By now, most of us here in the Bay State have heard about the "incident" at Milton Academy (for our out-of-state readers, Milton Academy is a prestigious private boarding school in a suburb south of Boston) in which a 15 year old girl "performed oral sex" on five older (16-18 year old) boys. The boys were promptly expelled; the girl is on "administrative leave" from the school. The incident has attracted national attention (see here and here). And it now appears that this was not an isolated incident.
Whether or not Milton Academy acted appropriately in expelling the boys, or unfairly in expelling the boys but placing the girl on "administrative leave" (whatever that means), is not terribly interesting to me; those are internal matters for the school to deal with. The bigger issue, though, is that because the girl was under the "age of consent" (16) in Massachusetts, the boys have all committed statutory rape under state law, and the local authorities are reportedly giving serious consideration to prosecuting them.
It’s easy enough to agree that what these students did was bad behavior, and that it’s probably not what most parents were expecting when they plunked down $32,000 a year to send their kid to Milton. But I have a hard time agreeing with the further proposition that it merits criminal prosecution (putting aside legalisms about the "age of consent" for the moment, I am assuming for purposes of this discussion that the girl’s actions were entirely voluntary – if they were not, I’d think everyone would agree that the boys should be treated as criminals).
