[DanaC]

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.