Dear Editor,

Men should indeed know better, as Dr Garrett posited in his letter [ please note: link provided by LOSP web site ], SN 29/6/2001. So should young girls and women.

Fortunately, since the inception of the bus operative/girl rider plague which has overtaken us, no infants, toddlers or small children have been seduced or ravaged. The real monsters who favour such fare attack them in their homes, schools and other places of presumed safety and gentility.

Which means that the young ladies who end up in the toils of the bussing personnel are persons of at least early teenage years. Capable of being allowed to negotiate geographical distances on their own, without accompaniment.

In other words, persons who are capable of being aware of happenings in the wider society, particularly of information which is freely, loudly and continuously disseminated. Persons who should be capable of exercising some level of judgement. Or at the very least, obedience.

It was never intended, in the previous item of correspondence relating to this subject, to make an argument in favour of the bus operative's acquiesence to the blandishments of youthful sirens.

What was intended was a statement of the fact that young women are not necessarily just passive inductees into these deadly escapades. And that they, for the greater part, are not wholly unaware of the dangers which inhere in the type of relationships that undue familiarity can bring.

In brief, except in those instances, which are very few to be sure, where young women are kidnapped, these encounters are not the result of abused innocence on the part of any of the players.

Like their offspring, most of the parents whose children use minibuses as their principal means of transportation, know of the culture which holds sway. Yet, most of them are content to confine their activism in resistance to this phenomenon to the issuance of a few oblique warnings, in some cases followed by picturesque threats. They make no effort to monitor their children's activities, their relationships or even the regularity or otherwise of their attendance at school.

Some have even been known to actively encourage their daughters to enter relationships with bus operators, viewing it as the possible source of daily cash and free travel along the route.

The ideal is indeed predicated upon the expectation that all should resist (avoid, overcome?) temptation and that none should sin.

Sadly, after considering events as they occurred in the garden, we now know that it is more likely than not, that temptation is one lure anyone can be a sucker to. Hence the law.