In the United States , each state and territory sets the age of consent either by statute or the common law applies, and there are several federal statutes related to protecting minors from sexual predators.
Depending on the jurisdiction, the legal age of consent is between 16 and In some places, civil and criminal laws within the same state conflict with each other. While the unrestricted age of consent is between 16 and 18 in all U. In , the ages of consent were set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7. The last two states to raise their age of general consent from under 16 to 16 or higher were Georgia, which raised the age of consent from 14 to 16 in , [ ] and Hawaii, which changed it from 14 to 16 in Age-of-consent laws historically only applied when a female was younger than her male partner.
By , ages of consent were gender independent. In , Mississippi became the last state to remove the chastity provision from its code. The laws were designed to prosecute persons much older than their victims rather than teenagers close in age; therefore prosecutors rarely pursued teenagers in relationships with other teenagers even though some laws made close-in-age teenage relationships illegal.
After the Landry and Forrest study concluded that men aged 20 and older produced half of the teenage pregnancies of girls between 15 and 17, states began to more stringently enforce age-of-consent laws to combat teenage pregnancy in addition to preventing adults from taking advantage of minors.
A backlash among the public occurred when some teenagers engaging in close-in-age relationships received punishments perceived by the public to be disproportionate, [ ] and thus age-gap provisions were added to reduce or eliminate penalties if the two parties are close in age. Kercher of the Criminal Justice Center of Sam Houston State University wrote that these laws are often referred to as "Romeo and Juliet laws", though they defined Romeo and Juliet as only referring to an affirmative defense against prosecution.
