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.
I can only imagine what the two girls must have felt when they learned that their rapists would walk free
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’.
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.
Almost all civilised societies that have ever existed would execute these rapists without a second thought. They have committed crimes of surpassing evil, which they clearly took great pleasure in. Two of them raped on more than one occasion, escalated to using a knife, sought to degrade their victims and even filmed their crimes, meaning their guilt cannot be in question. Their relative youth is no excuse. If they are old enough to rape girls at knifepoint, they are old enough to be sentenced as men. A just Britain, which actually cared about the safety of women and girls, would send these boys to the gallows.
Of course, we do not live in such a country. Instead, 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.
I can only imagine what the two girls must have felt when they learned that their rapists would walk free. I can’t imagine that the ten-year restraining order each rapist is subjected to will be any comfort. I spoke to Chris Philp, Tory shadow home secretary, who said this sentencing ‘undermines public safety. If traveller youths think they can gang rape schoolgirls and avoid jail because they are travellers it simply encourages such crimes.’ Indeed, how can any schoolgirl in England feel safe knowing that if she is raped at knifepoint her attackers will essentially face no punishment?
Putting aside the questions of whether having ADHD or being stupid make or excuse a rapist (because of course they don’t), this case reveals a deeper rot in how we approach justice and sentencing. Characteristics which make someone more dangerous and more likely to offend are officially defined in the sentencing guidelines as mitigating when they are aggravating. Those criminals who are low IQ, don’t understand the concept of consent and are easily led are much more likely to continue committing crimes. As noted criminal barrister Adam King said to me, ‘given their disproportionately high rates of reoffending, young, impulsive criminals can be seen as precisely the people law-abiding citizens need protecting from.’
There’s something even worse about this case. It is well-understood in criminological risk assessments that early involvement in rape reflects a deep-seated antisocial personality type. Such a personality type is known to be highly predictive of more serious lifetime criminality and a higher likelihood of committing more sexual crimes. In plain terms, boys like these who, aged 13 or 14, rape schoolgirls are very likely to commit more rapes. Their escalation to using a knife during their second crime may have been an early indicator of this.
So we need to invert our sentencing system. Those whose criminality is more likely because of their personality, intelligence or mental health should not be treated more leniently. They pose a much greater risk to the rest of us, and should be sentenced accordingly. Instead of sentencing in the interests of criminals, we must begin sentencing in the interests of victims.
Comments