Should grooming be a crime - and would it go far enough to protect girls and young women?

When people first started being like, well, we should just raise the age of consent, look, what I have seen the age of consent become over many, many years of working in this field is just a cliff edge. The same 18-year-old the day before or the day after is as vulnerable, and I sort of find it absolutely maddening. I mean, Louise Casey addressed it in, because we have had sort of a staggered age of consent, really. Louise Casey addressed it in the work that she did on the grooming games in that 13 to 16. People were not automatically charged with rape because they might have believed that they were over the age of consent. Now, we have changed that law now, so it is an absolute abscess. The David Walliams case leaves me, which he denies, of course, but he's not alone. There will be lots of these cases like this. It leaves a number of open policy questions. You struggle to find an answer to, so, like, because grooming in and of itself isn't a crime. The age of consent definitely seems to have, you know, in the reporting, he, you know, like, I'll pull you back after you're 16 sort of thing, or like, you know, asking the age and they're like, are you legal? Like, legal is the barrier. I would quite like just a grooming crime. That seems like the answer to the kind of cases that we're seeing in the Walliams case. Because at the moment, the law is... Grooming can be part of another crime, rather than a crime in and of itself. Yeah, so you'll get aggravating factors for grooming behaviours on a sexual crime, but you have to have committed the sexual crime. So you can groom someone, not have sex with them, or have sex with them consensually and completely legally at the age of 16. And that doesn't seem like nobody in the country would think, well, that's terrible. So if you groom them up to 16... But only had sex with them when they were 16, which some people have accused essentially Walliams of doing, that's potentially fine. Well, you know, you're dancing on the head of the pin if you're going for, it's technically legal, but it is technically legal. Cool. I mean, if it's technically legal and you did nothing wrong, maybe don't try and hide it for so many years. If I were to put grooming on the books, which seems like the right thing to do, I still I still think that unless you have multiple multiple cases. So the Walliams case, you'd probably get across the line because it's he said, she said, she said, she said, she said. Whereas that doesn't mean that the girl who's only one girl who's been groomed, it would be much harder to show that as a pattern of behaviour to get the evidential barrier to get to court. But I'm totally open to the idea of like, you know, if you're over 20, like, you know, like, you've got no business