QCOSTARICA – Legislators of the Women’s Committee of the Legislative Assembly (Comisión de la Mujer de la Asamblea Legislativa) have submitted a stiff bill that would prohibit minors to marry even with consent of guardians or parents.
The bill contains reforms to the Civil, Penal and Family codes as well as to the election law (Código Penal, del Código de Familia, del Código Civil and the la Ley orgánica del Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones).
The reform bill carries the signatures of Lorelly Trejos and Maureen Clarke of National Liberation Party (PLN), Citizen Action Party (PAC) deputy Emilia Molina, Libertarian Carmen Quesada, Evangelical Fabricio Alvarado and Social Christian Humberto Vargas. It also contains a prohibition against adults and minors having sexual relations.
But a puzzling twist is that teens even as early as 13 years old can legally engage in mutually consensual sex. “If two adolescents are of similar age and there is no evidence of imbalance of power or violence sexual relations have no legal interest.,” reads a portion of the bill.
The drafters of the bill say that the purpose is to protect children from abusive relations and especially girls from statutory rape.
But the “imbalance of power” or strength may prove difficult to prove in practice.
The country already has a penal code prohibiting sexual intercourse, regardless of the purported nature, by adults with minors.
Via Nacion.com, iNews.co.cr
It’s interesting that a Libertarian signed the bill. I always wonder how Libertarians can draw such a sharp line at the arbitrary age of 18 between the nearly absolute liberties they want for adults and the restrictions on liberties they sometimes want for children. I know of no evidence to show that at 18 people are all the sudden invested by God or nature with an absolute liberty they didn’t have at 17.
This said, I don’t really have a problem with the intent of the bill. Marrying young is usually pretty foolish. However, my Libertarian streak reveals itself when I wonder why the state bothers to regulate such things. By doing so, it creates problems like what to do about an 18- and 17-year-old couple. Is the older partner raping the younger one? This particular bill will also likely increase the number of unmarried teenage mothers, since without it some of them probably would have married the fathers of their children. Meanwhile, what’s to prevent the teenagers from living together anyway and after a bit being married by common law? Then, if they do, would they be in retroactive violation of the law forbidding them to have “married” when they did, and is anyone going to be sent to jail for this?
In all, it just seems to me that the state is better off banning coercion, regardless of age or circumstances, rather than micromanaging to the point where it arbitrarily decides ahead of time the ages at which actions are de facto coercive. I would also think that this is the Libertarian position, making it odd that a Libertarian would back this bill.
Of course nobody wants grown men taking advantage of teenage girls, but will a bill like this prevent that? I have my doubts.
Good points, Ken; but the one thing that this change would prevent is the fairly common practice of adults marrying underage mothers of their children, or simply underage girls with whom they have sex, in order to avoid charges of statutory rape. It will also stop the practice of parents selling their adolescent daughters into marriages to adult men. There are entirely too many thirteen-year-old girls in sexual relationships with much older men.
I have no problem with the “Romeo and Juiliet” clause. Two teens of roughly the same age should be able to experiment without legal penalty. I agree that the question of what constitutes “roughly the same age” is vague and that unequal application of the law would result. The law should state a maximum age difference (e.g., two years) for the difference in the ages of the parties.
I do have a problem with the absolute threshold of age 18. It seems more reasonable to allow marriage at age 16 with consent, especially if her fiance were within that same age group. A pregnant seventeen-year-old who is in love with the expectant father should be able to make the relationship legal with parental approval – as you noted, they could live together legally outside marriage.
I am also surprised that the libertarians signed on to this. It probably had more to do with forming party coalitions than it had to do with philosophical agreement. I wonder what they got in exchange.
While I doubt we’re far apart on any of this and could well find ourselves in complete agreement, for the sake of argument let me challenge the assertions in your intial paragraph (besides of course the one that says “good points”).
First, how common really is it for older men to marry teenagers in order to avoid statutory rape charges, for parents to sell their teenage daughters to adult male suitors, or even for 13-year-olds to be in sexual relationships with older men?
The marriage-to-avoid-a-rape-charge strikes me as an infrequent occurrence. Men are typically hesitant to marry in these situations, since marriage carries lots of financial and other obligations, a family angry enough to threaten bringing rape charges against the guy isn’t likely to give approval for marriage as an alternative, and as a practical matter any rare situation that unfolds along these lines is probably more easily handled by the man offering financial support outside of marriage. It would be the odd parents of a teenage girl who would welcome a marriage on I suppose moral and religious grounds at the same time they wink at the obvious exploitation of their daughter.
Parents do sometimes sell their teenage daughters to adult males, and probably this happens in Costa Rica, but it is more common in far poorer countries. Once again, though, outside of cultures in which wealthy men maintain harems, the contract doesn’t I believe usually include marriage. More typical I understand is for the arrangement to be nominally one of a live-in maid, with however all parties aware of the real agenda, than for it to be marriage. I have even heard of a guy who adopted a teenage girl via one of these deals in order to bring her to Costa Rica from Nicaragua and live with her legally, but have never heard of a guy marrying her.
With respect to the number of 13-year-old girls in sexual relationships with older men, I don’t think anybody knows how many this is. The data are all over the place, and I’ve seen research purporting to show that up to half of all girls in the US are sexually abused. I suspect that the real number both there and in Costa Rica is much lower, since many of the researchers are driven by an ideological agenda and sexual abuse can be defined very differently. Even so, it happens. Yet, the most frequent male offender is the stepfather of the girl, not a fellow hoping to marry her. I just don’t see how restricting marriage gets to the problem of sexual abuse very directly if at all.
Second, suppose I’m wrong about the above, and marriage does figure into all these scenarios. How does restricting the girls’ right to marry help her? Although it sounds awful to us, parents who do sell their teenage daughters to older men are not as a rule acting without regard to their daughters’ wellbeing. The way they look at it, the only future their daughters can look forward to is prostitution, and their daughter will be better off being taken care of by one man than bouncing around brothels. They also often see the money they receive less as an opportunity to make a greedy windfall than as an opportunity to help the girl’s younger siblings avoid her same fate. It’s all well and good for those of us who don’t have to make these tough choices to decry the parents who do, but I suspect that the misunderstanding is ours, not theirs. It follows that if marriage provides these girls with a better life than the alternatives, outlawing underage marriage only hurts them.
If I may, I would liken this issue to abortion. I believe that abortion is almost always wrong, but for me it doesn’t follow that the state should outlaw it. The problems with the state outlawing abortion are both that women will get less safe abortions anyway and, more importantly, that the ban miskenly assumes that women only face the choice between right and wrong, when in the messier real world their choice is often between two wrongs. If I can extend the analogy, I would accept very restrictive abortion rights in a state affluent and committed enough to assist mothers raise their children. My understanding is that Germany is such a state (and good for Germany). However, a state that merely bans abortion without following up with the social welfare programs necessary to assist the mothers in desperate circumstances is I believe wrong.
Anyway, same with restricting underage marriage in Costa Rica. Sure, it’s not usually wise for youngsters to marry and when they do the marriages can sometimes be one-sided and exploitative. But what is the state prepared to offer the teen brides instead? Will it be there with the social programs that enable them to remain in school rather than prostitute themselves in the neighborhood? Will the social workers and law enforcement folks be sufficient to prevent the girls from being raped by their stepfathers anyway? Will there be the kind of family intervention and counseling services necessary to pull the family through their period of crisis? This latter is especially important, since the marriages rarely if ever only involve the girl and her husband. Invariably the mother is instrumental, and often there are siblings and others involved. Banning the marriage doesn’t really solve the underlying problems.
Of course, teen marriages are currently so rare while there are alternatives available to the kids that banning them is of minor importance. It probably doesn’t matter much one way or another whether or not the law passes. Yet, for me it is a symptom of the usual cluelessness with which the legislators here go about their work. Many of them seem genuinely to believe that if a good idea can be put into law that the good idea will be realized. This though is rarely the case. The legislators never seem to notice the gulf between the laws they pass and actual practice, or that with each lofty law they pass the gulf widens.
We do seem to agree that whatever ages are written into the laws (and there’s probably no avoiding choosing some ages) that vagueness is in order. You may have heard of the case of the 19-year-old in Georgia some years ago who was imprisoned for statutory rape of his 17-year-old girlfriend. As I recall that case, even the judge shook his head in dismay over a law that forced him to sentence the kid to prison. Costa Rica needs to be careful lest it end up with laws that do the same thing.
OK, so I may have overstated in saying “fairly common” – I should have said “too common.” While I am sure that these practices are more common in poorer countries, and suspect that they are more common among poorer Costa Ricans; I have heard or read, usually in the context of pregnancies of young teens, that these are not uncommon problems. Perhaps I know poorer people here than you hang out with, but I have heard of specific cases of such incidents. Also, there was a recent case reported (I couldn’t tell you where, but I think that abuse of a small child ) of a case of an older man marrying a girl to avoid statutory rape charges, which may have been the spark for this proposed law. I doubt that the kind of man who will essentially rape a 13-yr-old would worry about financial and other obligations of marriage, especially if he doesn’t have any property to lose and when the alternative is prison time. As to how it helps the girl for the man not to marry her, if she is a young teen and the man is old enough to be her father or grandfather, not being married to him may be reward enough. If they are two kids about the same age, I don’t see an advantage for the girl if she’s pregnant. I think that there is a social benefit, in that removal of the marriage option may make men decide against having sexual relations with girls. As long as 13-yr-old and 17-yr-old victims are treated equally under the law and the age difference between sexual partners is not specified, though, much of the argument for the law falls apart. Fortunately for the girls, birth out of wedlock does not seem to carry much stigma here (again, at least among the Costa Ricans I know).
I looked at Costa Rica’s census data a couple years ago, and took notes. I believe the year of my data was 2011, but I’m not positive. Anyway, in that year 2211 men in Costa Rica over age 50 married. (The census data stop at “50 and older.”) For 13 of them their brides were 15-19 years old, for 48 of them the brides were 20-24, for 87 the brides were 25-29, and for 154 their brides were 30-35. In all, 302 men over 50 married women 35 or younger.
The proposed law would prevent fewer than 13 of these marriages, probably fewer than a half dozen, since only 13 marriages were with women 15-19 and women marrying at 18 or 19 would still be legal.
Of course, grooms over 50 may not be a satisfactory category. Maybe we’re worried about grooms over 40 or 30 too. Unfortunately, I didn’t jot down these numbers.
But I really don’t think we’re dealing with an epidemic here. There might be a half dozen or a dozen a year, if that. Not sure this calls for a blanket law
I doubt that many men calculate the “marriage option” when raping a 13-year-old either. This requires some really farsighted calculating.
And who really knows? My first book was about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the minister, theologian, and Nazi resistor. When he was hanged for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler, he was 39 and the woman he was enagaged to was either 18 or 19 (I forget which). No one I know of has ever judged this relationship improper, and Bonhoeffer has in fact been a moral hero for three generations now.
I’m just pretty sure that there’s not much overlap between marriage laws and sexual exploitation in Costa Rica, and therefore suspect that a law about marriage intended to combat sexual exploitation is frivolous.
BTW, since I have my data at hand, of 73,459 births in 2011, 20,499 were to women who were unmarried even by common law. 477 were to girls 15 or younger, none of whom I think were married.