Anne Lakey had sex with boys aged 13-15 when she was a teacher in her late 20s

Sometimes it takes only one thing to make you question everything you thought you knew about child sexual abuse; which was, in my case, that it was a man thing.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has just suggested, after all, that three per cent of the male population are potential child abusers. That means the stain of the so-called ‘dark field’ – the experts’ sinister term to describe those with some sexual interest in children – covers around 750,000 men.

We take it as read that on British Airways flights, for example, unaccompanied minors are not placed in seats next to an adult male.

It has taken the trial and last week’s sentencing of former headmistress Anne Lakey – who had sex with boys aged 13-15 when a teacher in her late 20s – to make me see how blinkered my attitude is.

For some reason we are conditioned to think that teenage boys are hotbeds of the horny- hormone and to snigger, ‘heh heh, lucky them’ if they get any.

The language used to report the Lakey case – that the older woman ‘seduced’ the teenagers, taking their ‘virginity’ – reinforces the presumption of a consensual, romantic transaction when it comes to experienced older woman and randy teenage boys, and that what happened never did anyone any harm.

But if you reverse the sexes so that it was an older man making a teenage girl sit on his lap and quack like Orville the duck (as Lakey did with one victim), or make her call him Daddy (Lakey made another call her Mummy), before having intercourse in the marital bed, while she was still in school uniform… see where I’m going? No reporter would dare use any other word than ‘rape’.

But we don’t. We don’t even see such activity as abuse most of the time (Germaine Greer published a picture book in 2003 called The Beautiful Boy in homage to the erotic charge of the male youth) let alone punish it in law.

This is because we are also conditioned to see the mature woman as the nurturer. We have something called ‘mother expectation’: a child left alone with a woman will be safe, but one left alone with a man might be at risk.

(Even though if you interpret the NCA ‘research’ another way, 97 per cent of men have not the faintest desire to harm children in any way.) But the notion that a woman alone and of her own accord can abuse a child messes with the myth of male power and the patriarchy, and therefore some feminists – for whom everything is the fault of nasty horrid men – don’t like it.

Even known female sex offenders – Rose West or Myra Hindley – are assumed to have been to some extent acting out the desires of a dominant male, like Fred West (who some say was abused by his own mother Daisy from the age of 12) or Ian Brady. Michelle Elliott, founder of Kidscape, says that a rare conference on female sexual offenders she attended was disrupted by angry feminazis, who shouted down participants who dared discuss the topic on stage.

But after Lakey, we simply can’t escape the knowledge that a female child abuser is drawn to schools, to teaching, to childcare, just as male child abusers are, and just as an alcoholic can’t stay away from pubs and clubs. Like Anne Lakey, they can often operate undercover, undetected, confident that either neo-Victorian feminists don’t believe women can be child-sex predators, or that people secretly agree with Greer, who once said a boy’s erection implies consent. (I’m a fan of Greer, but this statement is tantamount to saying that a girl who involuntarily orgasms during rape enjoys it.)

The judge’s sentencing of Lakey to eight years’ jail is ‘exemplary’ for good reason.

Whether the wimmin of Britain like it or not, what’s sauce for the gander must also be sauce for the goose.

A hint of 'mum tum' might make you smile too, Amal

After I had my daughter I was still wearing tents from what was then Evans Outsize nine months later.

People would ask when the baby was due. Zara Tindall doesn’t appear to care about her mum tum, either – certainly not enough to invest in a pair of Spanx, anyway.

It’s far more reassuring to see a beautiful woman waxing than waning away, like Amal Clooney, who turned up at Westminster with withers skinnier than an Ascot thoroughbred.

And if it turns out Zara does have a bun in the oven after all, jollier still.

Zara Tindall doesn't appear to care about her mum-tum while Amal Clooney was seen arriving at Westminster withers skinnier than an Ascot thoroughbred

Killed by too much kindness

Carl Thompson, Britain’s fattest man, is dead

Carl Thompson, Britain’s fattest man, is dead. He ate 10,000 calories a day, dining on Chinese food, curries, and pizzas that he ordered online.

Immobile, he lived off disability allowance and had NHS carers who did his lunches.

His carers sound like lovely people and were clearly very fond of him. But as I listened to one reminisce on the radio about his favourite lunch of sausage, beans and chips, I couldn’t help thinking that the State did not help Carl. In fact it was his – in therapy-speak – enabler.

He knew, and said, he had to lose 45 stone or he would die. He knew and said what he needed was a dietitian and shrink. Instead he was provided with a series of suppliers.

I’m not saying his death was state-sponsored euthanasia, but it comes pretty close.

Gym weights aren't the real enemy

The sheriffs of California have taken on face value the ironic hip-hop lyric that says: ‘Guns don’t kill people, rappers do.’

They charged Diddy (aka rapper Sean Combs) with three counts of ‘assault with a deadly weapon’ after he grabbed a ‘kettlebell’ gym weight in anger. I do wish US law enforcement would come down as hard on gun-owners as they do on rappers.

It’s not long since Dylann Roof, 21, mowed down nine black worshippers in Charleston using a legal firearm.

The deadly weapons infesting America are not kettlebells, or even medicine balls. They are guns. In the US, people are killed with firearms at 297 times the rate of Japan and 49 times the rate of France.

There are 88 guns per 100 people in the US, the highest in the world. If Obama leaves office having done one decent thing, he will repeal the Second Amendment enshrining the right to bear arms. The Presidency’s failure to do anything about the millions of deadly weapons in the Land of the Gun is a national tragedy.

I’m taking the kids to Greece this summer, where it’s easier and actually cheaper to feed everyone in local tavernas than it is to eat at home.

But now VAT on eating out there may be hoicked to 23 per cent. So, yet again, the Greeks are getting a free lunch and we – the two million of us from the UK who go there each year – are paying.

Wail! I know we’re worried about Grexit and all that, but what about the cost of my big fat Greek holiday, and all my ‘Mum’s nights off’?