BY the end of this month, former England footballer Adam Johnson is expected to be spending his first days in jail.
Last week he was found guilty of one count of sexual activity with a 15-year-old girl and was warned he faces a custodial sentence.
The ex-Sunderland player previously admitted grooming the girl and one charge of sexual activity.
The judge bailed Johnson before sentencing so he could get his "affairs in order" and warned him his jail term means he will not see his young daughter "for some time".
It is difficult to feel much sympathy for Johnson (28) who began communicating with the girl when his partner was heavily pregnant with their first child.
The girl herself said she had idolised him. He was a star player for her favourite club, she could not believe he was texting her.
The girl, now 16, had made it clear at the time that she was 15 but still Johnson persisted. After the crime he continued to play football, making millions, while the girl was vilified, verbally abused and in her own words "made out to be a liar".
"There are people who have made assumptions about me and this has been hard to deal with," she said. "Him being found guilty shows everyone I was telling the truth."
The sad thing is that this case does not feel in the least bit shocking. Just a few years ago footballer Ched Evans was convicted of raping a 19-year-old woman in a Welsh hotel.
Even after his conviction he has continued to protest his innocence. Again the woman involved was ridiculed and verbally abused. Her name was posted online, in defiance of the law.
So far, so familiar. In the world of top-flight football, some players see a woman as simply a sexual plaything, not a human being.
Players with too much money, too much free time, and a job that turns them into temporary idols will inevitably have a difficult time dealing with reality.
Many footballers do manage to navigate wealth and fame but a few will always manage to get themselves into serious trouble, partly feeling that they are somehow outside the rules of common decency, even outside the law. But is football really to blame?
Perhaps the question we need to ask is why does our society still allow teenage girls to be abused and mistreated?
Recent high-profile cases prove that some male celebrities assaulted children for decades, apparently without anyone causing too much of a fuss.
The inquiry into Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall found that were allowed to commit sexual abuse at the BBC because they were seen as too powerful to stop and could do as they chose.
And the Rotherham scandal, in which at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, were sexually exploited by a gang between 1997 and 2013 shows that we still have a long way to go in protecting children.
Despite serious and repeated concerns about girls in the town effectively being forced into prostitution, it took many years before anything was actually done.
Several years ago I heard a former social worker speak on television about the problems of dealing with teenage sexual exploitation.
She claimed that it was difficult for the authorities to do much about it because many of the girls ‘saw these men as their boyfriends’.
But if you are a vulnerable young girl with a difficult family life, or even just a 15-year-old starstruck by a famous footballer, what experience do you have?
How can you tell if this man, who is older and should know better, is not your boyfriend, does not love or even care for you, and is in fact an abuser?
No adult should need to be told that sexual activity with a child is a crime. Yet it seems to bear repeating.
Especially to the few Sunderland fans who sang of Johnson "he's done nothing wrong", and "he sh*gs who he wants".
Clearly none of these fans have daughters, wives, girlfriends or mothers. Or maybe they did not see a problem in defending an abuser, so long as he continued to play for their club.
Johnson will have ample time to think about how he managed to devastate the life of a young girl when he begins his stint behind bars.
But we also need to look closely at how we treat teenage abuse victims. It is our attitudes that need cross-examined, not the girls themselves.
