The ‘outrage bus’ is doing wheelies round the Sunderland Football Club car park as it awaits its ritualistic joy-ride through Twitter when Adam Johnson’s sentence is deemed too soft… as it will be if just one week short of a death sentence.
Collateral victims – i.e. not including his actual unnamed victim – of his criminal stupidity in kissing a 15 year old teenager so far include:
The Chief Executive of Sunderland Football Club – she ‘knew’, ‘he admitted’ kissing the girl, how could she let him kick a ball round the park before he was found guilty?….off with her paedo-enabling head!
The former editor of the Sun Newspaper, David Dinsmore – he published a picture of the victim taken from her Facebook page, with ‘no facial features identifiable from the photo, the hair colour has been disguised, the hair length has been changed, and the background to the photograph has been altered and indeed there have been other changes relating to, for example, clothing’. But no matter that the only people capable of recognising her from this pixellated pic were those who already knew her, to whom she had boasted of her conquest – Dinsmore now has a conviction under the Sexual Offences Act. Not even the more usual Contempt of Court.
Johnson’s girlfriend; Stacey Flounders; now a single mother with a baby to bring up – difficult to go back to her previous life as an air hostess with a broken heart and huge humiliation.
Most of all, his young daughter, Ayla, just learning to walk – but not to totter round the multi-million pound mansion with loving parents that should have been her birthright, but with occasional supervised visits with the sex-offender that she is burdened with for life as ‘Dad’.
We are told that it is only right that all these people should pay the price for being associated with a paedophile who kissed a 15 year old girl – in addition to the 4 – 10 year prison sentence he has been told to expect.
Am I defending Adam Johnson? NO, not a bit of it. He was the adult; however besotted this teenage season-ticket holder was with footballing stars (and who paid for her season-ticket? and the clothes she would need to dress the part to ensure that one of the stars of the club was prepared to overlook the law in order to accept her proffered kiss? – No chance of any parental responsibility here I suppose?) Nope – no matter how young and stupid she was – it was always his responsibility to obey the law, not hers. These girls were not nicknamed ‘jailbait’ for nothing.
What does concern me is the ‘4 – 10 years’.
For on the other side of the country, another man was also kissing a 15 year old.
This wasn’t a besotted fan, who however misguidedly was ‘up for it’ and tempting – this was a perfectly innocent 15 year old schoolgirl on her way home.
Nor was the man concerned a ‘delectable’ (in some eyes) athletic young man that you might, if daft enough, be proud to boast to your friends that you had kissed….
Nor was his boss fired for knowing about it, we don’t even know if he was employed. Nor was his face plastered all over the papers. There doesn’t appear to be a single picture of him.
If he has a girlfriend or wife, we haven’t been told about her, and she hasn’t had the humiliation of every detail of her man’s sexual habits exposed on the front pages.
There will be no outrage bus circling round the second man demanding that he be banned from ever doing his job again, nor was there at the length of his sentence.
Nor was the victim his sole victim.
Both men pleaded guilty to the kiss.
In fact the only difference I can find between the two offences is that I’ll wager the girl in Johnson’s case was considerably less traumatised by kissing someone she wanted to kiss, however wrongly, than the second girl who was neither groomed nor warned, but kissed by a total stranger, not a particularly edifying stranger by all accounts.
So how come Ali Abdullahi’s punishment was considered just and proper at a ‘community order and a sex offender course’ and Adam Johnson is being told to expect ‘years in prison’?
Before you suggest it – the judge specifically rejected Abdullahi’s defence plea for mitigation on the grounds of ‘misunderstanding cultural differences’….
Seems to me that if Adam Johnson receives any harsher sentence than Ali Abdullahi did last week then I shall be campaigning on Johnson’s behalf – and I believe he was guilty and should be punished.
Either we are equals before the law, or we aren’t – there shouldn’t be special treatment for those the media have singled out as ‘VIPs’ and treated to additional punishment.
Particularly not when the media only do it to boost their own circulation. They were not remotely interested in the young victim in Torquay. No clickbait in someone kissing that 15 year old.