Interesting one for the legals here

[ex-khobar Andy]

body and soles to God

Quite a feet, that. Is that just a slipper of the tongue, Ray?

[Joe Guy]

I'm confident it was intentional. Twists and turns are always afoot in Ray's mind...

[RayThom]

The toes knows.

[Jarlaxle]

When I was 16, I started dating a girl who was two years younger. We dated of and on for the next two years (we didn't start having sex till we had dated of nearly a year)

It would have been ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous for me (or anyone else in a similar situation) to have been charged with a crime, and labeled a "pedophile" or "sex offender" when we were having sex when I was 18 and she was 16...

(Of course this was back in the late 70s, when it would never have occurred to anyone to do such a ridiculous thing)

I don't know enough about the particular case in the OP to make a judgement about it (and I admit 12 is pretty young...though bear in mind that the age of consent in Scotland is 16, not 18 as it is in the US) but as a general principle I agree with BSG on this one...

There really should be some discretion and commonsense applied in "statutory rape" cases...

Spot on. I went to high school with a girl who used her sister's ID to get into bars...5 years apart, they could have passed for twins aside from hairstyles. She was pulled over by a cop...16 years old, ID showed 21, and he never suspected a thing!

[Jarlaxle]

How far should this guy have gone in checking that the horny bird he pulled was legal?

Many of these kids carry fake ID to purchase alcohol.

Or real ID...an older sibling's.