Misty Roberts, 43, faces sentences of up to 10 and seven years in prison after July 2024 sexual assault at pool party
The former mayor of a Louisiana city has been convicted of raping a 16-year-old boy during a party at her house while she was still in office.
Misty Roberts, 43, faces sentences of up to 10 and seven years in prison after a jury in the municipality of DeRidder on Tuesday found her guilty of two felonies: carnal knowledge of a juvenile – or statutory rape – as well as indecent behavior with a minor.
In October, in an unrelated case, her 40-year-old brother, Brandon Lee Roberts, pleaded guilty to raping two people: an underage girl and a young woman. He subsequently received a 42-year prison sentence.
I was going to joke how it’s “all in the family” but this goes to show how the law treats female offenders different than their male counterparts. In much of the western/anglophone world, we’ve come to associate sex abuse with men engaging in sexually predatory behavior; little thought is given about women committing sexual offenses since many are (sadly) the victim of such offenses. We’ve also come to see unbalanced age dynamics (younger man-older woman) as something of a rite of passage for men. If a guy loses his virginity with an older woman, he “scored” or got “lucky.” If the roles were gender-swapped, it would rightly be considered assault but the assailant would receive a much higher sentence than the woman.
We have stop treating sexual assault as one-sided.
The sentences are very different (7-10 years to 42 years), but to be fair, the crimes are also different.
1 time might be a “mistake”, 2 times is a trend. Also, I don’t know the specifics. I know children are not legally able to consent to sex with an adult, but I would punish harder in the case that the child doesn’t even “consent” to it. Maybe the boy “consented” and the girl didn’t. Also, I assume the “young woman” is an adult, so she definitely didn’t consent.