When Yes Doesn't Mean Yes

By Robin D. Stone
The New York Times
August 16, 2004
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Let's say a male teacher was arrested for having sex with a girl in his sixth-grade class. People would cry "Pervert!" and demand that he be locked up.

But when the perpetrator is a woman - and an attractive one at that - and the student is a pubescent boy, the prevailing thought is that she seduced him into an affair.

This double standard is clear in the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, the Washington State woman released this month after serving seven and a half years in prison for having sex with her student, Vili Fualaau. He's seen, with a wink and a grin, as a big man for scoring with an older babe. And she's seen as the siren who betrayed her husband and abandoned her four children in a misguided quest for love.

Vili was 12 when his teacher began to groom him for sex. She was 34. He wasn't a young stud, but a child exploited by an adult who was obviously mentally disturbed. She was not a seductress and they did not have trysts. She was a predator and what happened between them was second-degree rape.

Justice prevailed in this case - though it rarely even gets a chance in most instances of child sexual abuse - primarily because Ms. Letourneau blatantly violated parole after her first conviction and had sex again with Vili, who was then 13.

But if you ask the public's opinion, you will find that few people think that Ms. Letourneau's crime is as serious as that of a man having sex with a girl. Even if you discount the illicit, immoral nature of sexual contact between a 12-year-old and 34-year-old, how could there really be a "relationship," as it's often been described, between them?

The news media fuel the misconceptions. "Mary Kay gets her boy toy back," guffawed The New York Post on its front page. Many articles and TV reports have focused on the salacious specter of abuser and victim reuniting, perhaps with the two children they produced, as one big happy family. A tabloid once described Mr. Fualaau as saying that the two had sex in nearly every room of her house, something you'd never read about a man raping a child. But nobody talks about why Vili Fualaau was vulnerable to Ms. Letourneau in the first place, and the damage that childhood sex with an adult has caused to his psyche. Boys, the assumption goes, can take care of themselves.

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