Why Do Many of Us Feel That Madeleine Martin’s Sentence Was Too Harsh?

After reading a recent piece in the news about Madeleine Martin, the 39-year-old RE teacher, who has been charged following her nine-day affair with a 15-year-old male pupil, I’m quite ashamed to say that her 32 month jail term initially struck me as a bit over the top. Although I’ve come to reconsider this opinion, my first response still troubles me.

I now believe that of course she deserves this sentence and should indeed be made to sign the sex offender’s register, but at first this struck me as particularly over the top. The boy clearly consented to the affair, and I couldn’t help paying little heed to the teasing he apparently received from his peers. As we all picture 15-year old boys to be over-sexed, jeering hoodlums, one can only picture his classmates’ taunts to be laced with jealousy and his response to be one of pride at the ultimate conquest. However, this view is to underestimate the damage that can be caused by such a liaison. As a teacher, Martin had a responsibility for the wellbeing of her pupils and no matter how tragic her circumstances, there is no excuse for abusing her position of trust. His consent is made irrelevant by the law, and I would agree that a child of 15 is indeed too young to deal with the emotional implications of a sexual relationship.

My troubling reaction to the story is surely a result of society’s generalist images of desperate middle age women and loutish teenage boys (we shall not even get into the wholly disturbing and arbitrary concept of the “teenager” and all the supposed behaviours that go with it). Why do we believe that a 15-year-old boy would be less susceptible than a girl of the same age to the destructive ramifications of an adult affair? It is quite simply because our mental stereotype does not assign teenage boys much if any emotional awareness. Our mental image of the slavering, sex maniac male adolescent does not allow for the existence of any genuine ability to feel or the capacity to be exploited. Of course when put this way, it sounds ridiculous – more young men successfully commit suicide than young women, and there is endless anecdotal evidence to show that of course young men do, on the whole, experience very strong emotions, sometimes with disastrous consequences. So how can we for a moment consider that the average 15-year-old boy is not every bit as vulnerable as the average 15-year-old girl? Martin now starts to look more monstrous, as a male in the same position would immediately appear.