The Spectator on the slap on the wrist for rapists:
A gang of teenage traveller boys who filmed themselves raping lone schoolgirls on two occasions have been spared jail. It seems from Judge Nicholas Rowland’s remarks that ‘none of you need to go to prison today’ that he didn’t find this a difficult decision to make.
The details of the case as reported make the judge’s choice incomprehensible. Two of the rapists, both 14 at the time, targeted a 15-year-old girl on Snapchat and lured her to an underpass where they filmed themselves laughing as they raped her. On one video one of the boys is heard saying ‘don’t film it mush’. Two months later the same two boys, joined by a 13-year old, gang-raped a 14-year-old schoolgirl, this time at knifepoint. They filmed that attack on their phones, goading one another to degrade their victim. The first victim attended the sentencing hearing. She read a poem which included the line ‘All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes’.
Yes yes yes but how are the boys doing? Are they ok? Are they feeling stressed at all?
In the second victim’s statement, read in court, she said ‘I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body…the person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be’. The harm to the second girl was exacerbated by the rapists’ decision to share videos of her assault on social media, under the pretence it was consensual.
Yes, that would exacerbate it.
One triumph the internet can claim is making hatred of female people more virulent and destructive than it’s ever been.
Judge Rowland praised these rapists, remarking that ‘you have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial’. He also remarked that, ‘I think of you as very young and none of you have been in any big trouble before’, as though this somehow makes their horrific crimes less serious. According to Rowland, one boy’s ADHD diagnosis and anxiety made him more susceptible to ‘peer pressure’, while the second boy was in the bottom 1 per cent in IQ for his age, and had also been diagnosed with ADHD and the third apparently had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and ‘a limited understanding of consent’. Having considered all this, and remarking that ‘I have to remember that you are not small adults. I have to think how likely you are to do serious things again and I need to make sure you do not do serious things again in the future’, Rowland decided that youth rehabilitation orders would be sufficient.
They haven’t done it before so it’s ok that they’ve now done it twice?
Does not compute.
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