He can just fuck your brains out and make you gag on his cock and you just can't do anything about it because you can't consent.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/06/05/ ... -says-yes/
Matthew Rutledge seems to have known what he was doing.
In late March, the longtime history teacher at Miss Hall’s School resigned after more than three decades at the Pittsfield prep school, after two women publicly accused him of grooming and sexually exploiting them for years, starting when they were students there in the early 2000s.
Both women say Rutledge did not have sex with them until after they turned 16 — the age of consent in Massachusetts.
The notion that either girl could have actually consented to sex with a powerful teacher more than twice her age is ludicrous. Rutledge was an authority figure who, by all accounts, was a faculty star who operated with impunity at the school. He is alleged to have groomed Hilary Simon and Melissa Fares starting when each of them was 15, escalating his attentions, and his physical contact, until they reached an age at which he could not be criminally charged for raping them, as long as the teens went along with the sex.
Our state law takes no account of the power dynamic in such situations: It simply says they were able to consent, because they were 16.
It’s bonkers, but that’s the rule.
“Can a 16-year-old who has no idea what is coming actually consent when a teacher pulls her into a closet and lays her down on a yoga mat he has prepared for her and proceeds to have sex with her?” asked Kristin Knuuttila, an attorney for women who allege Rutledge abused them, describing the first time the teacher allegedly had intercourse with Fares, when he was in his late 40s, and she had just turned 17.
But according to current state law, anyone, including a teacher, a coach, a bus driver, a principal, a school counselor, or someone else in authority can have sex with a student or player who is 16, 17, 18 years old, and, if the teen says they agreed to it, the rape statute can’t touch the adult (though other laws might apply).
Nobody who has ever met a high schooler could be OK with this.
“This is such horrible legislative policy,” said attorney Eric MacLeish, Knuuttila’s colleague, who has represented hundreds of child sexual abuse survivors. “When I tell parents of victims about it, they are just aghast.”
MacLeish and many others have been trying to change this for years. For close to a decade, state Senator Joan Lovely has been proposing legislation that would close the consent loophole, raising the age from 16 to 18 when it involves sex with a person in a position of authority. For those with special needs, the age of consent in those situations would be raised to 21.
And every year, it keeps not getting done.
Other states have managed this, setting a higher age of consent in situations like the one at Miss Hall’s — Connecticut and New Hampshire, for example. Others make it a crime for an educator to have sex with a school student no matter that student’s age, including Ohio and Arkansas.
This is beyond embarrassing for Massachusetts.
“Legislators are like the general public,” said Jetta Bernier, who heads MassKids, an abuse prevention organization. “They don’t like to think about this problem, it is so distasteful.”
What the heck is it going to take to convince Beacon Hill to finally act here?
This year, a package of bills proposed by Lovely, a Democrat from Salem, and Ken Gordon, a state rep from Bedford, would close the consent loophole and establish other measures to better protect kids from sexual abuse. They would require schools and youth organizations to provide clearer education for employees and students about how to recognize and prevent sexual abuse, for example. If Fares and Simon had been taught to recognize grooming, and theirteachers had been put on notice about inappropriate contact with students, their lives may have taken very different courses.
Some of the measures are still alive, but time is running out on this legislative session. Lawmakers can pass the package and send a message that this state cares enough about child abuse to give teens the same protections as younger kids.
Or they can do nothing yet again, and 16-year-olds will just have to fend for themselves.
