A school teacher in France was handed a suspended sentence for sleeping with a 14-year-old pupil yesterday as the country grapples with changing the rules on underage sex, reports The Telegraph.
The relatively lenient verdict - the prosecutor had asked for a prison term of five years in prison, two suspended - came two days after President Emmanuel Macron called for adult sex with a child under 15 to be considered rape.
Lawyers for the girl's family had called for more time for a fresh investigation, saying that police had failed to grasp the gravity of the case, treating it as a "simple love affair".
The maths teacher and the pupil, who was in his class last year, started chatting on Instagram on February before beginning a relationship in June.
The girl insisted the pair were in love but when the stepfather found out how old her "boyfriend" was, he dragged the teacher to the police station and the family accused him of being a sexual predator.
The teacher was found guilty of "molestation" but cleared of "corruption of a minor". He was placed on probation for two years, ordered to receive counselling and banned from working with minors or contacting the girl.
"She's a child who believes in love with a capital L. As a teacher he knew that and used it to seduce my daughter," her mother told AFP news agency.
Currently in France, sex with a minor aged under 15 is classified as sexual assault or molesting, punishable by up to five years in prison. The law does not treat such an act as rape unless there is proof of force. Adults wielding some form of authority over the child face stiffer sentences.
The government promised change after uproar over rulings this autumn in which two 11-year-old girls were deemed not to have been raped by much older men because they had apparently agreed to sex. On Saturday, Mr Macron said: “Our criminal law contains intolerable ambiguities.
"We must without any doubt align the presumption [of rape] with the age of sexual consent, which is fixed at 15,” he told a conference on Saturday to mark the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.