Beware the culture warriors who ‘correct’ accurate sex crime headlines

Melville is a dangerous paedophile who needs locked up. Which, thankfully, is now what has happened.

I was not in court for his trial and have no particular insight in to the case against him.

All I know – from brief news reports – is the terrifyingly mundane narrative of Melville’s biggest crime. How he befriended the two girls, telling them he knew their dads. How he got the youngest in to a container behind an Aldi in the middle of Glasgow. How he manipulated the older to be his guard.

READ MORE: Can the UK still tolerate legal diversity?

As I type out these sparse details I can feel a knot tightening in my stomach, a nagging feeling of anxiety and revulsion. You probably do too as you read them.

There is something about crimes against children, isn't there, that triggers us all?

So it was no shock that stories about Melville’s appalling offences sparked anger on social media.

What was maybe a bit more surprising – at least for anybody unfamiliar with dysfunctional online politics – was the target of all the ire.

Because it was not aimed at the paedophile, but at the BBC and other news organisations which reported his conviction.

Why? Well, because their headlines said that Melville “had sex” with his victim.

“I think you mean ‘raped’,” tweeted the right-wing commentator Calvin Robinson at a BBC Scotland account sharing the news that the pensioner had been jailed.

This GB News presenter has a track record of politicising sex crimes. But he was not alone in insisting court reports were wrong.

READ MORE: The Melville case - reported correctly

The BBC Scotland tweet of the Melville conviction provoked hundreds of such responses. Some abusive, a few conspiracist in nature.

Mostly, I suspect, from people who had not even read the story, and who were certainly not in court.

Melville, the righteously outraged of Twitter decided, was a rapist and journalists who did not report this were downplaying his crime.

This is irresponsible garbage.

The reason the BBC and other outlets did not say Melville “raped" his victim is because that was not what he was charged with and not what he was found guilty of.

Facts matter. Reality matters. Law matters.

Journalists report what actually happens in courts. We have legal, ethical and civic duties to help ensure that justice is not only done, but that it is seen to be done. And that means we have to be accurate.

The BBC did not decide what charges the dirty old man Melville should face. That was prosecutors.

It was not the Corporation which came up with the laws under which he was convicted. That was Holyrood, and not even that long ago: current sex crimes legislation dates from 2009.

So you might expect all Scottish politicians to have some understanding of such court copy. After all, they are responsible for the relevant legislation.

You would be wrong.

Disappointingly, a sitting MSP echoed Mr Robinson’s misinformation when she saw the BBC tweet on the Melville case. “I think the word is ‘rape’”, wrote Carol Mochan, a Labour list member for the South of Scotland, on the social media platform.

“A disgraceful headline,” replied James Dornan, the SNP’s man in Glasgow South.

“Absolutely correct, Carol,” chimed in another nationalist MSP, Elena Whitham, who has since November been Scotland’s junior justice minister.

I think this is rather serious. What we are talking about here are three lawmakers – one in government – falsely accusing the BBC of misreporting a sensitive court case.

Now I am willing to give all three MSPs the benefit of the doubt, to accept that they were tweeting in good faith and that they genuinely were unfamiliar with both the law and the conventions of reality-based journalism.

But ignorance is not that great an excuse given that the BBC clearly explained the legal position in its article.

Here is my free PR advice to politicians and anybody who wants to be taken seriously: never comment on stories you have not read; there is a very good chance you will end up looking like an idiot.

Despite the confidence of online commentators – including the serially ludicrous Mr Robinson and the three tweeting MSPs – sexual activity with a child over 13 is not, in fact, automatically rape. Not in Scotland, not in England, and not in lots of other jurisdictions.

There are reasons for this. Quite good ones, I think. Legislators do not want to criminalise older children who engage in consensual underage sex with each other.

Police Scotland has developed a pretty nuanced toolkit for handling such incidents. They put the well-being ahead of young people first, flagging incidents up to relevant agencies rather than reporting children to prosecutors.

Does that mean that adults, especially over-18s, who have sex with kids are treated leniently? Hell, no. As the horrible Melville has just found out, sexual activity with an older child can carry serious jail time, in his case not that far off the average for a rape conviction.

There is a trend – a growing one, I fear – of online partisans attacking accurate journalism, including crime and court reporting on culture war issues.

In Scotland, for example, there is a toxic, dishonest online effort to portray the SNP government, the courts and media as “woke” or even “nonce”.

Such internet campaigns undermine popular understanding of the justice system and can pose real-world threats to the safety of media professionals and public officials.

Is there room for debate and discussion on sex crime law and how it is implemented? Of course, always. But do we want politicians and activists misrepresenting the outcomes of actual court proceedings? Surely not.