I get very confused. The 17 year old loony who tossed a 6 year old off the roof cannot be named as he (or she) is a "child". Anyone on the Sex Offender's Register cannot work with a "child" which seems to be someone under 18. Yet anyone can have consensual sex with someone of either gender if they are over 16. And the Children and Young Persons Act 1933 (never repealed) says a "child" is "a person under the age of 14" - anyone older than that but under 18 is legally NOT a child but a "young person".

JK2006 wrote:
Yet anyone can have consensual sex with someone of either gender if they are over 16.

Unless they're 16 or 17 and you're in a position of responsibility for them. Let's also remember the age of criminal responsibility is 10. For centuries, female "coming of age" in Britain was set at 12: an approximate average for the onset of puberty and therefore becoming marriageable. But there were other, non-legal rules about sexual behaviour based on social and Christian ideas of propriety, the value of marriage and the family.

What we have now is a complete bugger's muddle. Criminal codes from many other countries are much simpler and clearer. That's probably because they were drafted on a clean slate, when the countries were founded more recently, as in Germany or Italy. The UK has a long history of legal chopping and changing, and incorporating varying and sometimes contradictory legal influences.

one result of how the media and then the public who follow like sheep have over-used the word "peedeofile" to describe anyone who inadvertently touches someone under 40, anyone they dislike, old-school Tory politicians and basically the old bloke next door who puts his bins out in front of your driveway..is that they have totally devalued the word.

The original meaning of the word (created by psychiatrists) was to describe a person who had an innate sexual attraction to children (very young children) and that attraction was driven by the very innocence of those children.

But now anyone who is convicted of having sex (whether innocent or guilty) of someone under 18 years of age is automatically labelled a pedo.
Even someone who slept with a 15 year old after being show fake ID saying they were a 19 year old tart (male or female) automatically becomes a "peediofile"

We see this out of control on social media and the weird thing is that anyone accused of beiong a "pedo" or "nonce" only has to respond with "no you are the pedo and everyone knows you are and that's why you call others "pedos" to try to hid in plain sight". And suddenly the accuser becomes wary in case it sticks,

The media have so overused the world I get the feeling that "pedo" stories no longer carry the excitement value for a public who are so incensed by such "nonce" action yet lap up every word and previously couldn't get enough Pedo Talk in their Sunday tabloids.

They're loving the Carl Beech story of course because it has so many other elements..bent coppers. Big Names, MI5 and so on..but Beech's "pedo" conviction isn't the main attraction..it's more a sideline.

In other dreary and ridiculous cases like those hapless fools who bizarrely think they are being chatted up online by a 14 year old St Trinian's student only to arrive and find a hairy tattooed career criminal thug with a camera just aren't terribly interesting any more because the vigilante and "peedo" are so bloody interesting the newspapers just don;t run many of the tales anymore.

I reckon the Vigilantes will get bored soon.

Of course the reputed 4 million British children said to be living in dire poverty are of no interest to any of these "child advocates".

hedda wrote:
one result of how the media and then the public who follow like sheep have over-used the word "peedeofile" to describe anyone who inadvertently touches someone under 40, anyone they dislike, old-school Tory politicians and basically the old bloke next door who puts his bins out in front of your driveway..is that they have totally devalued the word.

The original meaning of the word (created by psychiatrists) was to describe a person who had an innate sexual attraction to children (very young children) and that attraction was driven by the very innocence of those children.

But now anyone who is convicted of having sex (whether innocent or guilty) of someone under 18 years of age is automatically labelled a pedo.
Even someone who slept with a 15 year old after being show fake ID saying they were a 19 year old tart (male or female) automatically becomes a "peediofile"

We see this out of control on social media and the weird thing is that anyone accused of beiong a "pedo" or "nonce" only has to respond with "no you are the pedo and everyone knows you are and that's why you call others "pedos" to try to hid in plain sight". And suddenly the accuser becomes wary in case it sticks,

The media have so overused the world I get the feeling that "pedo" stories no longer carry the excitement value for a public who are so incensed by such "nonce" action yet lap up every word and previously couldn't get enough Pedo Talk in their Sunday tabloids.

They're loving the Carl Beech story of course because it has so many other elements..bent coppers. Big Names, MI5 and so on..but Beech's "pedo" conviction isn't the main attraction..it's more a sideline.

In other dreary and ridiculous cases like those hapless fools who bizarrely think they are being chatted up online by a 14 year old St Trinian's student only to arrive and find a hairy tattooed career criminal thug with a camera just aren't terribly interesting any more because the vigilante and "peedo" are so bloody interesting the newspapers just don;t run many of the tales anymore.

I reckon the Vigilantes will get bored soon.

Of course the reputed 4 million British children said to be living in dire poverty are of no interest to any of these "child advocates".

I have come to the conclusion that some people get a sort of sexual thrill from demonising and excluding others.

People who are attracted to children, but who dont act on it, are treated with the same disgust as those who have actually raped small children, which indicates that actually, they dont give a stuff about the child.

It isn't all the fault of the media. It is the everyday dickhe**ds who are at fault too. Like I said in a previous post, people are massively easily fooled and jump on anything without so much as a second thought.


Yes, a pedophile is somebody who is strangely attracted to (very young) children in an unhealthy and quite overtly perversive manner. That is a disease.
Somebody who has simply engaged in sexual conduct with youths (willing) or indeed two underage participants is not pedophilia. Some (if not all) such participants go on to have appropriate relationships.

Will adults always be destined to be the scapegoats?

The law nowadays classes a ton of PAGE 3 girls pictures from the early 80s as child pornography...since page 3 girls used to be as young as 16 when they went topless in a national newspaper.16,17 is considered underage... thats a hell of a lot of photographers demonized and a lot of old newspapers and magazines now considered obscene.
Amazing ...

Yes adults should be the scapegoat if the child "partner"is not an adult (er...de facto) pre pubescent or pubescent. Who else should be the "scapegoat"...the abuser?

Donald Trumpton wrote:
The law nowadays classes a ton of PAGE 3 girls pictures from the early 80s as child pornography...since page 3 girls used to be as young as 16 when they went topless in a national newspaper.16,17 is considered underage... thats a hell of a lot of photographers demonized and a lot of old newspapers and magazines now considered obscene.
Amazing ...

I think it is fine to recognise mistakes, and that actually baring your breasts in a newspaper at sixteen was not a good thing to encourage, but we shouldn't punish people for doing something that was normal and acceptable at the time.