KEY POINTS:
Quote: "I am absolutely appalled that someone of that age should be involved in an incident such as this." So said Detective Sergeant Roger Small, commenting on the alleged abduction by two 14-year-old boys of a girl of the same age, whom they were said to have dragged kicking and screaming into a West Auckland house and indecently assaulted.
I find this statement astonishing, particularly from a policeman who, since he's a detective sergeant, has been around a while.
I wasn't even mildly surprised at this newspaper's lead story on Monday reporting the abduction and the arrest of the alleged offenders.
The only thing that surprises me is that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Perhaps it does, since Mr Small admits that police often deal with young teenagers accused of indecent assault.
There are those who tell us that only a small proportion of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to police, and I suspect that the younger the victim, the less likely she is to report one. But we know that a lot of 14-year-old girls and younger are having sex, even if only from the abortion statistics for last year, which recorded 104 abortions performed on girls aged between 11 and 14.
That doesn't surprise me, either. In a society utterly drenched in sex, what do you expect?
I have argued for years that sex education in schools, particularly that which begins before children even get near the age of puberty, let alone the age of consent, is simply an invitation for them to begin experimenting.
And what makes it worse is that the teaching they receive seems to be based entirely on the physical and takes no account of the powerful psychological and spiritual factors at work in human sexuality.
It doesn't help, either, that children can be supplied with condoms, or be given an abortion, without the knowledge, let alone the consent, of parents.
Along with survival (and the ultimate in survival is to reproduce oneself), sex is the most powerful instinct known to mankind.
Yet we have come to treat it as a purely physical transaction between a man and a woman. Having intercourse these days is considered in about the same light as having a meal or watching a movie. And its descriptions (bonking, shagging, screwing) have been reduced to the mundane.
Movies, television, magazines and books are riddled with sex, either showing it in the most graphic detail or describing it blow by blow ad nauseam. (It always makes me crack up when I read of the nicotine Nazis going crook about smoking in movies or on TV. It's a funny old world when actors can indulge in uninhibited sex on screen but woe betide any who light up a fag.)
And as for the internet: type "sex" into Google and, in a fleeting 0.6 of a second, the search engine will present you with 851 million relevant pages; type in "porn" and it will bring up 271 million pages.
Thus, considering the power of the primal urges that afflict young men and women, their ignorance of how to handle them and the temptations put in their way, it is unsurprising that things happen such as those which allegedly occurred in West Auckland last weekend.
We reap what we sow.
Coincidentally, last weekend saw some 400,000 people, most of them young, gathered in Sydney to hear Pope Benedict XVI urge them to reject the "spiritual desert" spreading throughout the world and to embrace Christianity to build a new age free from greed and materialism.
And even there, the spectre of sexual depravity hung over proceedings as the Pope sought once again to do what he can to atone for the inexcusable and irreparable harm wrought by the depredations of perverted, predatory priests and religious.
But that could not detract from the truth of his homilies in which he said: "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading: an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair.
"From the forlorn child in a Darfur camp, or a troubled teenager, or an anxious parent in any suburb, or perhaps even now from the depth of your own heart, there emerges the same human cry for recognition, for belonging, for unity."
It was up to a new generation of Christians to build "a new age in which hope liberates us from the shallowness, apathy and self-absorption which deadens our souls and poisons our relationships".
And there we get to the core of our societal disease. Our pursuit of self-gratification, including promiscuous and uncommitted sex, has left us dissatisfied, resentful, unhappy, ill at ease, anxious and afraid.
But why leave the solution to Christians? Let's all be in it. God knows we've tried everything else.
