Rape fully decriminalized
First we need to bear in mind that the vast majority of rapes in the UK don’t get reported to the police, and that only 1% of those – yes ONE percent – get prosecuted. Now we can learn about what happens when one rapist is prosecuted and convicted.
A man who raped a 13-year-old schoolgirl in a park when he was 17 has avoided a prison sentence.
Sean Hogg, 21, attacked the girl in Dalkeith Country Park, Midlothian, on various occasions between March and June 2018. Judge Lord Lake said that if the offence had been committed by an adult over 25, Hogg would have received a jail sentence of four or five years. Instead he was ordered to do 270 hours of unpaid work.
That’s it. Seven weeks worth of volunteer labor. Rape of a child is on a level with littering.
Over 25? Wow. So fully grown men (and most 17 year olds are grown in every sense but mentally) can get away with it, as long as they stop the habit once they’re 25.
So the judge is an accessory after the fact to the crime of rape.
AFAIK, the age issue is what it is because human brains don’t fully mature until about 25. From that rather uncontroversial fact comes this bizarre notion that people under 25 don’t fully understand right from wrong. I call absolute bullshit on that–I guarantee you that kids understand the wrongness of rape and physical assault at a very real, visceral level.
Apparently, elevation to the judicial bench can propel some into a mental universe so vastly different from the one we mere non-judicials inhabit, that day becomes night, black becomes white, and shit becomes champagne.
One percent prosecuted, or one percent convicted? I thought it was the latter, but that wouldn’t really be any better.
There are some allowances made in some jurisdictions when teenagers close in age have consensual sex, and the girl is too young to legally consent. This does not appear to be one of those cases. The girl was attacked, there were multiple incidents, and the age difference was four years, not zero to two.
The crime would have warranted a sentence of four to five years if he were 25? Really? Multiple rapes of an underage girl?
Re the statistics, this UK rape crisis organization says that 1% of rapes result in a charge, let alone a conviction. Information from other sources indicates that around half of those charged get convicted, but there are confounding factors: some jurisdictions have conviction targets, which influences prosecutors to drop weaker cases that they think might not lead to a conviction.
JtD @ 5 – prosecuted, as I said. Only one percent are even prosecuted. As women keep pointing out, rape is basically decriminalized in the UK.
I was trying to find the numbers for the US, but a quick search led me to a vast array of statistics that didn’t agree from source to source. Some of the sources have the number of arrests as high as 50%, prosecutions following arrest at 80%, and conviction rate at 50% of those. That seems extremely high…and other sources report it is fewer than 1% of rapes that lead to conviction.