Teen sex crackdown in KS: We're not KY!

By Greg Reeves

Kansas AG Phill Kline is poking his nose into the lives of 62 Kansas families in which an underage girl had a baby.

Just what a family with a newborn or a toddler needs - lawmen in the living room. But the law's the law, right?

Legal sex in Kansas occurs on a complex ascending age scale we don't understand. We have calls in.

But we know a million or so American teens are probably sex criminals under the law. A major CDC study released last month shows that much underage sex.

Taking the CDC's data, we calculated the number of 15-year-olds in the U.S. having sex:

Kansas is just under 1 percent of the U.S. pop. That would mean about 11,000 15-year-olds are having sex among the sunflowers.

Go Phill Kline! Or, what do you think?

Nebraska wedding present: statutory rape

By Greg Reeves
The lack of a minimum age for marriage in Kansas got a lot of attention recently with the case of Nebraskan Matthew Koso, 22, who showed up in Kansas to marry his pregnant 14-year-old girlfriend (left, with Koso) in May. Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning rewarded the father-to-be with a rape charge.
Koso's young wife gave birth a 7 lb, 1 oz girl Aug. 24. Koso faces 50 years in prison on the charge of first-degree sexual assault. This is a case worth watching.
Read Star reporter Scott Canon's excellent story and a more recent take by LA lawyer and radio news-talk personality Bill Handel, an expert on reproductive technology.

1.3 million teens sex criminals

By Greg Reeves
We did a little more number-crunching with new CDC data on sexual activity of persons 15-44 in the U.S. See previous post.
Here's a tally of 15-year-olds having sex - from what we can tell, illegal in every state (Chart may appear far below in some browsers)

                                   

15-yr-olds	Pop.	% sexually active	Total
Boys	1,819,000	38.2%	694,858
Girls	1,930,000	33.9%	654,270
Total "sex offenders":			1,349,128

Teen sex problem mounting

By Greg Reeves
That's just our favorite old newspaper headline, but it fits - The CDC today released advance data from a massive study of sexual behavior of persons 15-44 in the U.S. Whew! What you may or may not want to know is here.
Since this is a crime blog, we have focused on sexual behavior known to be criminal. Age-of-consent laws vary from state to state, but nowhere is it less than 16, according to this guy and a 3-minute look at Wikipedia's exhausting age-of-consent page.
So here are the numbers on 15-year-olds (and sometimes underage 16- and 17-year-olds) having (criminal) sex: (Table may appear far down in some browsers)

                                                                                                                                     

                     

Age	Vaginal Intcrs	Oral sex only	Other kind of sex   only	No opp-sex   contact
Boys
15	24.9%	13.3%	5.0%	56.8%
16	37.3%	11.7%	4.3%	47.0%
17	46.4%	14.2%	2.9%	36.5%
Girls	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%	0.0%
15	26.0%	7.9%	0.0%	66.2%
16	39.6%	10.0%	0.0%	50.4%
17	49.0%	14.6%	0.0%	36.0%
Source: CDC Advance Data www.cdc.gov