Friday, 3 June 2005

Fair treatment

Sorry, but today I’m going to just cut and paste something from today’s Daily Telegraph. It concerns a teacher involved in sexual relations with one of her pupils. Identities, to my mind, are irrelevant. My reasons for re-publishing this lie in Utley’s point as to why there should be a difference in the way we treat male offenders as opposed to female wrongdoers in such cases. I investigated many cases where males were accused and just two where women were involved as the instigator but with just that exposure I formed the opinion as laid out below. My reasoning brain tells me that there must be quite a number of couples who find themselves in the same situation. They do not come to widespread public notice, or court, because few young males would complain about their ‘treatment’ – almost a victimless crime one might say. One does not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs!. Mr Utley says what I would have liked to say many years ago – I commend it to your attention and, hopefully, comments.
Tom Utley(Filed: 03/06/2005)
Nicola Prentice has already paid a very high price for seducing a pupil who attended her dancing classes. At only 25, she has lost her career. She has suffered the ignominy of having to sign the sex offenders' register, and the acute embarrassment of having her photograph and the story of her crime published in most of the newspapers (including this one). Now she may even be sent to prison.
Judge Michael Stokes QC, who will sentence Prentice later this month, told Nottingham Crown Court: "If this was a man, prison would be inevitable. Why should I treat a woman any differently? You do not send your 15-year-old son to school for him to be seduced by his dancing teacher. The law is there for a purpose."
He is right, of course, and we can all see the purpose of that law. As a teacher, Prentice was in a position of trust, and she abused that trust by flirting with the boy and luring him out of lessons for visits to the pub. True, she waited until he was 16 before she had sexual intercourse with him - and for most Britons, 16 is the legal age of consent (in Northern Ireland, it is 17). But the law makes separate provision for those in positions of trust, who are forbidden to have sex with anyone in their care who is under 18. This is the law of which Prentice fell foul, pleading guilty to two counts of abusing her position by mutual touching and sexual intercourse between September 2001, when she was 22 years old, and February 2002.
I am sure that Judge Stokes needs no advice from me on how to deal with Prentice. He also has the advantages of having heard all the evidence, and of having seen the defendant's demeanour in court, which I have not. But the judge posed a question from the bench, and all of us whose parliamentary representatives passed the law under which Prentice was charged are entitled to answer it. He asked why he should treat a woman any differently from a man. My own answer to that is: "Lots of reasons."
One is the very nature of the sexual act. I know that it is unfashionable to say so, but it remains a fact that penetration is something that a male does to a female - no matter which way up the couple may happen to be. It is also a biological fact that the male has to be keen on the project, at a very basic level, or else he is physically incapable of carrying it out. The same is not necessarily true of the female. If consensual sex can be said to have a "victim", it is very much easier to see the woman in that role (or the penetrated male, in the case of homosexual intercourse) than the participant who is doing the penetrating. It belittles abused women to pretend that the sort of abuse we are talking about, when it happens, can be as great for a man as it is for a woman.
There is plenty of evidence that the young male in the Prentice case, who cannot be named because of his age at the time the offences were committed (he is now 19), was very keen indeed on the idea of going to bed with his dancing teacher. His parents, we are told, allowed him to continue with his 19-month relationship because he threatened to commit suicide if they forbade him to see her any more. The affair only became public after she grew weary of his emotional demands and dumped him, whereupon he took his story to the newspapers.
A second, and connected, reason for treating a woman differently from a man is the question of shame. For most 16-year-old boys, there is no shame at all in bedding an older woman - particularly if she is only 22. On the contrary, it is a badge of pride. There were rumours at my school that a classmate of mine had bonked one of the matrons. We all looked up to him with something approaching reverence.
It is not quite the same with a girl - although I realise that the times they are a-changin', and that there are a lot of young girls nowadays who would be proud to boast of having slept with an older man. I can't help feeling, however, that there is still something shaming for a girl - much more shaming than for a boy, anyway - about going to bed with a teacher. The balance of power is quite different.
Another difference is the attitude of parents. I know that if I had a 16-year-old daughter, I would be spitting blood over any 22-year-old teacher who tried to seduce her. But I would not be nearly as angry if one of my teenage sons were to go to bed with a female teacher. I cannot speak for my wife, who may feel very differently, but at least a small, laddish part of me would think: "That's my boy! Good on yer, son." I would not go as far as Coleen Nolan, former singer with the Nolans, who announced on television the other day that she had promised her 16-year-old son a visit to a prostitute in Amsterdam if he passed his exams.
But I think it monstrously unjust that poor Nicola Prentice has been made to add her name to the list of perverts on the sex offenders' register. I see nothing remotely pervy about a 22-year-old girl who fancies a sexually mature 16-year-old boy.
I will enter one last plea in mitigation of Prentice's offence. In my view, somebody who teaches break-dancing and hip-hop, as she did, is simply not an authority-figure, in the way that doctors or geography teachers are. I know that I would not mind a bit if she were to try to teach my sons how to dance. I also know that they would not feel the slightest pupil-to-teacher obligation to go to bed with her, if they didn't fancy the idea.
My own feeling is that Prentice is a bad girl - a very bad girl indeed, if she really did drag her young lover off to the pub, when he should have been in class. But what a terrible waste of a prison cell to lock her up in it, when it could be used to keep a violent thug off the streets. It is cheeky of me, I realise, to offer a distinguished judge my unsolicited thoughts on an appropriate sentence for Prentice. But I put it to you, your Honour: hasn't she already suffered enough - or even a bit too much?
OK - now you have read that, has it changed in any way your thoughts about what should have happened in the situation involving the three very young mums in the same family as reported recently?

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