Sex Offenses: the Marginal Status

INTRODUCTION Adolescence is not a highly institutionalized position in American society.1 It is a transitional status between childhood and adulthood, but it is less institutionalized than either of the two age-based status positions that it borders and connects. The adolescent is a marginal person who is no longer accorded the privileged status of the child, nor as yet many of the rights and responsibilities of the adult. The relatively low degree of institutionalization of adolescence as a status position and the marginal position of the adolescent in terms of role expectations in American society are reflected in the fact that most of the norms governing adolescent behavior do not have adolescent behavior patterns as their reference point. Rather, the norms and expectations governing adolescent behavior have either child or adult behavior patterns as their reference point. The exhortations of parents and other adults admonish the adolescent either to "behave like a grown-up" or to "quit behaving like a child." They rarely encourage him to "behave like an adolescent." There are, then, no highly institutionalized expectations of how one is to behave like an adolescent, in the sense that achievement of these status expectations is a positive transitional link with the adult status. This article is an attempt to show that the failure to accord adolescence a distinct status position that is closely integrated with the larger structure of American society and the resulting minimum institutionalization of norms for governing adolescent behavior has several very important implications for defining and sanctioning the sexual conduct of adolescents in our society: