COMMENTARY | She claims it is a love story. It looks more like a predator stalking, claiming and staking her prey. Loni Bouchard, a 20-year-old Connecticut woman, was arrested for her alleged sexual relationship with her babysitting charge: a 14-year-old boy.
The Hartford Courant reports Bouchard wrote in her journal, seized by police: “I have finally found the guy who treats me right and makes me so happy and I can’t be with him because the law says so?” It could sound like a woman boxed in by the rules of convention, until you learn that this boy is the second 14-year-old with whom she allegedly had a “relationship.”
According to the Courant, Bouchard met the boy’s mother at a playground and the woman subsequently hired her to watch her children. Like a younger, prettier female version of “Stranger Danger,” Bouchard was hanging out at a park.
It is time we stop treating female predators as though they are kindly older women willing to bestow the rites of passage upon young boys. Women in positions of trust who victimize kids are violating that trust just as much as men who violate children. Teachers, like Debra Lafave, whose lawyer famously deemed her “too pretty to go to jail” after she had sex with a 14-year-old student, are treated like women overcome by a temporary longing for a specific person who happens to be too young. Even the language used is less loaded: NBC News describes LaFave coaxing the boy into sex as a “seduction.”
Lafave pleaded guilty to two charges of lewd and lascivious conduct and received house arrest and probation. Would a male teacher in the same position get a similar sentence? Such acts, between an adult woman and male child, are treated as though they are consensual, with the mere legal barrier of age rather than an abuse of authority and an actual assault. Fourteen-year-old boys are as incapable of consent as 14-year-old girls.
Think about what a 14-year-old boy looks like. He’s gangly, barely out of puberty, stringy or doughy, likely in a body that hasn’t fully formed. Think of where their attention lies. Think of where their interests lie.
They are children.
That an adult woman could possibly feel a true romantic connection with a boy is as farfetched and disturbing as an adult man professing his love for a girl. Boys deserve our care and protection as much as girls, and those people who victimize them should be treated accordingly.