The prescribed relationship in which coitus is permitted in society is the monogamous marital relationship. The legal norms specifically prohibit adolescents to marry without the consent of parents. Unless this condition is met, heterosexual coition is proscribed for an adolescent. The statutory law on premarital coitus largely reflects the moral codes from which it originates; the Jewish and Christian heritage in medieval and renaissance Europe, the sex laws which evolved in the English Ecclesiastic courts, and the resultant laws and customs of the early American colonies.
Almost universally throughout the United States coitus is prohibited for juveniles, both males and females.
The adolescent is held accountable for violation of adult sexual norms, but is not
entitled to the rights of adults before the courts unless he is defined as "not a child." In
the latter case, the adolescent is often treated more punitively than an adult for the
same act of sexual deviation (Reiss, 1960) This is especially the case when the
adolescent is viewed as a morally responsible agent who deliberately or voluntarily
enters into an act of sexual deviation. An unmarried adolescent girl who is with child
has often been sent to a delinquency institution for her act of sexual deviation, while
an older woman who similarly bears an illegitimate child is not usually so sanctioned
by the courts. When the adolescent is defined as "not adult", society and its legal arm
tend to partially absolve the adolescent from moral responsibility for the deviation
and to protect the child from the full force of the sanctions, or all together fail to
sanction the behavior. This is usually the case when the adolescent is defined as the
"victim" or "exploited party" in the sexual encounter.
Society can do little about heterosexual intercourse when it is a private act of an
adolescent boy or girl, but in the United States society has not tolerated the behavior
if it becomes public and thereby flouts the mores. Nowhere is this more apparent than
in public reaction to the illegitimate child of the single adolescent girl. Adolescent
pregnancy, because of its social visibility, challenges the mores, and the challenge has
been met with negative sanctions.
The incidence of sex offenses among adolescents far exceeds their adjudication.
Although it is impossible to obtain precise estimates of the incidence or prevalence of
deviation from the sex norms or legal code's defining sex violations, the rate for
adolescents is undoubtedly very high. Kinsey estimates that at least 85 percent of the
younger male population would be convicted as sex offenders if law enforcement
officials were as efficient as most people expect them to be. Kinsey is not referring only
to coital behavior, however.
Given the fundamental problem in detecting and adjudicating cases of
premarital coition among adolescents, together with the problematic aspects of what
to do with violators, it seems doubtful that rational legal enforcement of norms is
possible. It may be of more than passing interest that in over a thousand cases in
which young people have recounted aspects of their sex lives to me, that I have no
cases that involved confrontation with the law. It is likely that they have never been
confronted by sex law enforcement. Such enforcement is not rigorous when applied to
non-delinquent youth, and most offenders have been cautious and clever enough,
sometimes with parental assistance, not to have been caught.
Whether regard for the law is a deterrent to adolescent sexual behavior or not is
difficult to determine. It is often said that adolescents are ignorant or oblivious of the
law as it pertains to their sexual behavior, yet Sorensen found a marked difference in
the responses of virgins and non-virgins to a question on law. While only 36 percent of
adolescents who were virgins agreed that they "don't pay any attention to what the
law says" when deciding on their own sexual activity, the majority of the non-virgins
(69 percent) agreed that they disregard the law in these matters, and over half (57
percent) of all young people agreed that "our society's values concerning sex come from
many generations of accumulated wisdom" (Sorensen, 1973, p. 93, 393).