Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
The past few weeks have seen a slew of bad defenses of Brett Kavanaugh, ranging from minimizing the seriousness of the assault he allegedly committed, to questioning the credibility or motives of his first accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Though all of these deserve rebuttal in their own right, I’d like to focus on a particularly disingenuous set of defenses: those that begin “but he was 17.”
Two lines of argument make use of this particular fact. The first contends that morally wrong acts sufficiently far in someone’s distant past shouldn’t be relevant to that person’s present-day life. The second puts forth that, in cases of sexual assault, holding the attacker accountable years after the fact for actions or decisions made while they were younger might scare young men away from interacting with women, for fear of later being accused of misconduct. I’ll take these one at a time, assuming for the purposes of the argument that Ford’s accusations are true.
The notion of a sort of “statute of limitations” when evaluating someone’s character based on actions from earlier in their life shouldn’t be dismissed as out of hand. It seems clear that people can indeed change for the better; much of progressive discourse surrounding prison reform and treatment of ex-cons relies on this fact. Accepting personal responsibility for one’s actions, sincerely attempting to reconcile with those one has wronged and taking concrete steps to atone for one’s misdoings are all indicators that such a change might have taken place.
Even absent these indicators, certain wrongs do tend to evaporate with the passage of time. Suppose I have a friend who made a particularly rude comment to me five years ago. We might think that I shouldn’t hold this against them now, regardless whether or not they ever apologized (even though the omnipresent urge to be petty says otherwise). What distinguishes these sorts of “evaporating” wrongs is a lack of long-term consequences for the wronged. No harm, no foul; similarly, no longer harmed, no longer fouled.
In summary, the argument that morally wrong actions in someone’s distant past shouldn’t be relevant to that person’s present-day life applies only in cases where 1) the person has indicated somehow that they have changed for the better since, or 2) the action in question didn’t result in long-term consequences for the wronged. So do either of these criteria apply to Kavanaugh?
In fact, neither do. Kavanaugh has offered no apologies, accepted none of the responsibility and given no indication that he’s changed since high school (the emergence of additional accusations from his college years strongly suggest he hadn’t by that point). And if the Senate hearing showed us one thing, it was that sexual assault can continue to harm the victim years and even decades after the fact. We can and should give extend the benefit of the doubt to certain people who have done bad things earlier in life, but not in this case. Time does not heal the wounds inflicted by an unrepentant sexual criminal.
The second line of argument similarly presents an air of reason. High school and college is a time of sexual naïveté and exploration for many. The freedom to try different things, and perhaps to have bad experiences in the process, is an important part of sexual development. The fear that these bad experiences might come back to haunt them later in life, so goes the argument, might scare young men away from interacting sexually with women in the first place.
To which I respond: let them be scared. For starters, it should be abundantly clear that the behavior Ford described falls clearly beyond the boundary of a grey-area bad sexual encounter and into sexual assault, but I’d argue its not a bad thing if young men are scared to have grey-area sexual encounters, either.
There is, after all, an essentially foolproof way to avoid “unintentional” sexual assault: abiding by the doctrine of affirmative or enthusiastic consent. There is presumably sufficient enthusiastic sex to be had, such that young men would be just fine in their development if they were all terrified of future accusations of misconduct to the point that they bailed on all remotely questionable sexual encounters.
The casualty of such a scenario is all of the mutually enjoyable, consensual sex that young people currently have that doesn’t quite fall under the purview of affirmative or enthusiastic consent. This is indeed a loss, but what the last year or two of the #MeToo movement has made abundantly clear is that it is one we must take in stride. Sexual assault is a disturbingly widespread, enormously damaging phenomenon. Combating it will require a significant adjustment to our societal standards, and that includes holding 17-year-old boys accountable for misconduct years after the fact.
Joey Marcellino is a senior jazz saxophone, physics and philosophy major. He can be reached at fmarcel1@terpmail.umd.edu.
