"You cannot describe any girl under sixteen as predatory"... Well, talking about myself (and my friends in my circle at school, who were all happy, intelligent young women who have gone on to get good MAs, MSCs and/or PhDs) - we were predatory! Firstly, we would delight in fooling bouncers into letting us in to overage pubs/clubs; secondly, we would set our sights on a man in our local night club and target him. My friend (who is now qualifying as a doctor, and is a server in her local church) got told to "tone it down" as she was being so badly behaved with one guy.
I'm not proud of how we behaved - as I said in an earlier post, it was immature and I look back with a fair measure of shame - but we were relentless in our pursuit of individuals. One girl in my GCSE class did it to our slightly nerdy but very nice history/politics teacher, just to delight in his obvious discomfort. If he had responded, she would have pulled him just to say she had, and not thought about the consequences at all. We were driven by cockiness and hormones and, perhaps, early sexualisation (through media?). All of my friends had older boyfriends: my first boyfriend was 5 years older and one friend went out with a man 15years her senior from when she was 15 to 21; they are still friends now.
It may be that none of this behaviour is relevant to the Forrest case; it may be that she never had such ideas about her teacher and he exploited her vulnerability. With the anonymising of the student, which is appropriate for her protection, she nonentheless remains a mystery - she could be like that girl in my class, or completely naive/innocent and utterly exploited, or somewhere between the two. I am not victim blaming; we just seem to have different responses to teenage male vs teenage female sexuality, which is reflected in the media (eg that daily m link to the boy who slept with his teacher). This is also reflected in the different reactions in school age students aged 15-18 who sleep with multiple partners - lads are treated as heroes by their friends, girls often are bullied/victimised as sluttish, or are perceived as doing it because of some emotional failing (lonely/insecure/trust/father issues etc), yet it is never considered whether lads do it for the same pejorative reasons, or girls for the same reason as boys (pleasure).
As I also said in my previous post, I absolutely do not agree with what Forrest did. It was irresponsible and worse as he was supposed to be the older, guiding pedagogical figure. He handled it completely wrongly & immorally. If the girl had been an adult, he would still have been using her as the ow, which shows his selfishness and lack of morals.
Ps I only mention academic qualifications to show that we turned out ok and that we have grown up to have sensible jobs and lives despite our stupid behaviour as teens.