Looks like more victim blaming from Platell
A grubby footballer and a very troubling question
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No one could dispute that footballer Adam Johnson is a bad man. A serial cheat and liar, he is set to serve a lengthy prison sentence for grooming and abusing a 15-year-old girl.
After such an opening you know that she is quickly going to insert a 'but' and sure enough.
But so many questions about this case remain unanswered. Yes his victim was only 15. And yes, as a 27-year-old, Johnson’s behaviour was not just illegal but morally abhorrent
And what are these questions?
The fact is, 15-year-old girls, growing up in today’s pornography-ridden world, are often already highly sexualised
Presumably when talking about young girls being sexualised she's referring to her own papers side of shame and headlines along the lines of 'Doesn't she look all grown up.' As far as I'm aware At no point in the trial did the defense try and argue that the young victim was already sexualised.
Around a third of young women in Britain today now lose their virginity before the age of 16 — and far more will have been sexually active in other ways.
Lord knows what advice their mothers are giving them about their still-young bodies; about restraint and self-respect; about waiting to meet someone they care about and, more importantly, meeting someone who cares about them
Teenage girls having sex with boys of the same age is totally different to a 27 year old man arranging to meet a young girl on the pretext of signing a shirt and then going on to sexually abusing her.
We then get this ridiculous argument.
This, don’t forget, was a footballer earning £60,000 a week. There are plenty of girls who would find that rather alluring.
Go to any nightclub that footballers frequent and you’ll find them queuing up to bag a multi-millionaire footballer
Well if rich footballers have got lots of women queuing up to have relationships with them why are they having to resort to grooming 15 year old girls who are not hanging around night clubs?
Then we get Amanda's summing up.
I have nothing but contempt for Johnson and pity for those whose lives he has ruined. But when you look at the hard facts of this case, we are entitled to wonder: was he the only one to blame?
Yes, he was guilty. But so is a society that almost seems to encourage teenage girls to behave in such a self-destructive way.
Surely the only people who have seen all the hard facts of the case are the people who have been in court through out the trial including the jury who have listened to the evidence and reached a verdict.