To think a 15 year old CANNOT be "in a relationship" with a 30 year old man.

[MissJayTea]

She is under the age of consent.

He has groomed, manipulated and abused her.

They are NOT in a relationship. He is a grown man and she is a child. He is a paedophile and she is his victim!

Even the bbc news referred to them as being in a relationship.

I have no idea why I am getting two different countries laws and charges mixed up. Guess I have watched too many Law and Order episodes and not paid enough attention to my own past studies!

I am amazed to be honest at the amount of publicity that this is being given. Missing children do not get this amount of press coverage. This is a 15yo who has chosen to run away. If she had run away with her 18 year old boyfriend, again none of this would be headline news.

wigeon that's 100% correct. The law in regards to teachers or people in a position of trust becomes criminal until both partys are adults 18.
If it was a mature student I think there still would be problems depending on the college/uni etc. But as far as law is concerned its under 18 is a criminal offence based on his job title.

nokidshere because he is taking advantage of her immaturity. And the fact that he only met her because he was there in a position of trust.

Its this sector of society that somehow seems to think "good on you" when men have sex with children, and that the children are somehow worldly enough to be more precocious than the average child and to have encouraged it. Makes me skin crawl.

Lets not forget this man had a wife of his own age, so what attracted him to someone half his age, still a child, whom he was paid to be in a position of trust to? Most likely her extreme unquestioning vulnerability, inexperience and naivity. Which is why I think he is manipulating her, and suggesting that it is vice versa is really disturbing.

Also lets not forget she is studying for the exams that will shape her life, and in order to deal with his whims of uncontrolled urges, that time is being disturbed and she will never be the same again.

here is the cps definition of sex with a minor if anyone is nerdy like me.

www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/sexual_offences_unlawful_sexual_intercourse/#Definition_of_unlawful_sexual

geegee888 Of course everything you say is true - but again thats only seeing it from our adult perspective.

And I did not suggest that she was the one who manipulated him - at all. I simply put it from her point of view. A 15 year olds point of view. We know its wrong (because we are adults) she almost certainly doesn't think it is. We are projecting our concerns onto her feelings and we can't do that - we can only speculate as to what happened.

No 15 year old girl in love is going to see the relationship as wasting her life. Only we can see that as adults.

The point of my post was simply that however its being reported, and however we feel as grown ups about it, she almost certainly would say she is in a relationship with this man.

Would anyoneon here take a 15 year old boy out of school and run away with him?

This is an educated, trained in CP full adult, who also happens to be married.

Whilst she may think they are Romeo and Juliet, he certainly knows better.

The messing up of her education should be enough of a red flag, to anyone that this has the potential to be an abusive relationship.

The isolation that she will go through wouldbe difficult enough for an adult woman, who has legal earning capacity.

I do believe that sometimes two people who are wrong for each other can think they are in love

That's fine, things can carry on until they reach of age' and they can set up home together, until them, even if you are in love, you don't have to live and sleep together.

You don't do something that has the potential to mess up the underage teens life.

The only part of the OP that is unquestionaably true is that the girl is below the age of consent.

The rest is little more than idle speculation.

When I was at school, there was an English teacher who many of the pupils fancied . I'm guessing he must have been around 30 or so. The "cooler" girls would, literally, fight to have the chance to go out with him - it seemed to be an open secret that he would have a pupil-girlfriend each year.

A couple of years after I left (so maybe 1989/90) he dumped one of his "girlfriends" who told her oarents who, in turn, reported him to the police. He ended up serving 2 years in Stangeways. Which probably serves him right. But one thing I will say about him... he didn't need to "groom" anyone. There was a constanty supply of girls who were only to eager to "go out" with him. I know this because some of them were my friends.

she almost certainly would say she is in a relationship with this man.

She can, the rest of us shouldn't and shouldn't feed into the myth that this is in any way acceptable.

I don't mean the underage crush, or the age difference, but the teacher/pupil side and the running away.

I was 17 when I was first with my ex-h , he was 26 .He told everyone I was 21 ,and got me to go along with his lie to begin with . ( You can easily guess what he told them when the truth about my age came out ? , ...." she told me she was older !" )

At the time I thought he was great ect , and I did believe I loved him ( at that age I didn't understand what it properly means to love and be loved by someone )...now I just think of him as an abusive perv . I totally get why my sister hated him .

My now dh is the same age as my ex , but he's said he wouldn't have went anywhere near me at that age as its not the age gap that is a problem , but the age and maturity of the younger person. The point of a relationship is being with someone who is on the same level ( age, career ,maturity , emotional intelligence ect )

...to quote dh " WTAF does a man in his 20's or 30's want with a teenager ? They have nothing in common , he's just a dirty pervy bastard ," ( on hearing about the girl and the teacher )

I was 17 ....which is only 2 years older than the 15 year old who's missing ...but the difference in maturity between a 15 year old and a 17 year old is massive .

But she has not run away with her 18 year do boyfriend she has run away or rather he as taken her away (he was th one driving, likely to have bought the tickets paid for hotel or wherever they are staying) with a man who is her teacher a man who was meant to be teaching her maths and is meant to act in a responsible way so not to harm her emotionally or physically he choose to ignore and uphold his professionally duties and choose to have some form of relationship with her so that is why it is headline news. Sad thing is the frenzy it is causing and that's down to him totally will be having an effect on so many people terrible worry for her parents (what selfish man could put them through what he has) snd his family. must be hard for the children at school (probably exciting) to have so much press attention and for teachers to do their job properly

he didn't need to "groom" anyone

I'm sue that i could get anyone of the school boys (13-16) on my bus home to have sex with me.

Thankfully there are laws against this.

I don't feel sorry for the girl. I agree he abused his postion of trust and should never have acted on any feelings he may have had for her.
I suspect she'll come out of this far better than him long term. She will return, possibly move to a different school, have brief notoriety then get on with her life with a story to tell her kids when she is older.
He will lose his job, probably his marriage, probably go on the child sex
offenders register and struggle to get another job.
I don't feel sorry for him though as he should have known it would end like this, if he'd been 23 and single I may have felt a bit more sympathy for him, but teachers shouldn't have affairs with pupils. It is an abuse of trust whether the pupil is 15 or 30, just like doctors and patients.
I don't understand the outrage expressed in the media and online about this, apart from maybe at the school who should have stamped on any teacher pupil relationships much more firmly. It is just another example of a man's cock ruling his head .

Putting aside the obvious misuse of position by the teacher.

My first sexual encounter was with a man I met at 15. He did what in hindsight was a bit of grooming until I was 16. But to be totally honest, for me it was a positive experience.

All this media coverage is now actually getting rather out of hand. It would have made me far more inclined to stay away for as long as possible.

Nokidshere geegee888 Of course everything you say is true - but again thats only seeing it from our adult perspective

And thats how the teacher should see it - he is the adult.

And she may not see it as wasting her life now, but in years to come she may well do so.

This is why adults, such as ourselves, should throw condemnation rather than acceptance on this. We should know better than to accept the manipulation of children.

sure, not sue.

I was saddened to hear that this is not the only child protection issue at the school. I can't believe that her parents were not informed of the investigation. No doubt they will have breached some code or other if they had

I think that from the response of the media and all the threads and poosts here on MN its clear that there is nothing but condemnation from the adults.

None of which will make her feel any differently about it until she is much older!

I suspect she'll come out of this far better than him long term

Let us hope that she isn't pregnant. That must be on the minds of her parents.

She is going to be hounded and bullied when she gets back.

There's a lot of confusion around this sort of thing. On the whole, we need to protect our children until they can protect themselves. And 15yo girls are frighteningly vulnerable not least because they imagine they are grown ups.

It is shocking but I think the publicity will hurt the girl more than anything else and I feel sorry for what she will have to live through during the next few years.

manti todays news says that the school, the police and the girls parents were working together to resolve the affair when they disappeared.

When I was 16 I dated a 26 yr old neighbour for a while.

It was what you'd call a 'relationship' ie we went out places and were sexually active.

However the actual dynamic of the relationship was completely off kilter. He knew none of my friends because, well, they were schoolgirls. I met his friends and just sat there smiling politely because I could add nothing to the conversation about their adult lives.

The sexual thing was weird because he was trying to teach/initiate me, including stuff I wasn't into but thought I should be doing because that's what you do 'in a relationship'.

He was slightly embarrassed about being seen in public with me because I dressed like a teenager. He used to phone before dates and say, "Er, don't wear those boots again, will you?"

He didn't like my (normal) teenage music interests and took on an 'educational' role in that regard too.

I reckon a lot if not most of the above must be common when a teenage girl is going out with an older guy. As an aside my mother let me go about this all without interfering but if it were my daughter I'd be a lot more concerned. My mum didn't ask any questions and if she had taken the time to she might have realised that I was in need of guidance about how important boundaries, respect and equality are within relationships.

She will be briefly houded by the media, not convinced about her being bullied. When I was 14 a girl in the year above ran away with an older man and was briefly in the news. She came back and was a bit of a heroine with crowds around her listening to to her tell stories of the escapade. She wasn't a girl to be easily bullied though.
He will get far more condemnation than her.
Any 15 year old may get pregnant if she has sex. I don't see why the fact that she has gone to France with an older teacher makes her more likely to get pregnant than if she was shagging her 15 year old boyfriend.

It is beyond me that an adult man wants a 'relationship' with a child and not an adult woman.