Fourteen-year-olds in Hawai`i are still legal targets for the sexual attentions of much older adults.
The last of seven bills proposed in the Legislature earlier this year, House Bill 236, still hasn’t been passed by the Senate. The measure is awaiting its passage on the third and final reading.
If and when HB 236 does pass out of the Senate and back to the House Judiciary Committee, three possibilities will then emerge:
l The House will agree and the legal age of consent will be raised to 15.
l The House will disagree and try to raise the age to 16.
l The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. Eric Hamakawa, a Democrat from Big Island, will refuse to hear the bill and it will die.
Kelly M. Rosati, executive director of the O’ahu-based Hawai`i Family Forum, said she thought the bill, one of the weaker of seven bills originally considered, would pass.
But Rosati and other House watchers won’t know for certain until the end of April.
HB 236 “does offer protection for 14-year-olds if the adult is five years older or more. But if you are 15, you are still fair game” for sexual predators, Rosati said.
Rosati and other proponents of raising the age of consent – Hawai`i is the last state in the nation where a 14-year-old can be legally bedded by grown adults — were in favor of some of the other bills proposed, which would have raised the age of consent to 16.
But Governor Ben Cayetano was only a lukewarm proponent of raising the age of consent at all, and the bills were opposed by the O’ahu prosecutor’s office and the Sexual Treatment Center of O’ahu, among others.
Rosati said her organization would be back at the Legislature next year, once again pointing for 16 as the minimum age for consent. But she isn’t very hopeful.
“If they do pass this bill, raising it to 15, they will be unlikely to want to revisit the issue that soon,” Rosati said.
HB 236 was sponsored by Rep. Marilyn Lee, an O’ahu Democrat. The bill had originally proposed raising the minimum age to 16, but that was amended to 15 earlier in the legislative process to keep the measure alive.
All the other bills expired in committee.
Staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and mailto:dwilken@pulitzer.net
