Consensual, With Genuine Affection – Go To Jail
Here we go again. A teacher is jailed for having consensual sex with a 16 year old girl.
I’m not going to run through the arguments again that make this a ridiculous over-reaction.
But consider the following:
Grim made a full confession to the affair, which involved sexual contact but not full intercourse.
Sentencing, Judge Paul Darlow told him… ‘In your favour I accept that you pleaded guilty at the first opportunity and you are not only of good character but people have told of your abilities as a teacher to bring on gifted children.
‘There was no intimidation and the relationship was consensual on both sides and with genuine affection.’
The guy is now in prison for ten month.
Somebody should start a campaign to end this ridiculous, infantile, illiberal, treatment of people choosing to have sex.
Category: Ethics | Tags: sex 5 comments »
November 27th, 2009 at 11:32 am
[...] been complaining about this absurd practice of jailing people for engaging in consensual sex (see here, here and [...]
December 20th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I cannot see why the teacher has been jailed. What purpose can this serve? Having consensual sex does not warrant punishment like this. Exclusion from his profession would be more appropriate I think.
February 6th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Grown men should not be having sex with 16 year old girls, period! This man was an authority figure, someone who parents and others entrusted to the care of this girl. If she had been your 16 year-old daughter and this had been her teacher would you feel differently do you think? All kids of every age need our protection – they don’t have much of a voice themselves and many are too young to have the sense to know who they should or should not be having sex with. It’s up to the sane adults of the world to enforce the rules/laws to make them safe and set the boundaries for them.
March 6th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Actually, I don’t the ‘well, what if it were your daughter’ consideration is at all helpful. Parents have a tendency to hold intense but rather irrational interests in their children’s chastity. Thankfully, this is not Saudi Arabia, where such instincts can be given free and terrible reign. But comparative liberalism over all can never excuse a single unjust law. Young people are not so helpless as you claim: they can make their own decision, and stand up for themselves. There exist already laws against abuse: to introduce further laws covering non-abusive relationships can only do harm. And I know no one has made this move here, but I wish people would stop appealing to the concept of ‘abuse of trust’ in this connection: it’s completely vacuous, and serves no purpose other than to offer the semblance of justification for laws like this.
March 6th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Actually, you did make something akin to the abuse of trust move, even if you didn’t use those words – ‘This man was an authority figure, someone who parents and others entrusted to the care of this girl.’ What trust exactly have sexually-involved teachers abused? If teachers are specifically being trusted not to engage in sexual or romantic liaisons with their pupils, then the argument is just pushed back one stage further. Why are they so trusted? What is it to the pupil or their teaching, and why should it carry the force of law? There are, of course, two much more obvious candidates for duties entrusted to teachers: duties of care (which you mention), and duties of, well, teaching. But what is not obvious is how sex actually constitutes a dereliction of those duties. Is it really such an overriding responsibility not to involve pupils in emotional attachments which could potentially (with a stress on ‘potentially’, as well as a note that just about any human relationship has this same potential) become painful? Is it such an overriding responsibility that society should enforce with the sanction of prison, or even of job dismissal? After all, getting involved in such attachments is just what young people do.