I spent the weekend before International Women's Day in the company of women who had started high school when I did, 50 years ago, in a nice, safe, Presbyterian school.
We had all done well, considering the naughty, dangerous and defiant activities we engaged in back then. We are not only lawyers, investors and singers of reknown but practised liars, Great Escapees, drinkers, sneakers-out- to-be-with-boys-and-sailors, and hoons who had gotten away with it.
We could laugh, now, about how the authorities had been fooled. This gave me cause for thought.
We have witnessed great heartache over the crude behaviour of some footballers, their representatives and supporters, brought to attention by an (until recently) unidentified 17-year-old girl whose motive is revenge for her own humiliation and pain over similar exploits with players.
The details don't matter, but her rights as a child and as a woman certainly do. The girl's identity is notionally protected because she's a 'child'. Yet in her own eyes she's a woman scorned, who is championing all women's rights to be treated with respect by exposing footballers' misogyny.
She seems to be estranged from her parents one minute, and staying with them the next; put up temporarily in hotels by newspapers and motels by 'friends'; regretful of past lies and attacks at one moment, pitiably defiant the next.
Any mother, any sister, must be, as I am, frightened for her wellbeing. We know where this leads.
When I started legal practice, Australian child protection laws enabled police, child protection workers and parents to approach a children's court to have a girl made a ward of state, and deprived of her freedom, if she appeared to be 'in moral danger'.
These laws were meant to protect society from the damage young girls were thought to do when they are sexually active. They were presented as protection of the innocent child from the ill-effects of being sexually exploited, but we have always blamed the victims of such exploitation. And the 'moral danger' provisions were always used to protect girls, not boys.
And they never did much good, because there was nowhere for them to go. These girls would end up in institutional care, 'for their own good', together with offenders, victims of neglect or abandonment, or the mentally ill