A staffer at TMZ Sports says

A woman has come forward in the Lawrence Taylor case to say the NFL legend did not have sex with the 16-year-old girl he is accused of raping.

The witness — a 23-year-old stripper who says she was living with the 16-year-old girl and her alleged pimp at the time — gave a sworn statement to investigators from the defense team, saying she was waiting outside the hotel at the time of the alleged incident. According to the AP, the woman says the teenager returned to the car with $300 in cash and said, “It was weird … we didn’t even have sex.”

Read the quote in context here.

According to another source, nfl.fanhouse.com, the defense witness claims “Taylor rubbed himself on the girl, but they did not have sex.” Which, I guess, is supposed to make it all better.

At the end of the day, though, what really matters… what the case boils down to… what’s wrong with the entire picture can be summed up in something else the woman is reported to have been concerned about. Again from the nfl.fanhouse newswire

The woman said in her statement that she did not come forward initially because she worried she would get in trouble because she knew the girl was underage.

Um. Yeah. She was living with this 51-year-old pimp and a 16-year-old girl she knew he was pimping, she accompanied the girl and the pimp to a customer’s hotel room and stood outside waiting while an act of teen prostitution took place. If it wasn’t for the evident fact that the word “prostitution” magically washes away all traces of “statutory rape,” “sexual assault of a child,” “sex offender registry,” “corruption of a minor,” and every other offense prosecutors, judges, and juries are usually (and, I think, correctly) willing to throw at people who have sex with minors, the woman had every reason to worry she’d get in trouble.

For that matter I’m really inclined to question (but certainly not challenge) the rape charges leveled against Taylor in the first place. It’s extremely unusual for prosecutors to charge johns with sexual assault… even when the johns commit violent assault against adult sex workers rather than statutory sexual assault against minor ones.

I’m not knocking their decision because I think it’s a really good idea to hold johns accountable for not meticulously verifying the age of the sex workers they hire. (Taylor claims he asked and the girl told him she was 19. Which doesn’t wash in my book — if she’d said she was Mother Theresa he’d probably have asked to see her ID so…)

But it’s so unusual I’m curious about the particulars that led to this, well, particular charge being brought.

Anyway, bottom line here is that a) yes, whatever one can say about voluntary, entrepreneurial sex work there are also sex workers who are conscripted and coerced, sometimes by violence, b) yes, whatever one can say about consenting adults we do not say the same thing about minors, even consenting ones, and c) while it’s laudable that prosecutors appear to be charging Lawrence with rape and the pimp with sex trafficking they’re still failing to bring with perfectly-accurate and well-deserved charges against them for crimes that would put them on sex-offender registries for life.

It’s perfectly possible to support legalizing the sale and purchase of sexual services from autonomous, uncoerced adults (as I am, even though I’m not terrifically enthusiastic about it) while also supporting draconian measures against the sale or purchase of sexual access to the bodies of those who are conscripted, coerced, trafficked, or otherwise unable to freely and legally consent.

It’s a mistake to imagine that rape is the right word for voluntary commercial sexual services. It’s an even bigger mistake to imagine any other word will do for those who are coerced into sexual servitude.

Yeah, I think it’s time. Echidne of the Snakes asks who…

should listen to the U.S. Catholic bishops as the arbiter of morality.

She said it here.

That these are the guys (and by invocation of their own infallibility clause it’s all guys) who are standing in the way of reproductive rights for women, universal marriage, fertility treatment, and cellular-level medical research, not to mention abstinence even in marriage except for procreation, all on the basis of their own moral authority…

It’s just starting to sink in that it’s not that these would-be emperors have no clothes — there’s room and possibly even need in society for moral religious philosophy and guidance. No, what’s getting me isn’t that they have no clothes at all, it’s that they have no pants!

And just to be clear I’m not saying every male member of the Catholic hierarchy is a pedophile. I am saying, however, that the intersection between public ideology on the one hand and a genuinely, theologically well-intentioned but catastrophic institutional forgiveness of biological reality inside that hierarchy has lead almost inevitably to abetting pedophilia.

Which might have been tolerable were pedophilia a minor flaw like depression, burnout, alcoholism, or even plain old incompatibility with a particular congregation or posting. But in both the most corporeal and the most etherial senses pedophilia simply isn’t the administrative problem the church chose to treat it as, for, evidently, centuries. Instead it’s a direct refutation of nearly all the principles the Church uses to distinguish itself and its clergy from other religions and other denominations. It also directly undermines any and all claims it may ever have had to be an arbiter of morality.

The irony I should be lecturing the Catholic church on morality speaks not so much to my nominal depravity. All my talk about sex and “kink” and so on are actually part and parcel with a fairly strong and reasonably well-informed sense of morality that I’m able to express with some consistency through word and deed both publicly and privately, and so I’m actually not at all depraved. The irony, instead, is that while morality is my hobby it’s supposed to be their job!

That I can now be suspicious (with what I fear to be strong foundation) that the real reason Church leaders permit neither marriage for priests nor ordination of women as priests is out of fear that heterosexual married men and women would neither tolerate nor be tempted by pedophilia… and that I can now be suspicious that the currently embroiled Pope was elevated not despite his history of condoning pedophelia but instead because his history was well-understood within the hierarchy, is probably all that needs to be said about how little moral authority remains with them.

It needn’t be this way. It needn’t have been. But it evidently really, really is.

Also via Research Blogging, Christie Lynn of Observations of a Nerd says neither doh! both the “but she looked 18” and “but I was too drunk to tell” defenses against statutory rape are bogus.

Many accused of statutory rape claim two things – 1) that the girl consented and 2) that they thought she was older. The first is unimportant – if the girl is underage, it’s still rape. But in the US, there is a special defense clause which allows defendents leiniency if there is reasonable evidence they “mistook” a younger girl for one of consenting age. Many times lawyers claim that a girl’s makeup or guy’s consumption of alcohol impaired the offender’s judgement of her age. As an excuse, it’s pretty common among men charged with all varieties of sex with a minor. Well, researchers wanted to see if those factors really had an effect on how men (and women) estimated a girl’s age. The results are clear: alcohol had no effect on a man’s estimate of a girl’s age, and makeup had little.

Read the quote in context here.

There are some half-hearted attempts to but… but… but… from her commenters but overall the conclusion is the more “real world” you make the tests (adding voice or conversation, for instance) the less likely it becomes to legitimately mistake a child for an adult.

And does this have bearing on anything? Why yes, I believe it does!

The study Lynn based her post on acknowledged a fairly consistent age overestimation of roughly two and a half years. Which might make the error plausible for older underage sex workers. But… given that a) ignorance of the law is no excuse and b) a generally accepted age of first-entry into sex work is closer to 13 than 15.5 I’m feel even more attached to my strong preference for prosecuting customers of prostituted children and/or child prostitutes for child sex crimes instead of the far more lenient laws intended to police hiring sex-working adults. (Obviously I think hiring, or being, a non-coerced adult sex worker shouldn’t be a crime at all. Hiring a child, however, especially in the face of the finding Lynn reports, ought to be prosecuted with chilling ruthlessness.)

Via reporter Levi Pulkkinen of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Man admits trying to force girl to prostitute herself

By LEVI PULKKINEN
P-I REPORTER

A Renton man accused of trying to force a 13-year-old girl to prostitute herself on Seattle streets pleaded guilty Wednesday to a sex crime.

Prosecutors asserted Tyrone A. Bellinger, 24, lured the girl into his car and, after showing her his pistol, forced her to sell herself in August 2007.

He pleaded guilty to attempted promoting commercial sexual abuse of a minor, a felony.

Read the quote in context here.

I could be wrong here but I’m guessing the behavior of predators like Mr. Bellinger are a lot more infuriating to proponents of legalizing sex work than are opponents.

If I hadn’t once been 13 myself… and if I didn’t have a 12-and-a-half year old child myself… I’d be perplexed by some of the behavior of the victim. From getting into the car with Bellinger and “an associate” to not flagging down a police car where she was dropped off or using the cell she was given to call 911 you just want to say “what was she thinking!?!?!” And not in a “blame the victim” sense but in a parental/diagnostic sense of what’s the logic of the combination of vulnerability, independence, intelligence and inexperience because.

He didn’t drop the child off in my neighborhood exactly, but he did drop her off on the corner near the grocery store I drive to for my big trip for the week’s groceries. But he drove her through my neighborhood on the way.

He dropped the child off literally on the other end of town from where he picked her up — 15 miles or so.
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He dropped the child off in an area where, sort of fortunately, no serial killers are currently known to be preying on prostitutes. Although, of course, since sex-workers are treated like the scum of the earth by friend and foe alike it sometimes takes a while for anyone to notice when a new serial killer takes up residence.

Somehow Bellinger got the idea that the way you make money is by appropriating children, intimidating them with violence or threats of violence, translocating them far from their support infrastructures, forcing them to sell sexual labor, and keeping all or most of the proceeds. Somehow he missed out on the possibility that maybe those children, being human beings and all, have their own ideas, their own possibilities, their own futures to unwind in front of them.

And… hey… maybe he was trying to run children because adult sex workers don’t… actually… need fucking pimps to make their decisions for them.

I dunno. All I know is that Bellinger pled guilty to the felony of commercial sexual abuse of a minor and will spend two years in prison. Which makes me wonder what other charges he was facing to make that plea look attractive.

It would be very nice, by the way, if upon release he had to register as a Level III Sex Offender. Because parole only lasts so long. And before one can argue that that’s a misuse of sex-offender statues you’d have to first argue how, exactly, selling sex with a child is a lesser offense than having sex with a child one’s self.