Content warning - Teenage boys escape prison for rape

4 year custodial sentence for offenders X and Y. Z's sentence to remain the same.

https://news.sky.com/story/fordingbridge-case-latest-teen-rapists-spared-jail-to-find-out-whether-sentences-will-be-changed-13559428

Announcement at 2pm according to bbc news.

Thank you!

Just updating with this Telegraph article about the appeal

https://archive.ph/H78zU

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/07/01/judge-who-spared-boy-rapists-jail-didnt-take-case-seriously/

I found this article that gives insight into some advice the judge was given on sentencing

Judge told Fordingbridge boy rapists ‘akin’ to previous case where teenager jailed for eight years | ITV News Meridian https://share.google/VEwHdyP9dVMPHD08G

Unless I've completely misread it I'm even more at a loss as to why the judge handed down the sentences that he did.

Also there's this article in the Times

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-missed-opportunities-stop-fordingbridge-teen-rapist-jqp9mnrfw

Which I assume is about one of the rapists. I've not been able to archive it. The article headline actually read, Fordingbridge rapist had ‘history’ of sex offences

My point is that there was a push to stop sending people under 18 into custody. Some young offender institutions were re- categorised , so they no longer held young people.
The do - gooders think all these are innocent children.
People under 18 in custody are generally in there for very good reason. No minor offences. The idea of keeping people in custody is to protect the public.

Of course these boys should have gone into custody and be on the sex offender register for life .

That's sickening. The whole thing needs a total overhaul.

Are you saying that this crime is not up there with those serious crimes? Or that it is? It's not clear to me.

These cases will count toward the woeful number of cases where a rapist is successfully prosecuted. I had to pay more when I forgot to display my parking permit.

It's an awful lot worse than we have realised, apparently, if they go to youth courts, they get let off regularly. Here's an archive link to a Guardian article, reporting on my area. Apparently, it's a £26 fee for teenaged boys to rape girls:

https://archive.is/rbEIj

Yes but most people in custody under 18 are in for very serious crimes. I work with people who’ve worked with young offenders and some of the people in there had committed crimes to sickening to post on here.

How the hell are they going to monitor and supervise them? They are travellers! They’ll be in the wind by now! No chance of seeing them again!

Agree, they have some cultural stuff in common. But there is still a huge difference between gypsies and the newer groups of "travellers". I live in a rural area which for many generations has gypsy families moving around the countryside, and they are part of traditional rural life. They are nice people on the whole, and approachable.

By contrast, "traveller" communities that sometimes descend in a fleet of huge expensive motor homes, take over public green space, destroying gates and hedges, and intimidate anyone going near them, even on public footpaths, are very anti-social and hostile. Unfortunately, they teach their young people to have the same them-and-us negative attitudes. Nobody seems willing to address this.

Romani, Gypsies and Irish travellers have some cultural mores in common though.
This is is from Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy,_Roma_and_Traveller

“Gypsy, Roma and Traveller.

“All British GRT groups have a strong preference for early marriage.”

Unless we know for certain that these boys are gypsies, it should not be assumed that they are from media reports that they are "travellers". Gypsies are an entirely different group from the type of travellers who are super hostile to non-travellers, and who have very strict "no sex before marriage" rules for their girls. I wanted to point this out, as have a lot of time for the traditional gypsies and their way of life, but have seen some real horrors from intimidating "travellers".

I think thousands of others also contacted the Attorney General.

Racism is a highly relevant aspect of abusing women and girls who are not themselves part of a segregated racial group. Muslims and gypsies are two such groups. It does not seem that police and prosecutors and courts grasp the simple facts (usefully spelled out by Sir Trevor Phillips): Assume for example A is Catholic and B is Jewish. It is unlawful for one to throw stones at the other, and the offence is aggravated if the motive is partially or wholly because of religious antagonism. The only way this stone-throwing would not attract an additional punishment, at sentencing, is if the assailant was unaware the victim was from the different group.

The 'Northern grooming gangs' clearly selected victims according to race/religion. So did the gypsy boys: As other Mumsetters have observed, young gypsy girls are fiercely protected to be 'pure' before marriage. The boys, and their families, would have met with harsh 'justice' from inside the gypsy community, if they r . ped 'one of their own'. They planned ahead for their attacks, and selected the girls to ensure they were not fellow gysies.

Mumsnetters should be proud of the part they have played in getting this case to the court of appeal!

The words sound hopeful, but as the saying goes - words are cheap. It is an absolutely disgraceful situation, the judge should be removed.

In 2018 in Dublin, two 13 year old boys lured one of their schoolmates, a 14 year old girl, to a secluded place, then sexually assaulted and murdered her.

They were the same age as the rapists in this case. Some of you may have sons of that age. Children, hardly teenagers, but even at that young age, capable of the rape and murder of a girl they knew well from school.

It was revealed that they had been accessing and watching the most depraved, violent porn on their mobile phones, and may have been acting out something that they saw online in committing this awful crime.

They were from a 'good' family, a 'nice' neighbourhood, they went to a 'good' school, they were socially privileged. Their parents gave them everything they wanted - including unsupervised access to mobile phones when they were only 13.

Their parents were probably totally unaware that their nice young 13 year olds were watching violent rape and murder porn, but they never asked, never checked.
I don't think they were ever challenged about giving their young children unsupervised use of mobile phones, with horrific consequences, at an age where they were clearly too young and too impressionable to be given unfettered access to the internet, 24/7.

I wonder was unsupervised use of mobile phones, and accessing violent porn, and feature of this rape case too?
Where are 13 year old boys - children - from all sorts of social backgrounds, learning these 'scripts' of hunting down, raping and/or killing girls, if not from material they are accessing online, unbeknownst to their parents who think their lovely little 13 year old boy would never watch anything ugly like that online, and would never ever harm another child... that is, if they think about it al all, or just hand over mobile phones to 7 and 8 year olds, and leave them to it.

I hope the appeal is successful and the rapists are punished by being detained; apart from justice being served properly, it also means that the boys, the children, who perpetrated these awful crimes will be taken out of the environment that led them to this state, and helped to change, so that when [not if] they are released, they will not be a danger to women and girls.

Court will review sentences for boys spared jail after raping teenage girls - BBC News

So the rapists got no credit for an early guilty plea. I wasn't sure, it wasn't clear in the articles i read and the punishment was so lenient I thought perhaps they had.

Now I'm wondering what on earth the sentence would have been if they had pled guilty. A new mobile each?

This is horrific, and should be the cause of another investigation into this terrible case, as well as the appeal against the sentences. This is no country to be female and wanting justice it seems. Those poor girls, my heart breaks for them. I hope they can somehow recover eventually and go on to be happy, but the "system" has let them down massively. Sending love to them.💗💗

An aspect of the case nobody has mentioned is that the girls were apparently forced to spend five weeks defending themselves in a process of 'proxy repeat rape by court ordeal'. (Which was supposed to have been banned)

I didn't hear the full interview on R4 but apparently, from the fragment I heard, the courtroom abuse included the rapists' lawyers and the judge being complicit in permitting this:

Iirc, the boys challenged them that they must have made up the stories of rape, to stop their parents being angry they were late home.

And that if anything did happen, it was enjoyed by the girls who were smiling and winking all the time. The boys, lawyers and judge knew there was film, yet somehow allowed the boys to enjoy challenging the girls as liars, for five weeks, then finally to pretend to cry to show how sorry they are.

PS I agree that Jess Phillips (what a disappointment she is) has done wrong, yet again, by describing girls as "young women" and the rapists as "boys".