“Ex-teacher resentenced to prison for raping teen”

So another teacher/student relationship is making the rounds of the news. And of course the word rape is being used liberally.

This has to stop.

From the story: “The two had sex for three months in late 2007”. The girl was 14. She wanted to have sex with the teacher, but 14 is too young to be making that call.

It’s a bad thing. Agreed.

The teacher should be punished. Agreed.

But there are heaps of combinations of letters. I think we have the scope to come up with a new word to describe this sort of thing. Because ‘rape’ already has a meaning in the minds of us English-speaking humans. And that is to fuck someone when the other person doesn’t want to be fucked. It’s a powerful word. Rough and bold and reprehensible.

So when you take a word like ‘rape’ and say, oh well actually it can also mean sex where one of the people was under x years old, then suddenly all rapes are potentially a beautiful love story where the two lovers are at opposite ends of high school.

Do we want to dilute rape like that? Do we want to water it down and make it not that bad?

But nothing will change. What sane journalist is going to take RAPE out of their headline because they think maybe the reader will have a different definition of the word to the meaning in the context of their story.