About the blame game being played by people here. If someone blames Kyle it does not necessarily mean they are therefore not blaming the mother.

Probably ALL the adults involved in the sorry saga are to blame, and I ask where's the father in all of this, or is he deceased? I get the impression from reading many of the comments here that some people here are just using this incident to push their own personal social barrows here. Any child who says that he/she was raped deserves to be treated with respect and taken seriously, regardless of the circumstances under which the alleged rape was revealed.

We need to respect children. A 14 yo girl is not an adult. She says she was raped as a 12 yo. When I was 12 I was in Year 6 for God's sake, still at primary school. From many comments here I gain the distinct impression that this child is viewed upon with contempt by some people here. Adults can be just horrible sometimes, and it makes me very sad and despondent about our humanity. Some of the insensitive comments written are horrid. I wonder if these people would still blame her, or cast doubts upon her character, if the rape claim is eventually shown to be true with the rapist caught, charged and convicted? I bet they would probably still try to rationalise some way to blame or doubt the child. There's people in our society who see rape upon females as the female's fault, even when the victim is a child.

Dear MaryE,

Children should be protected by adults not used
for whatever reason.

This entire affair was a mis-judgement on so
many levels by the adults involved - and
should never have aired.

We can only hope that this will be a deterrant
to others in future programming - there are some
lines that simply shouldn't be crossed. And, as
another poster pointed out - I wonder if they
didn't break some sort of law?

Excellent posts MaryE and Foxy.

Taking aim with intent to denigrate a 14 YO child is malicious. Any blame needs to be placed, as MaryE said, at the feet of ALL adults (parents, producers & presenters) involved in this piece of trash journalism.

Foxy, if a law of some type was broken, I would think it should have been cited by now, but I simply don't know.

Does the sacking of Sandilands mean that we (the public) hold more contempt for the ill-treatment of children than we do of corruption such as "cash for comment" from Alan Jones and John Laws? Maybe our values are better prioritised than I previously believed.

Regrettably, many of the television shows and magazine articles (no-one has mentioned them) that regularly transgress the privacy and rights of children are aimed at a female audience.

Don't watch the programs or buy the magazines, especially the trashy magazines for girls, which are probably the worst of all, grooming young girls for early sexual experimentation and not just with boys. What a certain way to lose a childhood. How many graphic photos of Britney et al sans undies have graced the mags bought by mothers for their daughters?

Where is the pressure to clean up the magazines for girls, or remove them from the racks of popular chain stores?

Exactly MaryE, were's dad in this sorry saga? Children, since allegedly that one episode some 2000+ years ago, have two parents: a mother and a father. If mother is a skank, as some of you who immediately *knew* where the blame should lie, what is father?

This girl's parents have failed her and the radio station took advantage of this purely for financial gain. How much lower can one get than preying on the most powerless and vulnerable? It's what peadophiles do. They justify what they do too.

I thought my opioion of Sandilands and Jackie O couldn't get any lower, but I was wrong. Not to mention the radiostation. Anybody have a list of advertisers on their programmes? Each and every product I would boycott.

And the school of angry goldfish circles in a discussion pond being drained of interest by the moment. No bold adventurers willing to take a risk and dive over the dam of their prejudices to the stream of ideas, just a starveling band following each other round in circles until the last morsel of interest seeps into the dusty ground where their withered bodies of thought lie dessicated and forgotten.