Will "Not Like Us" Actually Impact Predation on Children?

Imagining group chats calling out men who like 'em young

Kendrick Lamar has accomplished a seemingly impossible task - making liking Drake uncool. Could he do the same regarding preying on and grooming of young girls?

Teen pregnancies are already on the decline. According to the CDC, the birth rate for females from age 15 to 19 has fallen 67% since 2007, when it was 41.5 births per 1000. In 2022 it was 13.6 per 1000. Additionally, from 2021 to 2022, the birth rate for Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native females 15-19 declined 7%. For White females the decrease was 3%, while for Hispanic females there was a 1% increase. (Of course this report doesn’t bother asking about fathers.)

So will Kendrick’s lyrics help push this trend along? His “Not Like Us” Spotify streams jumped four hundred thirty percent in the hours after his Super Bowl performance, and the song has over one billion streams on the service. A packed football stadium, and the audience at the Grammy’s delightedly singing along to “a minorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.” This is undeniably a cultural moment. Can it cause a shift in the larger culture?

Interestingly, the main allegation of Drake “liking them young” seems to be the weird and creepy relationship he had with Millie Bobby Brown. A fully grown man in his 30s was texting regularly with a 14 year old child. Kendrick calling this out as grooming and the general public agreeing that this is... kinda gross. To make grooming something we aren’t going to accept…wow.

Kendrick Lamar smiling during his Super Bowl halftime performance

Now, teen pregnancy absolutely does not equal sexual abuse of children - many many more children are abused without having a pregnancy result. Still, pregnancies are easier to track, so that’s the data we have. Adult men are largely the fathers of babies born to teen mothers - including mothers under 18 (side note: a lot of the data on the age of fathers is old - I wonder why.) I’d make an educated guess that even those (very) young women giving birth at 18 or 19 may have been involved with these men prior to becoming official adults.

Let’s take a look at some of the numbers. This chart, in particular, from North Carolina, made my skin crawl. A twenty year old man fathering a child with a twelve year old. Thirty-one and fifteen (what was that Millie Bobby age gap again?).

From North Carolina’s State Center for Health Statistics

I have to quote the “Policy Implications” section of the North Carolina report,

“Teen pregnancy is a complex problem with many causes. This report suggests that in many cases teen pregnancies are not a result of peer pressure, since older men are frequently involved in the pregnancies of unmarried teens in North Carolina. In addition to focusing on the choice and will power of teenage girls and boys, pregnancy prevention programs need to address the role of adult men in teenage pregnancy (emphasis added). In addition to more public education, this problem may be reduced by better enforcing current laws and establishing additional legal and financial consequences for adult fathers of unmarried teen mothers.”

Maybe they were just waiting for Pulitzer Prize winning rap superstar to make a diss track, because it doesn’t seem like States are interested in prosecuting men who get little girls pregnant.

Let’s take Connecticut. In 2001, 1,067 babies were born to mothers 18 and under. In contrast, 187 statutory rape cases were prosecuted. Now, I’m a prison abolitionist, so this is in no way a push to throw more people in jail. And one of the reasons I’m a prison abolitionist is that I recognize the hypocrisy in what we as a society claim to care about (harm to children! harm to women!) and what we actually spend time and State resources prosecuting. (Plus, I was taught in law school that the main people prosecuted for statutory rape are Black men who get White girls pregnant, because the parents of those girls freak out and call the cops. The State is very happy using its power to uphold white supremacy.)

I’m old enough to remember when Angelina Jolie was pregnant for the first time, and local radio hosts had a long running bit counting down to her kid being on the stripper pole at 18. To see this shift in narrative is truly astonishing, and I only hope that it continues.