News Archive

IU McKinney Professor Jennifer Drobac was interviewed for a story that aired November 16 on the nationwide program All Things Considered for National Public Radio concerning California’s consent law.

At issue is a civil case that arose following a criminal conviction. A 28-year-old math teacher at a Los Angeles middle school engaged in a six-month sexual relationship with a 14-year-old girl at the school. The teacher was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison.

Her family then filed a civil lawsuit against the district, Los Angeles Unified. The school’s lawyers have argued that she was mature enough to consent to having sex with the teacher, and introduced the girl’s sexual history into the trial as a part of their defense strategy.

California is one of several states where the criminal age of consent laws clash with the civil laws.

"There are 12 other states, and perhaps more, where I've documented that civil law is diverging from the criminal law treatment of adolescent and juvenile consent," Drobac says in the story.

The story continues: “This means that in a civil and criminal case with the same facts and same people involved, the same consent will be treated with diametrically opposite results under the law. Drobac says that's the situation in states including New York, Illinois, Maryland and Louisiana.”

The disparity between civil and criminal consent came about when the state legislature changed the law and took sex with a minor out of the forcible rape statute, Drobac said. The intent was to establish separate penalties for the two crimes.

"But what happened was ... the California Supreme Court interpreted that as the legislature saying, 'Well, juveniles may be able to consent in certain circumstances,' " she says in the radio story.

"There's no basement on this," Drobac told All Things Considered. "You could take a 9-year-old and say that a 9-year-old could consent, under this reading of the change of law in California."

There is a link to the audio version of the story on the NPR website.

Professor Drobac teaches sexual harassment law at IU McKinney. Her first textbook, Sexual Harassment Law: History, Cases and Theory, was published in 2005; a new edition is expected in 2014. She also is working on a book concerning adolescent neurological and psychosocial development and the law, Worldly But Not Yet Wise, for University of Chicago Press.