Quote: "I am absolutely appalled that someone of that age should be involved in an incident such as this." So said Detective Sergeant Roger Small, commenting on the alleged abduction by two 14-year-old boys of a girl of the same age, whom they were said to have dragged kicking and screaming into a West Auckland house and indecently assaulted.

I find this statement astonishing, particularly from a policeman who, since he's a detective sergeant, has been around a while.

I wasn't even mildly surprised at this newspaper's lead story on Monday reporting the abduction and the arrest of the alleged offenders.

The only thing that surprises me is that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Perhaps it does, since Mr Small admits that police often deal with young teenagers accused of indecent assault.

There are those who tell us that only a small proportion of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to police, and I suspect that the younger the victim, the less likely she is to report one. But we know that a lot of 14-year-old girls and younger are having sex, even if only from the abortion statistics for last year, which recorded 104 abortions performed on girls aged between 11 and 14.

That doesn't surprise me, either. In a society utterly drenched in sex, what do you expect?

I have argued for years that sex education in schools, particularly that which begins before children even get near the age of puberty, let alone the age of consent, is simply an invitation for them to begin experimenting.

And what makes it worse is that the teaching they receive seems to be based entirely on the physical and takes no account of the powerful psychological and spiritual factors at work in human sexuality.

It doesn't help, either, that children can be supplied with condoms, or be given an abortion, without the knowledge, let alone the consent, of parents.

Along with survival (and the ultimate in survival is to reproduce oneself), sex is the most powerful instinct known to mankind.

Yet we have come to treat it as a purely physical transaction between a man and a woman. Having intercourse these days is considered in about the same light as having a meal or watching a movie. And its descriptions (bonking, shagging, screwing) have been reduced to the mundane.

Movies, television, magazines and books are riddled with sex, either showing it in the most graphic detail or describing it blow by blow ad nauseam. (It always makes me crack up when I read of the nicotine Nazis going crook about smoking in movies or on TV. It's a funny old world when actors can indulge in uninhibited sex on screen but woe betide any who light up a fag.)