28-11-2019, 12:23 PM
2225
Re: Coronation Street
Originally Posted by
OldGreyFox
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I think they are being a bit unfair on Kel (who supposedly abused Paul) Paul was sixteen when he fell in love with Kel.
In my opinion Paul must take some responsibility for the affair.
He is gay and has also led creepy Billy on, who in my opinion is worse than Kel the way he handles Paul and takes advantage of him. Is it that Coronation Street are saying that everyone who has been allegedly abused when they were younger turn into homosexuals in adulthood? If not, Paul was already fancying older men before he was supposedly corrupted...
Billy the creepy vicar has talked Paul into being the victim, and then gone on to abuse Paul himself.....Paul was doing alright until Billy messed with his mind...It's the creepy vicar who should be locked up!
This idea that the victim is partly to blame for the sexual offences committed against them when they are minors is one of the reasons so many victims are reluctant to report this kind of abuse.
In this storyline, Kel was in a relationship with the Mother of Paul and Gemma and lived with them as a family while they were growing up, so he was acting in the role of stepfather.
To my mind, that makes Kel’s actions doubly despicable because he was taking advantage of a child’s love and admiration for him as a parent figure by grooming the lad and manipulating those feelings from his early teenage years.
The story of Paul is not suggesting that Kel’s abuse of him made him become gay - it’s about a sadly fairly common scenario of a parent or step parent who abuses the trust and vulnerability of a child and manipulates their feelings, so the child believes they are in a special relationship.
It’s a scenario I have heard several times before from adult women who still bear the psychological scars of being abused by a step father (or even their father) in what they saw at the time as a “loving relationship”, but we don’t hear about similar situations involving boys and stepfathers very often.Perhaps that is why Corrie has decided to show that it does happen to young boys too.
If Kel’s sexual interests had been in young girls and if he had been abusing Paul’s twin, Gemma, grooming her sexually from aged 14 and moving on to having full sex with her at 16, would you think she must bear some responsibility for the “affair” too?
The Law doesn’t think so, which is why there is a law against adults having sexual contact with someone under 18 if they are in a position of trust or if they have a family relationship as set out by the Sexual Offences Act, which specifically includes anyone who lives in the household and has caring responsibilities for a child as coming under the same legal obligations as a parent or a step parent.
I know Corrie is only fiction and is far-fetched and contrived a lot of the time - no one family or street are ever likely to be deluged with the constant stream of crimes, personal problems and drama that befalls the Corrie residents.
However, many of the individual storylines are a reflection of what is happening out there in the real world. They do research these individual storylines with organisations that deal with real victims and they try to reflect some of the lesser reported but real problems some people face in real life.