Teen boy avoids jail after rape of girl, 12

You mentioned early intervention at the very beginning, in context of this particular case, I will accept you were just talking about systemic failures in education and social care.

Secondly, I used a world man consciously, I do confess it was eristic, but the discourse when men are men as long as their actions do not need to be diminished is another part of the problem.

I am not discussing here how YOIs should look like and what we can realistically achieve. However, the whole point of institutions is that no, they are not menat to be a form of banishment for forever, but a place where rehabilitation can take place in environment safe for all - an offender and society.

The UK is not good on this whole business and I agree, but in principle yes he should be 'locked up' till we would have any basis to trust him around female humans beings.

Drink spiking is assault in its own right.

Thats fucking depressing that that's the strictest sentence someone can get for his raping someone.
Sorry drugging and raping someone.

THIS. I’m so angry that men and boys get away with in this case - very calculated - rape, again and again. Spiking a drink is pretty much abduction isn’t it?

A 12 months YRO with the intensive supervision etc was the highest community order that the Judge could order for a child 13 years old at the time of the offence. (Also, in order for this sentenced to have been considered, he must have been a 'persistent offender').

The guidelines before the Judge would have told her that she could only impose an immediate custodial sentence, if there was no alternative. If the Defence's mitigation was correct and the "poor lad" (I think some have labelled him) had stayed out of trouble since the rape, then this was a clear indication that such a custodial sentence was avoidable. The Judge handed down the correct decision - under current guidelines. An appeal that the sentence was unduly lenient will not be successful.

It tells other teenage boys you can’t put your penis into a girl without permission thus protecting teenage girls. Or is it only the teenage boys we are worried about?

That is very clearly not what i said. Please don't put words in my mouth. I said there needs to be better provision for victims and it needs to be more secure and accessible for them but it also needs to be on their terms. Offenders don't get to have that support on their own terms. Where did I say that victims aren't as important?

"arguing that a man who raped a girl at age 13 should be treated with the same understanding and cordiality as a 13 years old caught stealing food is not on."

If you're responding to me could you point out where at any point I have suggested or even implied that a child who raped another child (because we are talking about children here not adult men, the male in question is still only 16) should be treated the same as a child who stole food? Because I don't think that and I haven't said it. What I did say is that it's not the normal behaviour of a happy, healthy, well adjusted child. Something has gone very wrong when at 13 a child thinks to do something like this and that something needs to be rooted out and addressed properly and prevented in future.

From your post what would you suggest happens to male children who commit sexual crimes? Do we lock them away forevermore? At no point did I suggest this boy is suitable for early intervention- he's clearly at post offending stage and needs intervention appropriate to that including rehabilitation and community supervision. My point is that we take the learning from the reasons why someone may have been more inclined to carry out a rape so we can identify other children/ young men who are in similar situations and who WOULD benefit from early intervention before they actually commit a crime. For example young men who are engaging with misogynistic content online regularly, or who are exhibiting low level, harmful or controlling behaviours in relationships or who have grown up around high levels of abuse and misogyny or who are exhibiting concerning behaviours towards female teachers or other pupils for example.

I agree that other case you mention is utterly horrific and that outrages me as well. Absolutely I'd agree she was a victim and other similar cases have angered and disgusted me just as much. Similarly we have a huge problem where I live with police pursuing women who's reports of rape didn't end up in a conviction (because we all know that doesn't mean someone wasn't actually guilty) for making a 'false' report. It's horrific, but I do see them as two very separate issues - one being the treatment of women accused of crimes or generally engaging with the justice system, and one being the appropriate sentencing of children guilty of sexually based crimes. I think part of the difficulty is in both cases, it's such a very emotive topic and people do feel affected by and emotionally invested in the outcome (totally understandably) and some people will react to that by calling for the death penalty to be reinstated or labeling someone as you say a murderous bitch without consideration for their background and vulnerability.

So I don't think you can necessarily offer the same levels of support to people affected by crimes because it serves very different purposes
Gosh, well that makes me feel so much better! Of course all the therapy and support should be aimed at the criminals (or is that too mean to call them that. Victims have to accept the hierarchy and they are just not as important.

I am all in for early intervention but early intervention is for exactly that - early intervention. Rape is beyond the scope. He is a danger. He did not show remorse. Violence is the red line. you can't have a violent person in the community before they will shown thy are not a threat.
We can discuss why there is not sufficient provision and what we want to achieve thus how those services should look like. However, arguing that a man who raped a girl at age 13 should be treated with the same understanding and cordiality as a 13 years old caught stealing food is not on.
This person not only believes he is not guilty but also whole community tells him don't worry, forget it happened only once. He is a danger and is not suitable for early intervention strategies.

I did not say I want men to be treated the same as women are by CJS. I want women to be treated with the same leniency. That hits me.
There was no one arguing for no custodial sentence in the thread about 15 years old, with troubled home life, who gave birth in silence - their parents did not hear anything from the family bathroom!- whom father was more keen on naming the newborn than checking on his alive daughter, who pleaded not guilty of murder. Medical evidence was inconclusive, but judge was sure she is lying and guilty. No one suggested she was slightly unkind that day but learnt her lessons.
She won't reoffend, she is a victim, we do not know what really happened but some of posters did not hesitate to call her a murderous bitch. That hits me.

Male violence should never be excused.

So we are supposed to believe this rapists home life is so terrible we need to feel sorry for him - but not so terrible that he cant reform better at home than in a young offender institution. No, just no. There speaks people who will always put a male first.

It's highly likely this poor girl killed herself because of the rape. His refusal to admit to it wont have helped. He should have been given a custodial sentence.

He wasnt "pressurised" into this by adults, no adults were present. There are no circumstances that would lead me to believe he didnt deserve a custodial sentence.

I absolutely agree there should be much greater support for survivors of such crimes, but equally I think it's essential that perpetrators are 'hand held' as a means of supervision as well as support. They need to closely managed and watched. That in part means being actively engaged with a number of services who are then able to feed back on their engagement/progress/highlight emerging concerns/feed into the justice system to ensure sentencing is fair and appropriate. Having a number of services also means you've a number of professionals assessing that person and the risks around them rather than it falling to one or two people.

In my own experience I wasn't ready to access support for quite some time after my experience of SA, I didn't even really process it fully for at least a year and I would have really struggled had that been forced on me as something I HAD to engage with or if someone kept contacting me to follow up. I wouldn't have been able to use the support properly because I wasn't ready. It was important to me that it was in my time on my terms and that's unique to each individual.

Someone who has shown themselves to be a danger to society doesn't get to have that same flexibility. And if they don't engage then they should expect harsher sentencing as that signals a lack of remorse or personal awareness or being prepared to make active change to prevent the same thing happening again, and is a sign that work maybe needs to happen in a much more secure setting. Similarly if someone has actively and consistently worked hard to demonstrate remorse, to cut out certain social networks, to become a safer and more productive member of society and who has shown that they fully understand the implications of their actions and their responsibility for it and are genuinely remorseful and are living very differently, you'd also expect that to be fed back into the courtroom as well. That really becomes more about actually reducing the risks of that person reoffending than just punishing them.

So I don't think you can necessarily offer the same levels of support to people affected by crimes because it serves very different purposes, but I do absolutely agree that support should and could be so much better than what it is and particularly funding should be so much more secure and waiting times should be reduced significantly and it should be more widely available geographically so that when someone is ready, the help they need is ready to go and they can access it straight away. I do also think the support offered to minors is different to support offered to adults, again whether or not they are ready or able to use that support is a different matter.

The victims can't even be certain of a male-free Rape Support Centre. They are expected to "re-frame their trauma" if they don't want to relive their assault in front of a man.

Thirteen year olds are barely teens and in many ways function as children still

Yet had he been a girl who wanted to change gender, many clinics would have rushed him towards surgery and life-altering hormones because "the kids are never wrong".

Edit - spelling.

@Lavender14 what angers me though and happy to be proven wrong, do you think the victims of these crimes get the same level of therapeutic support as the perpetrators do?
You've mentioned he'll have had 3 years of rehabilitation and therapy, my (not personal) experience for rape victims is they'll get handed a number to contact for 'support' unlike the hand held, personal touch that it seems the rapists get?

@deragod I fully agree with you that girls and women suffer from harsher sentencing and that's totally wrong. But I don't think that making all sentencing harsher is what we need to even the scales. We need there to be fair and appropriate sentencing for women and girls so it probably needs to be more lenient (or at least in proportion to the crime committed) in line with what happens to males who commit crimes. Making 'an example' of men and boys doesn't get women a better deal, what we need is a full system overhaul and better funding and resourcing for community services both at early intervention stage, and at post offending stage. I would also say that if the case has taken 3 years, due to his age its very unlikely that he hasn't already been engaged in some level of rehabilitation work due to the need for statutory bodies being present due to his age. The vast majority of young people I work with who are involved in youth justice will be doing a lot of rehabilitation and therapeutic work before they even get to trial and that is then taken into consideration as part of sentencing but its never ever reported on publicly.

There is nothing complicated about rape..The time.it took to come to court, the mental health of that poor girl were the complications here.

Between capital punishment (wow!) and being let free because 'you know circumstances' are some other options.
Rehabilitation is a proces. institutions have a role in this process.

But I will say it again: girls and women are granted much less of understanding when it comes to sentencing and suffer in prisons twice as much only because they are female. He is free, his actions drove someone to suicide. A 16 years old girl whom baby girl died in a cell, who had to give birth handcuffed to the wall was guilty of being homeless orphan without family support.
When you listen to stories of women how prison, in which they wouldn't be for the crimes they commit if they were male, is the place when for the first time they feel like human beings, how it is the first time in their lives they are free form domestic abuse you really look at the institutions differently.

I don't think it's minimizing to say that it's not clear what the sentencing considerations were in this case, or why the judge used such an odd way of speaking, and that without that information it's difficult to comment on their suitability with much confidence.

I understand that some posters think that every 13 year old boy who rapes is really just a man who should be put to death or locked up in an adult prison for life, but the law doesn't actually support that. Judges are supposed to consider things like age, the circumstances of what happened, and the mental capacity of the criminal, when sentencing.

Thirteen year olds are barely teens and in many ways function as children still, that's why grooming them sexually is so heinous. We can't have it both ways, either they don't have adult capacities in their decision making and need extra protections that adults don't, or they do. That will apply to the ones that commit crimes too.

It's possible for someone to both be guilty, but also lacking full capacity. I do't really understand why anyone would think that is the same as saying that rape (or murder, or whatever) isn't a crime.

The situation feels desperate for women and girls. How can this be an acceptable outcome?

Rapists and child sex offenders frequently walk free from court, even when they are found guilty. There's a Twitter account that lists some of them;

https://twitter.com/Wommando/status/1762517990728212696

I wonder if he had learning disabilities... I feel like something is missing here. How can a rapist just be let off like that?

Not adult prison.

So this poor young girl self-harmed then died by suicide after she was raped, and this bloke gets off Scot-free??? Ridiculous.

I know he was only 13 when he raped her, but that is over the age of criminal responsibility. And she was so badly affected that she took her own life. That poor girl.

He deserves prison.