Should a Web site be held accountable for statutory rape?
The Internet is used in an inordinate number of different ways. Some people use it for research, some for downloading, some for entertainment. And some, well they use it in order to hook up with strangers for sex. And the price some pay for these services is more than just of the monetary variety.
Meeting new people on the Web is relatively easy – visit any chat room, forum, or message board and the chances are you’ll acquire new friends, even if they are of the virtual kind. It’s not that much of a progression to find people on the Web willing to sleep with you although I don’t know that from personal experience, just what I’ve heard, honestly.
Some Web sites provide a means to find new sexual encounters, acting as a kind of portal for people interested in hooking up with others. One such site is SexSearch.com, which charges its clients $30 a month for the pleasure, or pain depending on their wishes.
Obviously, you have to be 18 years of age or older to join the site, otherwise we’re looking at a much shadier and illegal area of the Net. The only ID check on SexSearch (at time of writing) is a checkbox confirming you are over 18. So not exactly hard to fool the system.
As Eric Goldman’s Technology & Marketing Law Blog details, this was a big problem for an Ohio man who joined SexSearch in order to find new sexual partners. Within a month of setting up a gold account, he had met a girl and reportedly done the dirty deed.
After a few meetings, things turned sour and the girl called the cops. The Ohio man was arrested on three counts of “unlawful sexual contact with a minor.” It turns out that despite telling John Doe she was 18, and lying on the site about her real age, she was in fact just 14, meaning Doe could be charged with statutory rape.
The criminal case was thrown out of court but the man’s name had been dragged through the mud by this point. So naturally, because this is America after all, the man sued who he thought had caused his woes: SexSearch.com. A District court had already thrown out the lawsuit and now an appeals court has done the same.
I do have some sympathy for this man, even though I may not personally ascribe to his means of meeting members of the opposite sex. He didn’t go looking for underage sex and the girl seems to have been a willing partner, or why else would she acquire a credit card and join the site in the first place? However, the Web site clearly cannot be held accountable for what its members do in real life, with the onus having been on Doe to verify the girl’s real age.
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