Concept Paper based on Criminal Justice-related research topic that Essay

Concept Paper based on Criminal Justice-related research topic that you choose - Essay Example This is based on the fact that age differs from state to state. In most states, the lawful age of sexual consent is between the ages of 15- 18 years. In statutory rape, force and consent are not necessary for conviction. The defining factor in statutory rape is the age of the victim. Statutory rape is a crime, and the perpetrators have to go through the legal system of justice. Minors lack the capacity to provide meaningful consent to sex and should be protected against sexual exploitive behaviours by adults (Brody & Acker, 2011). During a criminal trial, a defendant may argue that he was unaware or mistaken about the age of the victim and is not guilty of rape. Most states however view statutory rape as a strict liability offense and have declined to allow defendants to raise the mistake of age defence at trial. Defendants are prosecuted regardless of their mistaken belief about the age of the victim (Carlan, Nored & Downey, 2011). Statistics shows that the majority of fathers of children born to teenage girls were adults; the United States Congress participated in the 1996 Federal Welfare reform law that urged states to enforce the law to reduce teenage pregnancies. More recent studies however show that majority of sexual offenders to teenage girls are teenage boys or males who are about the same age as the girls with whom they are having sex (Leitenberg & Saltzman, 2000). A study in 1995 revealed that 50% of teenagers in the U.S have had sex by the age of sixteen years which is a serious issue for criminal justice because the age of consent is 16 years. This according to the law is statutory rape despite the numbers of such cases rising in an alarming rate (Oberman, 2000). Leitenberg & Saltzman (2000) in their articles used a survey of a representative sample of participating adolescent girls between the ages of 13-15 years and between 8th- 12th grades. Cocca (2002) used case studies on her research. The concepts used in