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Computer science student Zach Anderson, 19, met a girl, 17, on the "Hot or Not?" app. He was from Elkhart, Indiana. She was 20 minutes over the border in Niles, Michigan. They hooked up. Once.
But it turned out the girl was really 14. She'd lied to Anderson and also in her profile. Now Zach sits in a Michigan jail, serving 90 days. When he gets out he will be on the Sex Offender Registry for 25 years.
Does anyone thinking treating him this way is necessary to keep kids safe? Anderson and his family certainly don’t.
Neither does his supposed underage victim. The girl readily admitted that she lied about her age, and in this WSBT-TV interview her mother admitted that Anderson “didn't do anything my daughter didn’t do.” Everyone agrees the encounter was completely consensual. The only reason the police became involved at all is because the girl suffers from epilepsy, and when she didn't come home as quickly as expected her mom worried and called the cops for help.
In this excellent South Bend Tribune article, the mom told a reporter that she didn’t just ask the judge for leniency, "we asked him to drop the case."
But court records show that Berrien County District Court Judge Dennis Wiley (who once jailed a woman for 10 days over Christmas because she cursed while paying a traffic ticket in the county clerk’s office) paid none of the participants any mind. At sentencing he told Anderson, "You went online, to use a fisherman's expression, trolling for women to meet and have sex with. That seems to be part of our culture now: meet, hook up, have sex, sayonara. Totally inappropriate behavior. There is no excuse for this whatsoever."
It's absolutely unjust. Hopefully it will be turned over in appeals or something. That whole country sounds a bit draconian though--later in the story it talks about a woman who got jail time for saying a "bad word" while paying a traffic ticket.
In the meantime, the best way to protect yourself from this kind of situation I suppose is to make sure you really know a person before having sex (especially if the person is younger and could be lying).
Another example of how our culture draws fewer lines as far as morality goes, but the lines we do draw are much bolder and the consequences for crossing them are much more severe. This is also an example where new morality and old morality come in direct conflict with each other. The prosecutor's motivation here is that he is against the hook up culture in general, and the age difference is the line in the sand he can use as his justification for making an example out of him. He'd probably throw anyone who hooks up with someone online in jail if he could get away with it.
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