Children do not have affairs with older women, they are abused by them

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/06/children-older-women-abused-jade-hatt

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There is nothing new in a victim of a sexual assault being blamed for the offence. Back in 1982 there was a national outcry when a convicted rapist was punished with just a £2,000 fine after the judge ruled that his victim, by hitch-hiking in a skirt, was “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence”.

Related: Babysitter who had sex with 11-year-old boy gets suspended sentence

At least things have moved on, or so one might have thought. Yesterday, 21-year-old Jade Hatt walked out of court with a suspended sentence after being convicted of unlawful sexual activity with a child. The leniency was explained in part by mitigating testimony that the victim was “sex mad” and ‘“fully up for the experience”. The encounter was a “notch on his belt” and he was “totally unaffected by it”. The victim was just 11 years old. As if that were not sufficiently horrific, that testimony was provided by the boy’s own father, who had himself been in a previous sexual relationship with the defendant.

Everything about this case is appalling. The crime itself. The manner in which the victim’s own testimony that the incident felt unpleasant and wrong was apparently considered insignificant. The defence counsel’s bizarre plea that his client was “a small, immature, woman and the victim was very advanced for his years”.

Unsurprisingly, the reaction from child protection charities has been one of disgust. The NSPCC noted that: “The judge’s comments in this case send out completely the wrong message and confirm a common view in society that the abuse of a young boy by a woman is somehow less serious than the abuse of a girl by a man.” Claude Knights of Kidscape added: “It is very sad to hear this young boy described in terms such as ‘sex mad’, which somehow implies that he was to blame for the illegal activity that took place.”

That said, it is the intervention of the victim’s father that people will surely find most chilling and distressing. One might question how anyone could hypersexualise their own child in such a way and to such an extent. The tragedy, however, is that there need be no great mystery. While admittedly at the extreme, the father’s comments stem from our society’s degenerate and ignorant perspective on the sexual abuse of boys by women.

There is evidence that male victims of female offenders may find it harder to get help and address the consequences

Last month Caroline Berriman, a 30-year-old teaching assistant was convicted on three counts of illegal sexual activity with a child. Headlines led with the words “Glamorous teaching assistant spared jail”. With these words, coverage of sexual offences committed against a child was framed around the attractiveness of the offender. Only after her courageous victim had appeared on television to explain how his life had been shattered by the crime did the reporting of the case begin to change tone. Suddenly the papers went from describing it as “an affair” to saying, more accurately, that he had been groomed.

In many cases, that correction is never made. At best, most media reports describe these crimes in neutral terms. They had sex, an affair, a relationship. Often the phraseology is more giddy and salacious, with talk of a “fling” or even “romps”. You will have to scour the cuttings long and hard to find any mention of child abuse, molestation, paedophilia or rape. In many cases such language would not be pejorative, it would be entirely accurate.

On this issue the media follow popular sentiment and prejudice, but lead those too. The trivialising and eroticising of these cases has to stop, for several reasons. The first is that it feeds the false belief that such offences are harmless, sexy, even funny. Clinical research offers no support for the idea that victims of childhood sexual abuse are less damaged when the offenders are female. Meanwhile, there is evidence that male victims of female offenders may find it harder to get help and address the consequences, when everyone tells them they should have enjoyed it – this is still best illustrated by Andrew Bailey’s brilliant and harrowing monologue.

Finally, we should be aware to the possibility that this gleeful celebration of abuse is playing out in the minds of potential and actual abusers. How many boys have been molested because older women genuinely believed it was just a bit of fun, or even romantic? It seems likely that Hatt and many others may not have fully appreciated that what they were doing was especially wrong. It would be appropriate for the attorney general to look again at the sentence handed to Hatt. It would also be appropriate for all of us, as a community, to look again at how we consider the sexual abuse of boys.