The difficulty here (and speaking as an ex-teacher) is that I could line up girls aged 13 up to women aged 24 and in some cases it’d be obvious who was what age and in some cases it wouldn’t - knowing someone’s age is a difficult thing. I’ve taught 13 year olds who look 18, I’ve taught 18 year olds that look 13 and I have a 27 year old friend who, if you put her in a school uniform, could probably pass as 15.

The issue with the law is that it begins with a presumption of innocence. You have to prove guilt, you cannot start with assumptions of wrongdoing and work backwards. You have to prove (beyond reasonable doubt) that he did those things. If she says he didn’t ask, and he says he did - you have reasonable doubt.

Rape is a complicated thing to convict, because there are two parts to it. You have to prove the act happened - this isn’t all that difficult. But you also have to prove that the person accused of rape knew, at the time the rape was committed, that the other person didn’t consent. That’s quite a high bar and a difficult thing to prove.

It’s frustrating. Society does not have it right. In worldwide cases like these it’s a little harder. The age of consent here is 16 (in the U.K.) but it’s 18 in most US states but 14 elsewhere in the world. If you rape a child, you don’t need to prove whether they consented or not. The point is irrelevant, because they cannot give consent. That applies in cases where 13 year olds are pregnant - in most cases they would’ve been 12 when they had sex, their children are proof of statutory rape.

Society needs to have long in depth chats about how we resolve this. Simply shooting people won’t help, nor will going on guts feelings. I have a story called ‘a deep dive on a footballers overturned rape case’ (or something similar) where I go into the complexity of the legal stuff and why we need better solutions and for the public to not be involved very much.