A message to Donald: Teen clothing is not an invitation for sex, OK?

Published on Thursday 13 March 2008 08:10

FOR my primary seven leavers' party, I begged my mum to allow me to wear a short dress. All the other girls had one, and I desperately wanted a short, tight one I had my eye on in the Kylie shop at Cameron Toll, that clung perfectly to my child-like, curveless body.

The answer was a firm no. I cried, stamped my feet and sulked. After days of my Kevin the Teenager-worthy tantrums, mum finally relented and we compromised with a knee-length, tent-like dress . . . which I promptly hiked up to my thighs courtesy of a hidden belt as soon as I'd left the house.

Three years later I finally got my wish – a tiny white dress from Morgan that barely covered my rear. In fact, it wasn't a dress but a top, and I kept my brow-beaten mum happy by agreeing to wear shorts underneath.

As I left for the party, my dad was furious. To him I was vulnerable, and despite looking far beyond my 15 years, I did not have the maturity to match.

With hindsight, I agree. That night the dress attracted unwanted male – or should I say grown men's – attention, when all I wanted was to wow the girls.

So Donald Findlay's recent comments infuriate me. A top Scottish lawyer, he claimed that in cases of sexual assault, courts should no longer assume that a girl under 16 is "vulnerable" and many such girls know more about sex at 13 than he did at 23. He also said defence lawyers should, in certain trials, be able to refer to how an alleged victim was dressed.

Let's clear a few things up. Firstly, yes, girls may well know all about sex by the age of 13, but that's down to the Scottish education board – not experience. While there are some young teens out there who have had sex, it's unfair to generalise. The majority have not.

Now for the clothes. Short skirts, skimpy tops, midriff flashing and push-up bras all form part of a teenage girl's rite of passage, but it doesn't mean they're dolled up as jailbait, or are responsible for the reaction their dress provokes. Give me a break. It's an insult to the huge majority of decent men out there to dismiss them as that simple-minded.

When I was a young teenager, I didn't dress for boys, I dressed for me. My dream was to dress like Kylie Minogue, not jump in the sack with Paul from physics.

When I look at my teenage cousins now, they are the same, gushing over pretty outfits to impress their friends – not to impress the boys.

Clothes, whatever their shape or form, do not an adult make. Any arguments to the contrary are narrow-minded and dangerous. Scotland has one of the worst records in the world for rape prosecutions, without trying to use fashion as mitigation. So if I ever met Donald Findlay, I'd tell him shut the hell up. My friend was seriously sexually assaulted when she was just a teenager and her mini kilt and knee-high boots, which were all the rage then, were not to blame. The man who did it was.

Clothing is never an invitation – nor should it be described as such in a court of law.