Heidi Artman, the executive director of Victim Outreach and Intervention Center of Butler County, said that physically intimate or sexual relationships between an adolescent and a young adult are illegal for good reason.

The organization, which provides counseling and other advocacy services to victims and their families, deals with dozens of such cases each year, Artman said, and she sees common elements in many of them.

“The majority of the time, they are inherently manipulative,” Artman said. “A younger male or female is going to be more apt to become isolated, and that's how it starts.

“It's really (about) power and control — and that can happen over a short period of time, or a really, really lengthy period of time.”

In 45 years as a forensic psychologist in Chester County, Bruce E. Mapes sees offenders in sex crimes against juveniles falling into three groups.The largest group is those who offend through “naivete and adolescent stupidity.”That doesn't mean their crimes are non-violent, Mapes said, though they can be.“They may be violent. They may also be sort of a situation that got out of control,” he said.As an example he recalls one case in which a 17-year-old boy who was “limited in intelligence” raped a 12½-year-old-girl. Mapes said the contact between the two started out as innocent playing, then progressed to kissing and finally intercourse.“He was nice to her; he gave her gifts,” Mapes said. “On the other hand, I have seen situations where they forced the victim; there was no two ways about it.”That's generally where more members of the second group — offenders who have “anti-social attitudes about females” — fall, Mapes said.“The sex is maybe the goal, whereby whoever happened to be available at the time the urge hit, they victimize,” he said.The third group Mapes sees are people whose sexual appetites fall somewhere on the spectrum of clinically diagnosed, deviant sexual interests, called “paraphilias.”That group is the most difficult to predict and identify, Mapes said. Psychologists have identified more than 500 paraphilias, and Mapes said an offender's drive to satisfy their urges can often result in rapes.He recalled a 19-year-old offender whose sexual predilections required his partner to be covered in chocolate syrup.“He was with a partner, and he poured chocolate syrup all over her, much to her surprise,” Mapes said. “At that point she wanted no part of the whole thing, but he was ready to go, and he ended up forcibly raping her.”Particularly when it comes to paraphilias, like pedophilia, focused on underage victims, offenders' goals tend to be more than simply sex, Mapes said.“Sexual behavior or sexual offending is more of a means to an end,” he said. “The goal is to dominate, humiliate, control; revenge. The sexual offending provides a means to do that.”

To further complicate matters, Mapes said, there's no reliable profile of who targets underage victims for sex.“I think it runs the gamut of socioeconomic, racial, even religious” groups, Mapes said.“I think this is what makes it so difficult for people to understand. What they do is horrendous, but many times they don't stick out in a crowd. They blend right in. That's one of the reasons they're often so successful.”When offenders are discovered to have been having an illegal sexual relationship with a young person, they will often say similar things to try and excuse their conduct, said Charlie Johns, the director of Butler County Children and Youth Services, which investigates claims of statutory sexual assault.“They're going to say that (the victim) was willing, 'I didn't know what I was doing was wrong',” Johns said. “Sometimes, the'll say that other people knew about it.”

A challenge for investigators and for the counselors and advocates who provide services to victims and their parents in a statutory rape is that the victims often don't believe they've been victimized.“It's so hard for the kiddos because they're in love and they're all of these things,” said Artman of Butler's victim outreach center. “They come in to us, and they're angry because they 'consented.' ”Much of what VOICe counselors and advocates do revolves around trying to explain the law, Artman said.“It's a really tricky, fine line because you do not want to make this young person feel like a rape victim, but by law they are,” Artman said.Mapes agreed, and said the effects of statutory rape on victims varies almost as widely as profiles of those who commit the crimes.“It can range from being a nonharmful experience to something that could scar a person in many ways,” Mapes said. “One 18-year-old girl told me 'I didn't know I was victimized until my therapist told me'. That set the stage for a whole series of events.”Other factors include victims' own coping skills, how their family and friends react, and how mental health professionals treat them, Mapes said.Artman said that regardless of how victims feel, the majority of the time their relationship proves to have been “inherently manipulative.”

She said most offenders in statutory rape cases seek to isolate and control the younger person. The victim, in turn, often romanticizes the attention from an “older, cooler” individual.“That's how its starts, and then they're isolated from their support people, their reality check people who say 'there is no 24-old that should be dating a 15-year-old. That's not OK',” Artman said.Kristen Houser, the spokesman for Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, said that push to isolate and control highlights just how deliberately offenders make the decision to target a young person.“It's really not a matter of we've just normalized sex with younger people,” Hauser said. “This is about ... people who are interested in manipulating a younger person. These are deliberate choices, and it's not an innocent ... relationship that happens with a younger person.”