The ‘groomed’ teacher judge and (tin hat on!) why she got it RIGHT
That’s one answer to a saggy neck, Carla
Carla Bruni was muffled in a turtleneck in Paris at the Je Suis Charlie march, right. i bring this to your notice as the rollneck is an important staging post in the life Journey of Woman. Just as mummies adopt puppies after their childbearing years conclude, this garment signifies the moment when even an evergreen model and singer has reached the age when she ‘feels bad’ about her neck. Or, as Jack nicholson put it as he revealed his yearning for one more romance at 77, when ‘biogravity’ first strikes.
I’VE been champing all week to pull on my hobnail boots and wade in to all the armchair jurists who’ve been bleating that what happened in court was all wrong, the judge shouldn’t have said this, the accused shouldn’t get away with it, and it’s all outrageous.
No, I’m not talking about the increasingly bonkers Broadchurch, though it’s tempting after a judge ruled Joe Miller’s murder confession inadmissible in order to provide a plot for the second series.
I’m talking instead about Bexleyheath Academy and the court case that’s just ended involving a teacher (Stuart Kerner, now 44), who has been convicted on two counts of sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust – and the unnamed child in question (now 19).
The congealed details have been served up on a cold school dinner plate: how the teacher took a condom to school, her virginity on a yoga mat in a store cupboard, how the pair had sex in the spare room at his home between rounds of Marmite on toast and episodes of Bargain Hunt… enough.
But as she passed sentence, the judge, Joanna Greenberg QC, told the court the ‘obsessed’ girl, then aged 16, ‘groomed’ and even reportedly ‘stalked’ her teacher.
THE girl told the court ‘hand on heart’ how she’d been ‘in love’, and encouraged the religious studies and ethics (yes, I know, ha very ha) teacher at the school. Therefore, Greenberg continued, even though the teacher was found guilty of two charges and had failed to be a ‘responsible adult and show restraint’, she ruled he should not be detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure but be free to go to the bed he shares with his wife and home he shares with his son.
‘It is a tragedy that somebody like you committed offences of this nature and has come to be sentenced,’ the judge concluded. ‘The victim pursued you and formed an attachment to you that was not something that you sought.’
Cue outcry. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood said: ‘This ruling sends out the worst kind of message to abusers – or the best, if you are one.’
Barnardo’s, the NSPCC, End Violence Against Women, and many other organisations and individuals have knee-jerked against Greenberg, and accused her of both slut-shaming and victim-blaming, and demanded she should be investigated, even though the Attorney General has already confirmed Kerner’s crime cannot be referred to the Court of Appeal under the unduly lenient sentence scheme.
For the child abuse expert, there is only black and white.
When it comes to justice in this case, I approve of the judge’s allowance for shades of grey (in another rich irony, part of the title of the pornographic book that the teenager used as her template for the relationship).
Kerner fell foul of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which rules that an adult in a position of trust is guilty of a crime if he intentionally touches someone under 18, and the contact is sexual (this is why teachers can’t afford to be in a room alone with a pupil any longer, or hug them, etc).
Whatever you think about this law, this particular case tells us it is very much needed – at this point I add tin hat to hobnail boots – and it’s there to protect teachers from pupils just as much as pupils from predators. Without the law, teachers are far more vulnerable to temptation, suggestion, flattery, sexual interest, and so on.
And if they do find themselves in a sticky store-cupboard situation they can say, hand on heart, to their teenage crush: ‘No. I can’t. If I carry on, I could lose my job, my livelihood, my family, and I might even go to prison.’
Which is, if you think about it, almost exactly what’s happened to Stuart Kerner, who has signed the sex offenders’ register and can never teach again.
I think that in this case, the jury got it right (he did have sex with a pupil under 18) and the judge got it right (awarding a non-custodial sentence).
And in this case, above all, and most unusually, the law is not an ass, and everyone should jog on.