The point is all these ages of consent are artificial and vary from country to country. 14 seems pretty common. But worldwide it is as low as 12 and as high as 21. There is no consensus.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent

This isn't really the issue though is it?

Of course it is an issue if you are putting people in the slammer for something which is not a crime in several countries.

It is a bit like exceeding an equally artificial speed limit.

In some countries you can be whipped, beaten and put to death for crimes, that is irrelevant here.
Stick to the laws we have in place in this country please.

We are talking about arbitrary figures which are not agreed even within the EU, of which the UK is part.

I was merely pointing out the arbitrariness. That's all.

All laws within the EU can be considered 'arbitrary' then by that fuzzy logic.
The fact remains that 16 is the law in this country and as such a crime was committed.

I agree, talking about Spain and their laws is a different arguement for a different day. Trying to broaden this debate by bringing up other countries laws doesn't change the facts in this case. He bears total responsibility for what happened regardless of the girls actions. He committed a criminal offence knowingly and should be punished accordingly.

Using the girls so called willingness to engage in the act as mitigation is indefensible and should not have been allowed in open court as it is irrelevant to his actions. He should have been given a prison sentence in accordance with normal sentencing guidelines for offences such as these........!!!

A barrister who described a 13-year-old victim of sex abuse as "predatory" in court has been suspended from sexual offence cases pending a review.

Robert Colover has been criticised for his remarks, in which he also described the girl as "sexually experienced".

The Crown Prosecution Service said he would not be instructed in sex cases while it considered his situation.

Neil Wilson, 41, admitted abusing the girl at his home in Romford, London, and was given a suspended jail term.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) described Mr Colover's language as "inappropriate".

The CPS said the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, would carry out a review and decide what action to take.

A CPS spokesman said: "We are now considering the involvement of this barrister in sexual offence prosecutions and have advised his chambers that we will not instruct him in any ongoing or future cases involving sexual offences in the meantime."

The CPS added: "The word predatory in this context should not have been used and is of real concern to the CPS.

"It is not consistent with the work that we have undertaken alongside the judiciary and others in the past year to improve attitudes towards victims of abuse.

"We expect all of our prosecutors, including self-employed barristers who act on our behalf, to follow our guidance in these very difficult cases."

The Metropolitan Police said the word "predatory" did not did not appear in any police material concerning the victim.

A Met spokesman said: "The Metropolitan Police Service is aware of reports in the media surrounding terminology used by the prosecution barrister in the case of Neil Wilson.

"This is not terminology the Met Police Service would use to describe a victim in such a case, and was not used by the officer who provided testimony in this case."

Prime Minister David Cameron said he supported the position of the CPS.

He said: "I think the CPS are absolutely right to say that what one of their lawyers said was not appropriate. It isn't appropriate. We need a criminal justice system that stands up properly for victims.

"The victims should always be at the centre of our thinking and I'm pleased the CPS have made that statement and I'm also pleased that the attorney general has said that he is personally going to look into this case."


Labour has written to the Bar Standards Board to ask it to investigate whether Mr Colover had breached its code of conduct.

Shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry said: "It is appalling that, after the scandals of Jimmy Savile and Rochdale, these awful Lolita prejudices are still being served up in court, and by the prosecution of all people."

BBC legal correspondent Clive Coleman said a prosecutor must draw to a court's attention any matter that assists the defendant - and it is not at all unusual.

But, our correspondent added, the prosecutor needed to scrutinise the potentially mitigating material carefully and the language in which it is expressed.

The police were alerted to the actions of Wilson, who now lives in York, after his victim told a friend. Images of child sex abuse were also found on Wilson's computer.

Wilson later admitted two counts of making extreme pornographic images and one count of sexual activity with a child.

Mr Colover, who was employed by the CPS at Wilson's sentencing hearing at London's Snaresbrook Crown Court on Monday, said: "The girl is predatory in all her actions and she is sexually experienced."

The judge, Nigel Peters, said that when deciding Wilson's punishment he had taken into account the prosecution's comments that the girl looked and behaved older than she was.

Wilson's eight-month jail term was suspended for two years. The Attorney General's Office said the sentence had been drawn to its attention as "possibly unduly lenient".

Details of the case came as the head of the judiciary in England and Wales said a select pool of judges with specialist training would be created to handle complex child abuse cases, amid concerns at the way some child witnesses were treated in court by lawyers.

Javed Khan, chief executive of independent charity Victim Support, said: "Victims of sexual abuse should be praised for their bravery in coming forward not censured and have their credibility called into question, least of all by the prosecution."

However, Carl Gardner, a former government legal adviser, warned that most people commenting on the case did not know the full facts.

Paul Mendelle, a criminal barrister and former chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, said the behaviour of the victim is not usually a mitigating factor.

An online petition on Change.org calling for the CPS to investigate the language used by Mr Colover has been signed by 30,000 people

i think greg and livia put my thoughts across very well. i think both the parents and the man are to blame.

The third last and second last sentences of that article Ammi posted just above say it all for me really; that the barrister's words were in context and I assume he would not use those words lightly.

Government legal adviser = spin doctor.
Of course they will be wanting damage limitation from this and as little fallout as is possible.
Is there a link to this article?

I'm shocked everyone got so bent out of shape because he referred to a sexually experienced 13 year old as predatory, instead of getting angry that a 13 year old actually is sexually experienced and predatory.

I think he should have added that her parents are inadequate and irresponsible.

Agree with this 100%.

Yeah definitely agree with all of that. You can argue that parents can't control who their kids want to be - but at the age of 13 you can still keep them in the house and not let them do whatever they want in their free time.

If that were to happen both the boy and the girl would have committed statutory rape, statutory rape doesn't just count for girls :conf:

Just to be clear, it is an offence to have sex with anyone under 16. Regardless of gender.

Which was a great way to explain my lack of a love life for the first 16 years of my life but the last 6 years have just been really awkward at family gatherings.

''Paul Mendelle, a criminal barrister and former chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, said the behaviour of the victim is not usually a mitigating factor.''

That is because especially in cases like this it should never even be suggested, and I can well understand why the CPS are getting 'bent out of shape'.

''In a statement, the Crown Prosecution Service said that Robert Colover, QC, the prosecutor in the case at Snaresbrook Crown Court should not have used the word “predatory” and confirmed that he would be investigated by Director of Public Prosecution Keir Starmer. The statement added that the use of the word is “of real concern to the CPS”. It said: “It is not consistent with the work that we have undertaken alongside the judiciary and others in the past year to improve attitudes towards victims of abuse. We expect all of our prosecutors, including self-employed barristers who act on our behalf, to follow our guidance in these very difficult cases.''

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...s-8750521.html

Lets put this into a wider context though, Zee. It is a relatively recent thing that victims of rape or sexual abuse, and particularly children, have been considered entirely innocent in such instances.

Even now, it is far too common that the authorities look with suspicion on victims of this kind of crime. One of the girls systematically abused by that gang in Rochdale recently, having tried to report what was happening to the police, was dismissed as 'a prostitute'. Basically, having been turned by those men into a prositute for their own and others' use, that was then seen as reason to dismiss her, rather than additional reason to help her.

The girl was not responsible. Cannot have been responsible. And if she was sexually precocious, that just means her precociousness was abused and used against her by a man old enough to know better.

Might also be worth considering the fact that pedophiles often characterise even very young children as 'wanting it', or 'cockteasing' or 'knowing what they're doing'.

This description of a 13 year old girl as 'predatory' fits into a very old and very disturbing narrative around girl's sexuality and availability. And it resulted in a much shorter sentence being given to someone who was the real predator. It makes him out to be partially exonerated and shares the blame between them. It effectively recasts him as falling victim to a Lolita's charms.

It's dangerous and wrong.

You've made some fantastic points and I don't disagree with any of them. However, I stand by my original view that the barrister must have had very good reasons to make such statements and for the judge to accept them, when as Kizzy posted above, the behaviour of the victim is not usually considered - all of that suggests to me that the victim is only a victim in the legal sense of the term. I'm not in possession of the full facts so I can only speculate, but as Livia said, we cannot box all 13 year olds into the same "a 13 year old is a child" mentality because people grow and develop at different rates; and when you have children being subjected to sex in all forms of media, it's not surprising that children are growing up faster than they used to, which perhaps explains the comments about her acting older than she was.

Once again, that is not to say that that excuses what the man did. What he did was wrong, categorically wrong. I just believe that there are different levels of criminality and that if the 13 year old girl was actively pursuing this encounter then it would be equally wrong to denounce the 41 year old man as a predatory paedophile in the same category as men who raped children.

Actually, to be fair 'pedophile' is the wrong word anyway. She was pubescent not prepubescent.

But: in terms of mitigating his guilt, it would have been acceptable to say that the girl looked, acted and claimed to be older than 13. That woulld have mitigated his guilt without judging her. As it stands she was judged to be 'predatory'.

She was not on trial, he was. But she was still judged. That is wrong. It is far too common, sadly, that young women and girls, especially, are routinely held accountable for their victimhood.

We are assuming the prosecutor had good reason for using that word. But how do we know that? When it is, as I say, all too common for girls to be held accountable for the actions of men.

To say she is predatory is to paint the man as her victim. He was not some innocent, naive, sexually inexperienced young man. He was a middle aged man with a computer full of images of child pornography and bestiality. He also made pornographic images. I do not beleve that the prosecutor and judge used that word because of the evidence. I believe that two older men were willing to accept that a young girl bears more responsibility for sexual activity than another middle aged man.

We in our society treat women's sexuality as essentially seductive and men's sexuality as essentially reactive to that seduction. Time and again in rape trials, the fact that a woman was wearing revealing clothes is held up as evidence against her in mitigation of her rapist's guilt. The implication being that the man simply misread the signals and couldn't help himself. That he was reacting with understandable desire to an object of desire and seduction. Time and again, girls and women are assumed by the authorities to be lying about consent. despite the rarity of false rape claims and prevalence of rape, the conviction rates for that crime remain terribly low compared to other violent crime.

The reason the police set up specialist units was precisely because of this paradigm. And even then those specialist units have been caught advising, and even bullying female victims to withdraw their accusations. The reason the CPS now insists on specialist lawyers for cases of this nature involving children is because they require specialist knowledge of crimes of this nature. Too many cases were falling through the system because children were not believed , and because predatory sexual offenders specifically target very vulnerable children. Kids in childrens homes, for example, who having been abused are then disbelieved or treated as criminals themselves.

I think that this prosecutor was operating on an outdated model of child sexuality and female culpability. It would sit very comfortably in the 1980s or even 1990s, when high court judges would make statements about girls 'asking for it' because they wore a short skirt.

Here's a little quote from the prosecutor's case just to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Really? Forced upon him? The sexual activity was not of his doing?

because men cannot help themselves once aroused is that it?

And she 'looked around 14 or 15'. Not 18 as has been quoted by some: so a grown man simply couldn't help himself when faced with a 'predatory' girl who looked 14 or 15.

But nobody's arguing that he didn't commit a crime and nobody said she looked 18 - I said she could have been anywhere up to 18 years old if she was in a school uniform, I think that's the only comment along those lines that was made. What he did was wrong. That is not up for debate. The prosecutor's argument that it was "forced" upon him is of course a heap of nonsense, but the point he's making that she was the one pursuing the encounter is an important point in my opinion that differentiates this case from cases where men force girls into acts that they didn't want to commit.

Apparently the girl in question did not report the incident a friend of hers reported it to the police a few days later.

So the man could have denied it as lies or said the girl was trying to blackmail him for money or some other story. But as he has been convicted for this offence you have to wonder if he admitted it from the off even though it was only his word against hers... Not enough to prove beyond a reasonable doubt I would have thought ???

A lot depends on what she said to her friend and how she said it, I think. Was she upset and confided in a friend or was she bragging to a friend who thought it was wrong? Pretty much everything I think on this case hinges on the opinion of the girl - because this is a statutory rape it doesn't really matter what the girl herself thinks in the eyes of the law. She was underage and that is wrong. So whether or not she totally consented to it is irrelevant; except in this case, the court seems to have taken into account that she wanted the encounter and suggests that she was pursuing it aggressively (going by the prosecutor's comments and the judge accepting them) so that's led to the abuser getting a lenient sentence. It's very curious to me. If she was upset and told a friend about it and what the prosecutor is saying are lies, then this is a total travesty - but if she consented to it and was actually the one pursuing it then do we need to change the existing laws in some way?

He didn't just get a lenient sentence, he got a suspended sentence: effectively no sentence at all.

Even if she wanted it: by the above statements he thought she was around 14 or 15. Therefore he knowingly committed a crime in allowing sexual activity to take place.

Yeah :/ I think that's ridiculous. He still committed a crime, he ought to be in jail.

I honestly think this says a good deal more about the prosecutor and judge's view of girls than it does about the details of the individual case.

Perhaps it does.. I'm working on the basis that they are both doing their jobs properly but there is of course the possibility that they're misogynists, either one or both of them.

But without his admittance that sexual activity took place , would there have been enough evidence to secure a conviction if eg it was his word against hers ??

Great posts Dana

He got a suspended sentence. It is lenient, but it is till a sentence. No sentence at all would have been if he had been given no sentence at all.

I think it says a lot about the judges and the prosecutors view of 13 year old girls who are sexually experienced and sexually predatory.

Although this girl was underage, although the man was totally in the wrong and should have been jailed, you cannot deny that the circumstances surrounding this case were mostly initiated by the girl. She didn't even report the case. Which begs the question, what did her parents think their child – because that’s what she is – was doing while she was willingly performing sex acts on a paedophile?

I never got the suspended sentence thing though, he walked free from court, what good is a suspended sentence?

A suspended sentence means that the sentence is hanging over his head. If he commits a crime while his suspended sentence is running, it will be added to any further sentence he's given.

Pah, that's a load of s**t tbh not much consolation to any victims

Two really excellent points that tie in with the reason I joined the debate, there is something very old fashioned and blinkered about these attitudes that appear not to have grasped the concept that child grooming is prevalent in the UK despite years of evidence that it is now of epidemic proportions.
It is shocking that there are these professionals that are conciliatory towards these practices and due to their archaic standpoint it is important they don't oversee these cases.

..wasn't the prosecutor banned from similar cases while being investigated for the case..?..

..for me there isn't any circumstances where a 13yr old should be held to have any responsibility in a case like this because she's a minor, whereas he is a paedophile who is three times her age and completely responsible for his actions...she may have been sexually active, which is also wrong for a minor but that's another debate...her actions whatever they were, don't in any way take his guilt away and should not have an effect on his sentencing...I find describing a child as a sexual predator completely sickening...


..anyway, I'm going to opt out of this thread now because I have nothing more to add....

Ah yes the age old story of middle aged men seduced and entrapped by dangerous young Lolitas.

By describing the girl as predatory, she is recast as perpetrator and by default he is recast as victim: if she is predator, then he is prey. His sentence reflects this recasting.

How exactly, does a 13 year old girl 'prey' upon a middle aged man? How was she able to seduce him into allowing her to perform a sex act on him? The only way that works is if her charms were 'irresistable'. However sexually experienced or aggressive, however manipulative she might have been (not saying she was, just taking the description at face value) his defence rests solely on an assumption that he was unable to say no. That he was unable to resist, even whilst he believed that she was a young girl of 14 or 15. It rests on assumptions of male powerlessness in the face of desire and female voraciousness as a danger to men.

We are back in the land of the 'self-guiding penis':

http://www.theguardian.com/science/t...atell-rape-men

The conclusion to the above article is excellent:

It makes a lot more sense though if, like Ross, Wolf, Platell, and a thousand other hacks, you believe the myth of the self-guiding penis. It allows offenders to abdicate responsibility for their actions, and transfer it to seductive women; it leads people to assume that rape is a crime of passion rather than a cold, premeditated act of psychological manipulation and physical oppression; it reinforces the victim-playing notion among misogynists that female sexuality is a dangerous weapon; and it reduces men to the role of a barely sentient bag of hormones clinging desperately to the back of a rampaging penis.

The myth is as offensive to men as it's dangerous for women. Perhaps the worst part of it is the subliminal message repeated across the media each and every day of the week: whether it's porn driving men crazy or short skirts inviting rape, female sexuality is dangerous, and it must be controlled to protect men. How bizarre to be confronted with the world the way it is, and come to that conclusion


..the thing about this case though is wasn't a woman, it was a child...and I don't believe a child should ever be perceived or described as a seductress...