We’ll start with the good news: Teen pregnancy has declined significantly in recent years, and of the teenagers who give birth, only a fraction–about 2 percent–are under 15 years old.
Now here’s the bad news: Authorities in Alexandria, Va., are holding a 29-year-old man who reportedly got his 12-year-old girlfriend pregnant.
Funny, isn’t it, how the good news does absolutely nothing to mitigate the bad.
According to police, Tyrone Gaskins and the girl had a “relationship” that lasted several months. Last week that girl–who had hidden her pregnancy from her parents–gave birth to a daughter. She wrapped the infant in a plastic bag and dumped it in a garbage bin. The baby, you will be relieved to hear, was discovered in time and is doing well. Her father will be charged with rape.
I’d like a minute with him myself. Not to do violence, though it would be a temptation. More than that, though, I’d like to have him answer a simple question: Why? What made him–allegedly, at least–do this to a child?
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Gaskins, of course, will not be available to answer my questions anytime soon, so I took my search for enlightenment to the Washington-based National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy and had a talk with director Sarah Brown. She cautioned against reading too much into this, against inflating a single episode into an epidemic of older men preying on little girls. Where teen pregnancy is concerned, she reminded me, the overall trend is a good one.
But in the end, the facts she marshalled seemed to help her understanding as little as they did mine. In the end her disgust, like mine, was palpable.
Her word for Gaskins’ behavior: “pathological.”
But not, unfortunately, unprecedented.
Though the age spread between him and his victim makes this case stand out, it’s not exactly unknown for older men to have relationships of this sort with children. Forty percent of all 15-year-old teen mothers report that their partners were at least five years older. Among mothers 15 to 17, half were impregnated by men 20 years and older.
You might wonder where the parents are in all this. Well, sometimes they’re fooled. Sometimes, just foolish.
“Some parents have trouble setting limits for their young people,” said Brown. “This is a clear one. A 29-year-old man and a 12-year-old child . . . this is not an older boyfriend. I don’t know what this is.”
Me, I find “child molestation” an adequate term.
But I take her point: Some parents are clueless. I’m reminded of a 16-year-old girl I once knew who was dating a 30-year-old man with her mother’s knowledge and consent. Heck, Mom thought it was cute. I thought it was sickening.
But then, I’ve always had trouble accepting the popular view of children as miniature adults. Never been able to shake the idea that kids need–and adults owe–guidance, vigilance, protection.
Indeed, who ever needed protection more than a teenage girl who is, or thinks she is, in love? Who was ever more vulnerable to exploitation by an older man willing to whisper the proper promises and tell the necessary lies?
The man is usually the last person mentioned in the national dialogue about teen pregnancy, but, from where I sit, he ought to be the first. As a nation, we ought to make him know that what he’s done will cost him. And the price should be high–his money and his freedom. Especially in cases where an older man exploits a child.
Because the end of that story is predictable. Sadly so. The baby comes and the guy goes.
I’d wanted to ask a man why, but that would be useless, wouldn’t it? What answer could he give that would make me understand? What answer might soften a single, unforgivable truth:
When he goes, this guy takes with him the future of two children. The one he made, and the one he used.