I do wish you luck. I would think that many teens would find having the police involved would bring out the "Romeo and Juliet" in a relationship. not that they would kill thenselves, but it often makes them more determined.
You have to be VERY careful when or if you threaten to use these laws. There are more than a few police departments who do not want to be bothered and will use discretion and do nothing other than talk to the kids. Sometimes it is policy because they feel they have more important things to do, and sometimes it is just some of the officers hwo don't want the bother. I am NOT saying they are not good cops, just that they have to make a lot of judgement calls and they don't always feel teen dating should be criminal because of age differences or they don't think it will do anything but drive the kids together so they don't want to push the kids.
As far as states recognizing a person under 18 is under control of their parents? Not real or realistic. Many of us have had problems with our underage kids being able to refuse mental health care and/or being allowed to totally exclude parents from having any information on their mental health care. Many states allow teen girls to have abortions without parental consent, to have birth control with-o parental consent, and to block parents from ever seeing gyn records in spite of being under 18 and parents paying the bill. Same is true for std testing for guys in many areas. I believe that at one point Onyxx was interested in a man over 18 and Step learned that there was NOTHING she or husband could do about the relationship because their state didn't have laws that criminalized this, that in her state 16 was the age of consent, not 18. Of course if Onyxx had gotten pregnant, the child would have been the responsibility of Step and her husband, because Onyxx was underage, but even with being legally responsible financially, they could not make many decisions during the pregnancy or after hte child was born - those would be Onyxx's decisions and they just had to pay for them. I know other people who have been there done that in Step's state and they were FURIOUS that they had to take charge of some things but had no say in the decisions that caused those bills and responsibilities. One Gma I know ended up with a MAJOR CPS issue because she reported her teenmom daughter as putting vanilla extract in the baby's bottle at night because she would cry and the teen mom daughter didn't want to get up with the baby. This Gma had zero alcohol except for vanilla, and didn't even realize vanilla extract had alcohol. She objected to adding it to the bottle because it was not dr recommended and the baby wasn't six mos old yet, plus Gma realized the baby didn't act the same after a bottle with vanilla.. She asked the doctor about it, doctor hit the roof and called CPS. CPS didn't even CARE that no other alcohol was in the house, or that the teen did it over the Gma's objections, or that Gma took the baby to the doctor the day after she learned about it. It was the Gma's fault ONLY and they tried to get the prosecutor to bring serious charges against her. She got lucky. The prosecutor read the file, asked WTF?? of CPS, went into court and said to the judge that if cps wants to charge the teen mom, they would get total cooperation, but charging the Gma was totally wrong because she stopped it asap and didn't even know there was alcohol in vanilla until then.
I am SURE that many examples of this craziness exists in many if not most states. while overall the states feel parents should be responsible for children until they are 18 or older (as in NY), they don't feel we should have input into some areas of their life, other than having to pay for their mistakes, be it from stealing, having a chld, mental illness, WE are in charge of those fines and heck, we cannot even force our kids to stay in school until they graduate. They can drop out without our consent in most states.
Please talk to the chief of police BEFORE you threaten to call the cops. It would be devastating to ANY parental authority that you have if you called the cops and then had them show up and tell you that they wouldn't do anything, sorry, just not a problem they can/will deal with. Of course if a cop does tell you this, and you know the law is different, then you can go talk to an atty and go to the chief of police and say you want the law upheld and it is a law and not a choice for the officer to make. There are a lot of good officers who will sometimes say that something isn't the way a law is written, and they can either be saying this because they don't think it will help or because they were taught incorrectly on the issue/law. But you don't want that playing out in front of difficult child, not EVER.