Jeff Anderson, Pick Up the White Courtesy Phone

An op ed article for the Washington Post offers a gentle suggestion (emphasis mine):

If religious leaders and heads of state can’t keep their pants on, with all they have to lose, why does society expect that members of other professions can be coerced into meeting this standard? A more realistic approach would be to treat violations in a way that removes and rehabilitates the offender without traumatizing the victim. The intensity of criminal proceedings, with all the pressure they put on participants, the stigma, the community and media scrutiny, and the concurrent shame and guilt they generate, do the opposite of healing and protecting the victim. Laws related to statutory rape are in place to protect children, but the issue of underage sex, and certainly of sex between students and teachers, may be one in which the law of unintended consequences is causing so much damage that society needs to reassess.

That approach worked out pretty swell for the Catholic Church. But hey, why not go for the full Nabokov, right?

I’ve been a 14-year-old girl, and so have all of my female friends. When it comes to having sex on the brain, teenage boys got nothin’ on us. When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the sexual boundaries between teachers and students were much fuzzier. Throughout high school, college and law school, I knew students who had sexual relations with teachers. To the best of my knowledge, these situations were all consensual in every honest meaning of the word, even if society would like to embrace the fantasy that a high school student can’t consent to sex. Although some feelings probably got bruised, no one I knew was horribly damaged and certainly no one died.

But then there's this cautionary tale, in which the writer seems not to notice the notion of cause and effect:

Pretty much every woman I know has been sexually harassed in at least one, and usually many, of her jobs and/or academic settings. I was fired from a waitressing job in Boston in 1979, during my first year of law school, after I refused to sit in the manager’s lap like the other girls. I would have much rather seen that sleazebag dragged through the legal system than certain teachers I considered friends despite their sexual relations with students that today would land them in jail.

So unwelcome sexual advances should be illegal, then. That's certainly the best way to construct a legal system, making it contingent on subjective judgments.