I have been away from the thread as I had a busy day but like everyone else here (thank God!) I've been raging.
I blogged about this earlier and thought you lot might be interested. Very sadly, when I shared this on my Twitter page I relieved upwards of ten messages- from men and women- calling me a slut and a whore. I also had a message from a man saying I deserved what I got and deserved to be "repeatedly raped" and one from a woman saying by speaking out I was "an attention seeking whore" who was trying to "justify being a slut". What a beautiful world we live in, eh? 
In Response to the Case of Stuart Kerner, By a former "intelligent and manipulative" teenage girl
Like many, I was shocked and upset this week to hear the Judge’s comments in the case of Stuart Kerner, a teacher who had sex with his 16 year old pupil and then was told that she “groomed” him. I know that many others were upset by the judges words, including child abuse charities, but for me the cold shiver that the Judge’s words gave me was a bit too close to home, after all once upon a time I was that “intelligent and manipulative” teenage girl.
Now happily married with a daughter, a career and headed towards middle age, it’s hard even for me to remember the teenage girl I was. Long legged and busty in a school uniform, it’s hard to know if I caught the eye of my young and flirtatious teacher or if he caught mine. Twinkly and charming, Bob- we’ll call him Bob- was in his late twenties, funny, intelligent and most of all, worldly. What started at the age of 13 as a cat and mouse game of flirty ping-pong ended at 16 in frantic and passionate snogging down back alleys and finally, intense sex in his marital bed. What had been doublentandres and close to the bone humour that we batted back and forth at one another: me sitting on the desk in front of him with my already too short school skirt creeping up my supple young thighs, moments of breathless confusion as we got too close in the dark of the wings of the school stage, became something illegal with that first kiss.
Was I intelligent and manipulative? Certainly. I knew what I wanted and I went out of my way to get it. My new found sexual power was intoxicating; I was drunk on it and high on lust and secrets and hormones. I fancied him like mad and when he made the first move towards turning what had been several years of tinder-box like pressure into a sexual relationship, I fell hook line and sinker. After all, I didn't just fancy Bob, the older man who gave me books to read and CDs to listen to, I loved him too.
Aye, there’s the rub- as I highlighted dreamily in my A Level copy of Hamlet as old Bob stood at the front of the class- in these cases of teacher and pupil that make it onto the news, everyone has an opinion about the sex. On Twitter angry feminists battle angry misogynists and talk about the damage that these sexual relationships do to the teenagers in their unscrupulous teachers care. And of course, they do. I was catapulted head first into a sexual relationship that was far beyond my maturity level, not for me the teenage fumblings and wet snogging at teenage parties. I was very quickly having very intense sex, lead by a man who had had almost as many lovers as I was years old. As a professional there is no doubt that he shouldn't have been doing it, and that in doing it he had crossed a line which, in my opinion ensured that he should never have been allowed to teach again. But the sex was nothing like as damaging as the mess he made of my head. As I have mentioned I loved him and the worst of it all is that he told me that he loved me too.
It is important to note that despite my pursuing my teacher, just as Kerner’s pupil may well have pursued him, when push came to shove and the line was crossed, it was he who instigated it. Whilst I cannot speak for all young people in these situations, I suspect that is often the case. For all my bluster and intelligence and manipulation of the situation I would never have made the first move, it was he who did that.
As I mentioned, I am married now as I hurtle towards middle age at alarming speed. I am not married to Bob. 16 became 17 and 17 became 18 and all too soon I was 21 and on the cusp of adulthood, almost a graduate thinking about the future. And there, after more than eight years of flirtation and lust and sex and promises, Bob went. Was I now too old for him? Possibly. Too mature? Certainly. Because the fact was that as I had, at 13 years old and in lust with this funny and immature man, had absolutely no concept of the consequences of any of this, nor did he really. By now in his mid thirties, Bob was a man-child who couldn't truly see that he was responsible for this mess. I had a nervous breakdown.
I was never the same again, never the same as I should have been. Broken down by the fact that I never had a normal youth, what Bob robbed from me was not sexual really, it was a different kind of innocence. The same is true of Stuart Kerner. I have no doubt that his teenage victim “wanted it”, that horrible phrase being trotted out by good old fashioned sexist pigs and trolls all over the internet. But whether she wanted it or not, the children in our care are children, and it is our business to preserve their innocence while we are in loco parentis. The men and women who have sexual relationships with their pupils are perhaps not paedophiles or sexual abusers in the traditional sense, but what they do is abuse. It robs their victim of something that should be a right: a normal teenage hood, a sexuality that they discover themselves, love that can be reciprocated by those with similar levels of maturity.
The girl in Kerners case and the many like her- the many like me- may pursue these men, but the truth is that they don’t know what they are pursuing. The Judge is wrong, no child can groom an adult. It does adult men a disservice to suggest that they can be so easily manipulated and we owe it to the professional integrity of our teachers and the faith we have in men as a gender to disregard such comments. Whether a teenage girl is “asking for it” or not, no adult man who has a duty of care towards her should ever allow themselves to cross that line. If we believe that they are ever justified in doing so then we do both the children we are protecting and the adults that we trust to look after them a huge disservice.