Jeremy Forrest verdict - aibu to be confused?

[noddyboulder]

Yep, I don't think even his own parents could deny he's a massive, hideous scumbag with no impulse control - but how can he have been found guilty of abduction when the girl he had an affair with said it was her idea to go to France and she went willingly?

Can somebody legal shed some light?

"I would imagine some of the apologists have dds and am wondering how they reconcile their thoughts with being a parent to a teenage daughter?"

I have a 14yo teenage daughter, and I want to know what the hell her parents were doing when she was seeing her teacher, i think they abdicated their responsibility completely.

And IMO this whole 15/16 thing is overblown, it's an arbitrary number.

We maintain a modicum of safety in this society because professionals in charge of vulnerable people (school children, medical patients, people with MH disorders) are given to understand quite clearly that if they break the rules excuses will not be made in the name of human frailty.

They are warned about it from the start and noone forces anyone to choose a profession with these restraints.

I'm a bit late to this as I had a mega busy day yesterday, but I exhausted myself explaining to various idiots friends who thought it was a really romantic story. One even said "one person's grooming is just another person's being nice and kind and understanding though isn't it?"

AVR2

Even if she had been seventeen and a half it is still prohibited for her teacher to have sex with her. That is the law he broke.

Oh also I never advocate vigilante justice but if he turned out to be my daughter's teacher (she is currently 5) at any point in the future I'd be chasing him out the school and out the fucking town with something bigger and pointier than a pitchfork! The idea anyone could do to my daughter or other girls what this bastard has done horrifies me!

"the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" Am I seeing things, has this been written on a thread discussing a man that abused a vulnerable young person.

Shit!

It is a question of professionalism. If you take a job of this kind you accept that you will be judged differently from other people. If you don't like the thought, don't take the job.

There is responsibility to be apportioned on both sides. He was stupid, but so we she, and simply because she falls under an arbitrary age threshold does NOT mean that she was completely unaware of what she was doing.

Bollox

He was in a position of responsibility. He should not have been alone with her once he realised she had a crush.

He was advised to do that in Feb 2012.

And no, I don't think teenage girls do realise exactly what they are doing. They have an idea someone finds them attractive and they are flattered about that.

Children don't lead adults on. Adults choose to exploit vulnerable situations. End of.

Going back to the 'smirk seen on his face,' you can't possibly draw any conclusions on this. Imagine how many reporters there were. They will have taken hundreds of photos and will have been provoking and goading him. They may have just said to him 'your dad's okay' or anything. Reporters will always find the least flattering/controversial photo, then print it. It sells newspapers. It's not fair to draw conclusions from a smirk on his face.

As for him teaching my daughters, I understand he was a very good maths teacher. Just because he fell for one pupil, it might not mean that every girl in the school would be at risk. I'm being deliberately controversial, as i find the discussion interesting, but when I walk down the street I don't think that every heterosexual man fancies me.

When my daughter was under the age of consent, I trusted to rather more than the thought "oh, he might not find her sexually attractive". I trusted to the thought that it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference if a teacher found her sexually attractive because teachers were adults and knew the rules.

There are issues on both sides when somebody gets a parking ticket.

The issue is that he was in a position of power. His training and work within his profession would have encompassed the issue of teenage crushes, their normality and the way young kids these days are often sexualised by society before they are mature enough to understand the consequences thereof. It really doesn't matter whether a teenager is receptive to a sexual advance or not. It does not. Otherwise where is it going to end? How can we maintain any kind of social order?

Making him a pantomime baddie- boo hiss- does not help. But he is guilty and she is innocent. Because the laws both professional and legal make it clear that it is an abuse of power and a manipulation of normal teenage behaviour to do what he did.

This is not an issue of 'normal' human impulse control and an every day example of how we go astray when it comes to what we want to do, should do and end up doing. This is a man who distorted the situation to his own end. And he deliberately went against every opportunity he was given to make it right. That is not 'love'

My contention is that it's entirely unfair to cast him as entirely the villain and the girl as the innocent victim. There are issues on both sides of the story

Yes, there are issues on both sides of the story. She was a young girl, whose mother had just remarried and had another baby. He was a fantasist and a teacher who recognised that she would respond to his grooming.

I'm another one who thinks there is absolutely no grey in this, Utterly black and white. She was a vulnerable child, he abused his position of trust and abused her.

What if she had been 12yrs old? would it be acceptable then, He couldn't help himself could he, he was gripped by powerful emotions. Poor man.
What age does she have to be before she is innocent?

What crap!

I am just reading this thread.

I'm also quite certain that once he realised that the girl was attracted to him he realised how much trouble he was going to be in, but he couldn't help himself

AVR2 - do you know Jeremy Forrest personally?

If he couldn't stop himself from having sex with a minor then prison is absolutely the right place for him.

Children don't lead adults on. Adults choose to exploit vulnerable situations. End of

^ this...

I suppose Jummy Saville 'couldn't help himself' too right?
and all those girls had a part to play? Madness.

When I was 14 I sniffed glue and smoked fags, to keep in wtih older kids, I wouldn't do that as an adult, as I can think for myself and make rational decisions.

do you remember being that age? you are NOT in a position to make decisions to have full blown sexual affaris with grown men. Hence the age of consent.