Rebecca Joynes is currently serving a six and a half year prison sentence
A teacher who was convicted for having sex with two boys, becoming pregnant by one, has been banned from the profession.
Maths teacher Rebecca Joynes, 31, was jailed for six and a half years in July last year after being found guilty of six counts of sexual activity with a child, after sleeping with one pupil before falling pregnant by a second while on police bail.
The Teaching Regulation Agency (TRA) convened earlier this month via a virtual hearing, which Joynes did not attend, to consider her professional conduct. A panel recommended she be banned from teaching.
The article doesn’t mention ages, but another article says she groomed them from age 15.
However, I have to remind you that language is under constant development, and “paedophile” has long lost its original meaning. It now covers a much wider age range, although counting adolescents is a stretch.
In that case we need a new word for people who have the urge to have romantic and/or sexual relations with prepubescent children. Hopefully one with less of a stigma, so these people have an easier time to come out and seek mental treatment to prevent them from acting on their urges.
You know what, that’s probably the best suggestion I’ve heard on this topic in a while. You’re right, “pedophile” as a word is just completely ruined. You can probably go about and raise awareness as much as you want and demand a correct use of the word, but at the end of the day, the societal connotation is there and you won’t get it off the word anymore. Maybe a new word would really be the easiest way to go.
It is like, people, in their stunted vocabularies, have reached for pederast, but not knowing it, just used paedophile instead.
Even though I know the word pederast, from hearing paedophile so much in context of sexual abuse of children, when I hear paedophile, I think of it more like pederast.