From "Welfare Queen" to "Exploited Teen": Welfare Dependency, Statutory Rape, and Moral Panic

In recent years, adolescent sexuality and statutory rape have been constructed as leading inexorably to teen pregnancy and welfare dependency—manipulative older males impregnate young vulnerable females, who then give birth and apply for public assistance. While these connections are tenuous at best, millions of dollars have been allocated by the federal government and some state governments to step up statutory rape prosecutions. Such prosecutions are touted by policymakers as a means to protect young mothers, even as they have otherwise reduced financial and other supports to those same women. To explore this policy initiative from its conception through its implementation, I examine the discourses surrounding the federal welfare reform bill in 1996, and undertake a case study of one state which has greatly increased its statutory rape prosecutions as a means of decreasing its public assistance costs. I argue that conflating adolescent sexuality with non-marital reproduction and with poverty, as both an economic and moral affront to "traditional" American sensibilities, furthers a conservative agenda vis-à-vis gender, race, class, and sexuality. Further, the focus on, and panic over, the simplified and divisive moral undermines discussion and action on broader economic, political, social, and cultural inequalities.