a while. But not for the rest of my life. When I’m in this (locked) room thinking about all that, I start getting sad, then I start crying until I fall asleep.”

A child crying himself to sleep? Or a dangerous adult criminal? We have put two heads on our children to satisfy competing political imperatives.

The law is right to say that sex between an adult and a 14-year-old can never be consensual in a legal sense, even when both parties want it to happen. A 14-year-old is a child. So are a 15- and 16-year-old. Think of the under-18-year-olds you know: the brilliant ones, the stoned ones, the lazy ones, the snarling ones, the cool ones. They all have one thing in common: They are all kids.

While we need to protect children from adults like Mary Kay LeTourneau, we are hypocrites to pretend that children in our juvenile halls don’t also need protection.