Thrawneen is making an interesting argument. He isn’t defending what Humphries is alleged to have done. If the allegations are true they are indefensible especially the violation of trust aspect and they’ll result in a jail sentence and deservedly so.
But Thrawneen is right that many 14 year olds are sexually active. The story in the Sunday World says the sex was consensual. There’s no evidence or hint in the story that this carry on ever happened with any other girls. Humphries coached for a good number of years without any known incident before the relationship with the girl started - don’t know how many exactly, but judging from his articles, I’d say at least six or seven. I think that should at least give him the benefit of the doubt that he didn’t get into mentoring for the purposes of shagging young girls.
Some on this thread have compared Humphries to Josef Fritzl, Ian Huntley and Hitler. Read it back. I’ll leave it up to yourselves as to whether you think they are legitimate comparisons.
For the benefit of the more reactionary posters, none of this takes away from what was an unforgiveable error of judgement from Humphries and it isn’t a defence of him.