Jane 10 - I feel much the same way about your tedious repetition of the same word, as your only contribution, Seriously - if the thread bores you that much, stay off it.
I just don't know what to think here.
If we assume that the child could pass for 19 with enough make up and appropriate clothing, are we saying that males should not enter into any kind of a relationship with females without having sight of birth certificates or passports to prove the female is old enough to embark on the relationship?
Does anyone remember Mandy Smith, the 13 year old who "dated" Rolling Stone Bill Wyman. I don't think anyone would have questioned her age if we had been told she was 18 or 19 years old. (Incidentally, in this area a couple of years ago, the local police Facebook page regularly posted a photograph of a 14 year old girl who regularly went missing, with an appeal for anyone who knew where she was to contact them. Every single time this girl's photograph was published the comments were always "no way is she 14, she looks in her 20s at least". So yes, young teenagers can be mistaken for much older teenagers.)
However, the fact that this child had signed herself up to a dating app with a profile appropriate to the app gives me a tiny amount of sympathy for the male.
That the child has a social worker involved, has had previous episodes of going missing, and has a parent who feels she has to sleep downstairs to stop her daughter leaving the house at night (albeit unsuccessfully) leads me to think that this child is already in the throes of being groomed and at risk of CSE (by others, not by the man in this particular incident).
However, the actions of the male when he had the girl in his flat, of taking images of her and then distributing them with the very sleazy way he described her, loses any sympathy I had. I can maybe forgive him for accepting her saying she was 19 (why 19, and not 16, which is the "legal age", I wonder, and which she would be more likely to pass for), but I cannot possibly forgive his unacceptable behaviour .