The details of the case

Written by

Ophelia Benson

in

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.

Comments

3 responses to “The details of the case”

  1. Mark Avatar
    Mark

    Speaking from a neurological perspective, the fact that they have a low IQ makes them more, not less, likely to re-offend. Rehabilitation requires that the subject possess a degree of intelligence to understand that what they did was wrong, to be able to empathise and put themselves in another’s shoes, so to speak. Low IQ people have many problems with doing this – and they are notoriously known to have very poor impulse control.

    And it’s often not fixable. While IQ is often derided, it is a relatively useful measure of a specific type of intelligence, and neuroscientists and clinical neuropsychologists use it often. If they have a low IQ by the time they are 14 years of age, the odds are that it will remain low forever – especially if they remain in the same environment. A lot of it is set in stone by the time the child is 6 or 7 – poor early childhood nutrition, poor nutrition in-utero, low levels of mental stimuli or parent interaction, alcohol use by the mother while in-utero – all of that impacts IQ and a lot of that is irreversible.

    The “punishment” given to the offenders is appalling, especially as it completely ignores any sense of justice for the victim. The judge didn’t even try to balance the right of the juvenile offenders with the need (and it is a need) for the victim to feel a sense of closure, a sense of justice. It was entirely “oh those poor widdle boys” and absolutely NOTHING (as far as I can see in the reports I’ve read) about the suffering, humiliation, pain and trauma faced by the girls attacked.

    And does this judge really feel that these boys are going to learn any lesson by being let off the hook?

    It’s a horrific case and a horrific act of judicial incompetence and a lack of care on the part of the judge for the victim. I’m not saying we should treat 14 year olds as adults, but neither should we treat them as if they are 5. And I’m also sadly quite certain that these boys will offend again. It’s just a matter of time.

  2. Omar Avatar
    Omar

    And I’m also sadly quite certain that these boys will offend again. It’s just a matter of time.

    One former jailbird I once met, who had served time for burglary, said that in his opinion, locking people up was a waste of time and resources, due to the recidivism rates. He cited the case of a forger he met inside, who was released in the morning, pinched someone’s cheque-book, ‘flew a kite’ in some handy pub, was re-arrested and was back in the clink he had been released from in time for supper that same day.

    The clink had become his home; apparently the best he had ever known.

  3. John the Drunkard Avatar
    John the Drunkard

    Ah, but ‘travelers’ are among the Great Oppressed and have license to avenge themselves on the general populace. And it was just girls after all.

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