Don’t call young victims of abuse ‘underage women’
The criminal law issues in the Jeffrey Epstein case are dizzying. Toss complicated jurisdictional issues in with a questionable non-prosecution agreement and potential prosecutorial misconduct and, voila, a criminal law expert could dine out for a year. Overshadowing all of these intellectual quandaries, however, is the visceral reaction any thinking person experiences upon hearing an absurd term pervasive in the media coverage: “underage woman.”
Who is this mythical underage woman? If you identify as female, you’re either a child (a girl) or an adult (a woman). The term “underage woman” is an oxymoron, a jumbo shrimp for the public to consume. It hides that this is a case about systematic, serial child rape.
We haven’t seen the underage woman’s male counterpoint. No “underage man” made an appearance in the famous Pamela Smart case from New Hampshire, where a female teacher’s “affair” with a male high school student made national headlines. Billy Flynn and his co-conspirators in murder, no less, were boys. Or, at their most mature, teenagers. In the coverage of subsequent cases of female teachers preying upon students, such males are seldom if ever referred to as men or even young men. Perhaps in the most salacious accounts, they are deemed lovers but on the whole they are boys, plain and simple.
Yet in the Epstein case, 14-year-old girls raped by 60-year-old men are euphemistically known as “underaged women.” This matters, in serious ways that affect how we view the application of criminal statutes.
In the 2008 non-prosecution agreement, Epstein effectively pled guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a 17-yearold, a slap on the wrist, in exchange for the government dropping further pursuit of his case. He was deemed a john, the same as some guy in an outdated Buick cruising the seedy backstreets of any American city. He served 13 months in jail during which time he was allowed to leave to work in his office six days a week, 12 hours a day. So, really, for a little more than a year he slept in a county jail — a private wing of a facility in Palm Beach, to be clear. That didn’t stop him from throwing a party when he was released and otherwise going about his life, notwithstanding his status as a registered sex offender.
But in that watered-down solicitation charge, lies a darker implication: If he was only guilty of solicitation, then does that suggest a 17-year-old girl coerced into sexual servitude is a prostitute? And what about the legions of other, much younger girls whose apparent victimization was not encompassed by the agreement?
The plea deal was abhorrent, on that we can agree. But the flawed framing of the case started with that agreement, the repositioning of men as somehow unwitting consumers of sexual services rather than child predators. Every time the term “underage woman” appears in our courthouses and our newspapers, we push that fallacy a little bit further. Those fallacies reverberate throughout our criminal justice system.
We need to say that truth and keep saying it. Girls were repeatedly victimized by the wealthy and powerful. Girls were raped. Girls.
Who is this mythical underage woman? If you identify as female, you’re either a child (girl) or an adult (a woman). The term “underage woman” is an oxymoron.