My heart breaks for ‘groper’ Jamie

I AM DEEPLY upset about the case of student Jamie Griffiths. The ‘shy and awkward’ 19-year-old Durham student faces jail after he touched a teenager in an attempt to befriend her.

he had Googled ‘ how to make a friend’ and came into contact with the 17-year- old during two attempts to engage her in conversation.

he touched her arm and then her waist — and in this post #MeToo era, that was enough to convict him.

The ‘victim’ burst into tears during the second encounter and went to police with her mother, claiming Griffiths ‘would have touched her breast had she not moved away’.

With the best will in the world, and all respect to the court and the judge, how could she have possibly known that? HOW? HOW?

The anonymous miss claimed her school work suffered as a result of the contact, leaving her unable to sit her mock exams and apply to Oxford university. God forbid that she ever suffers from genuine trauma.

Griffiths, who lives with his parents, denied two charges of sexual assault, claiming he was ‘shy, anxious and awkward’. The court believed the girl’s version of events rather than his — but what was his crime?

Is this what the tentative fumblings of lovestruck kids have come to, those clumsy stirrings of affection between young people that are now criminalised to such a grotesque extent? It breaks my heart. Not least of all because this guilty verdict will follow this young man around for the rest of his life, while the woman he touched on the waist fades back into the shadow of legal obscurity.