Two young teenagers deserve our thanks and gratitude.

They spoke up about a personal and embarrassing incident in their lives. The result is that footballer Craig Thomson has been convicted as a sex offender. Because of their courage, other children will be wary of him and of the threat men like him pose.

They deserve our sympathy and our congratulation. What they don’t deserve is to see Thomson back on the pitch at Hearts Football Club.

Thomson volunteered to help with PE at the school one girl attended. Imagine how excited she must have been when the football star asked to be her friend on Facebook. She was only 13 years old. It said so on her site.

Thomson’s conversation was general at first, then it became sexual. After her 14th birthday he said he wanted to sleep with her. Pictures of his genitals followed.

Around the same time a 12-year-old whom he had known since she was little was also chatting to him online. He’d asked to be her friend too. That was a while before he asked her to expose her breasts online.

The court fined him £4000 and put him on the sex offenders register for five years. Hearts have told him to carry on playing: so much for it being a family club.

Why would anyone with children – or anyone with a sense of justice – support the club while Thomson is in the team?

Is it because they think sexual chat on the internet and sending children explicit pictures don’t really constitute abuse? Does the assault have to be physical before they think damage is done?

If so, they underestimate the psychological and emotional harm of Thomson’s actions. They fail to understand the trauma involved in loss of trust. What he did to the children was abusive. Seriously so.

Thomson was caught after he said he wanted to sleep with the 14-year-old. Calling him naive – as his employer has done – is like catching a masked burglar with one leg over your windowsill and colluding in the excuse he couldn’t find the doorbell.

Hearts’ owner Vladimir Romanov spoke of extenuating circumstances and of seeing the footballer’s action as part of a bigger picture.

I hadn’t read the detail of the case at that point and wondered about that wider picture. Maybe Thomson had been the victim of stolen identity? Did someone send pictures of themselves in his name? Perhaps the offences had been committed when he was much younger himself – or he’d thought a 14-year-old girl was 17?

But no. No-one stole his identity. He admitted sending the pictures himself. He clearly knew how very young the girls were and the offences happened just a year ago so he was fully adult.

Mr Romanov says he was naive. I say he was sly.

Thomson volunteered to help with PE in primary and secondary schools. That’s an admirable thing to do, unless its intention is to gain access to children for the purposes of sexual exploitation.

Mr Romanov says Thomson’s actions constituted a grave error of judgment. That sounds as if he made a spur of the moment bad decision. The 12-year-old girl had been known to him since she was a small child. What he did to her was planned. It’s called grooming.

When he asked her to expose herself online the child told her mother. Where might it have ended if she had lacked courage to do so or had been too shy to speak of such things? What if she hadn’t had an open relationship with her mother?

It has been said that concerned parents reported Thomson to the football club six months before he was charged. Hearts still sent him to represent them at a Barnardo’s event where he was pictured with children. What’s the matter with these people?

We’re not talking about Kate Moss snorting cocaine or Wayne Rooney canoodling with grannies. We are way beyond a Ryan Giggs extra-marital fling. Everyone involved there was an adult.

Thomson’s targets were children. His activity was criminal.

Has Mr Romanov thought through the effect on the family support his club enjoys? Why would any parent take their child to attend matches when Thomson is on the field? No wonder sponsor MacB Water is pulling away.

Some people ask why Thomson should lose his career just because he’s a professional footballer. After all, he’s a young man with a talent for the game and qualified for nothing else.

If he was barred from Hearts, wouldn’t his punishment be greater than the courts intended?

It’s true. Thomson’s working life might well be unaffected if he was an anonymous office or factory worker (though I wouldn’t be too sure). But then factory workers are not role models. Their work sprinkles no stardust. They are not attractive to the young and aspiring. They don’t gain access to schools because of their fame. If Thomson’s career carried on uninterrupted, children will get the message that men who abuse them are applauded and rewarded by society even after people know what they have done.

Paedophiles meanwhile will be celebrating the decision as a sign of increased acceptability. For that is what it is.

No wonder the charity Children 1st is kicking up a storm. Chief executive Anne Houston has urged the club to think again. She said, “Allowing convicted sex offenders to continue working where they will have direct and indirect contact with children is wrong.”

I’d like to ask Hearts, if abusing children isn’t bringing the game into disrepute, what is? Hearts say Thomson’s actions were the “result of a grave error of judgment ...”

Thomson himself is asking people to respect the judgment of the court (which didn’t think him a danger to the public) and that of Heart of Midlothian.

These sound like the understatements that rumbled round the Vatican for decades during which offending priests were shunted between parishes and thousands of helpless youngsters were abused. The priests were protected, leaving their victims with nowhere to turn. It was an abomination. It mustn’t be repeated in any other sphere.

Football in Scotland is already blighted by sectarianism. Let’s hope Hearts think again about leading it to new depths.