Having been away from blogging for a week or so, I missed until
today Zoe Williams excellent article in the Guardian reflecting on the case of
the girls in Oxford who were being sexually abused and whose cries for help
were ignored for so long.
Zoe is absolutely right. The key to understanding this whole
sorry mess is the fact that the girls were not listened to; they were not
accorded ‘basic human respect’ by professionals. Somehow they were labelled as
‘challenging’ and ‘unreliable’ and that made it easy to ignore what they were
saying.
Zoe makes another important point. She argues that distinctions
are not being drawn between consenting underage sex with someone of similar age
and forced sex with adult men. That results from clinging to a myth that
children under 16 are ‘pre-sexual’, which, of course, they are not.
I think that the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was particularly remiss in this respect, criminalising all under-age sexual
activity and so leaving open the unwelcome possibility that children of similar
age experimenting in sexual acts could be charged with serious crimes.
At the
same time the Act failed to properly distinguish this type of activity from
grooming, coercion and rape by adult perpetrators, which should be treated as a
most serious offence and punished accordingly.
