One of the foremost researchers of that "older males impregnating younger females" phenomenon as it occurred in California (the sociologist Mike Males) has described statutory rape (a broad term) in general as
"routine 'statutory' offenses involving sexual encounters between adults and teens that have been going on for thousands of years." That's admittedly descriptive rather than prescriptive, but he seems to incorporate it into his examination of "alternate" evidence about teenage pregnancy and childbirth that cast doubt on the nearly universally accepted premise that those behaviors are economically harmful. For example:
Teach these kids simple economics and how children eat capital and how this loss of capital effects their own life and they'll be petrified of it.
An alternative perspective can be found in Hotz et al.'s
Teenage Childbearing and Its Life Cycle Consequences: Exploiting a Natural Experiment. Consider the abstract:
We exploit a "natural experiment" associated with human reproduction to identify the causal effect of teen childbearing on the socioeconomic attainment of teen mothers. We exploit the fact that some women who become pregnant experience a miscarriage and do not have a live birth. Using miscarriages an instrumental variable, we estimate the effect of teen mothers not delaying their childbearing on their subsequent attainment. We find that many of the negative consequences of teenage childbearing are much smaller than those found in previous studies. For most outcomes, the adverse consequences of early childbearing are short-lived. Finally, for annual hours of work and earnings, we find that a teen mother would have lower levels of each at older ages if they had delayed their childbearing.
The premise is that teenage childbearing can function as a beneficial reproductive strategy in light of its ability to facilitate later uninterrupted labor.
Let's just take a look at the sexualization of young girls in the last 10 years.
These popular socially conservative sentiments aren't sufficient for us to make a sound analysis. Do you have any legitimate evidence that indicates a causative effect between this "sexualization" and a corresponding increase in "unwholesome" teenage sexual activity (not that I'm prepared to immediately condemn it as such anyway)? Are you aware that reports of skyrocketing rates of adolescent promiscuity are generally fraudulent in nature?
We also have the problem of media reports being uncritically swallowed by those who wish to criticize teenage sexual activity in general as unwholesome, but insufficient consideration of whether the media reports are actually true is of course a facet of this. For example:
There's been a disturbing new "game" among middle schoolers as of late. It's called Rings (or something). Each girl wears a different color lip gloss and goes down on a boy. The boy with the most rings wins. The kids say that BJs aren't really sex. Where did they hear that? I'm loathe to find the person who can participate in oral sex and not end up going all the way. Play with fire and all that.
The reference is to the "rainbow party" phenomenon, which seems to have been invented by Oprah. I don't know of any validated reports of there being a trend or even isolated instances of rainbow parties before she mentioned it or even if there is one now. It would seem obvious to anyone familiar with the mechanics of a blowjob (a
good blowjob, admittedly), that the "ring" effect wouldn't even work because the colors would smear together, thus ruining the "rainbow."
I can;t help but think about those high shool girls in Gloucester MA last year who made a game of seeing who could get PG. It was an epidemic. Gloucester is not a conservative town. I doubt anyone was teaching abstinence in those schools. MA is traditionally very liberal. If we're going to blame politics, let's be honest.
Similarly, the "pregnancy pact" was evidently a total and complete fabrication by one individual that was immediately jumped on by the media because it delivered information about wildly irrational and disturbing teenage sexual misbehavior that they were eager to believe and insert into their propaganda.