Two recent news items strike me as worthy of comment. One is that an immigrant called Jafar Adeli has been convicted of grooming a teenage girl for sex.
Adeli is one of many victims of online vigilantes who pose as girls under the age of sixteen in a bid to snare paedophiles. Adeli contacted one such vigilante, and - thinking he was exchanging messages with a girl aged fourteen - asked her to meet him for sex. He turned up at a bus station expecting to meet the non-existent girl, but was arrested instead. He has since been imprisoned.
The second news item is that a judge has expressed regret at sentencing an eighteen year old boy called Connor O'Keefe for having sex with a girl who was only fifteen at the time. O'Keefe met the girl at a peace festival, and they both drank heavily. Later on they had sex in a car park.
There are two things I find disturbing about this. The first is that the comments on the Daily Mail website are broadly supportive of the judge. The second is that young people should see a peace festival as an opportunity to drink to excess.
What O'Keefe did was only slightly less heinous than what Jafar Adeli had in mind, and I am glad he was prosecuted. People who drink heavily in public deserve to be arrested and then spend the night in a police cell. As for peace festivals, I wonder what purpose they are realistically expected to serve.
Related previous posts include:
Peace for more than one day
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