"I hope I'm not the only one who is uneasy about the growing witchhunt over Graham Rix's arrival at Hearts. Talk about unstinting castigation before the guy has even had a chance? The hysteria around Rix over the past 48 hours has been absurd. I was going to say I have been amazed – though I shouldn't have been – at the Scottish football community's ability to be so judgemental and Pharisaic.
You'd think Rix was a paedophile from the way he has been treated. Let's get this straight. What Rix did in the under-age sex case in 1999 was wrong. He committed his crime and he paid for it. Indeed, not only did Rix pay for his offence in the penal sense, but his name became forever tarred, as we have already witnessed over these past two days. As usual, no-one is interested in the finer details of Rix's crime. In actual fact, that case in 1999 was a complex one, with the 15-year-old girl in question, who was already in a relationship with Rix, coming as perilously close as you can get to being a consenting adult.
Nonetheless, Rix's behaviour was to be deplored. I still maintain, though, that the new Hearts coach deserves sympathy. He is neither a paedophile nor a pervert, yet the lynch-mobs are already marching on various phone-ins and websites."
On the other hand, Joan McAlpine takes a rather more censorious position:
"Graham Rix says the full story of his crime has yet to be told. Only he knows the truth, he told the press this week. So, by implication, we should not judge him too harshly over the behaviour which sent him to jail for unlawful sex with an underage girl. We surely must question the extend of his penitence. A generation of porn-reared males may rally to him. They may assume he was seduced by some teenage temptress, a fantasy Lolita they dream may one day cross their own path. As one fan said on a Hearts chat room yesterday: "Who among us has never looked lustfully at a 15-year-old girl?" But Rix did not just look. His position, age and experience gave him a responsibility to exercise self-control, something he failed to do. There is a case for nderstanding when an 18-year-old boy or even a man in his early twenties finds himself in a relationship with a younger girl and one thing leads to another. Similarly, we all might feel a modicum of sympathy for a chap who is duped by a sophisticated young lady who pretends to be older than her years. None of this applies in Rix's case. Here we had a 41-year-old man abusing a child 26 years younger than himself. We should remember that, as well as unlawful sex, he was convicted of a separate offence of indecently assaulting the same girl. This suggests he forced her to do something against her will."
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