Posted by Eugene Volokh: Washington State Makes it a Felony for School Employees to Have Sex with Up-to-21-Year-Old Students, http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_07_26-2009_08_01.shtml#1248806966
when the employee is more than 5 years older than the student. That's [1]HB 1385, which [2]just went into effect. ([3]Arkansas and in [4]Louisiana have similar laws.) As I argued before, this strikes me as quite wrong. It might be unprofessional conduct that would justify firing the employee, but not sending the teacher to prison. The "abuse of a position of power" rationale doesn't work here, I think; a teacher has no more power over the student than the typical employer, or police officer, or many other people. Yet we deal with the extraction of sexual favors through threats in those contexts by requiring proof of abuse (whether in a civil case or a criminal extortion case), not by just presuming it. And the law applies to even less powerful employees as well. Nor does the psychotherapist analogy work. To my knowledge, psychotherapist-patient sex isn't a felony, though it may lead to professional sanctions. And in any event the teacher-student relationship strikes me as quite different from the psychotherapist-patient relationship. Criminal punishment, and especially felony punishment, of sexual behavior should be reserved for genuine force, fraud, imposition on children, or situations where there seems to be a real risk of extraordinary psychological or physical harm, or harm to social institutions -- not to consensual sex between adults, even when one adult is a school employee and the other is a student. References 1. http://apps.leg.wa.gov/documents/billdocs/2009-10/Pdf/Bills/House%20Passed%20Legislature/1385.PL.pdf 2. http://apps.leg.wa.gov/billinfo/summary.aspx?bill=1385&year=2009 3. http://www.volokh.com/posts/1245263501.shtml 4. http://www.legis.state.la.us/billdata/streamdocument.asp?did=648863 _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://lists.powerblogs.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
