Bochead, you said
"1 What noone has ever explained to me about our legal system is why crimes against property seem to be more severely punished than crimes against the person? Why do you get a lower sentence for gang rape & trafficking than for robbing a bank? I keep reading about what seem to me to be very low sentences for rape and peadophilia & it's wrong."
I'm afraid you are misinformed and quite possibly unduly influenced by the degree to which the tabloids stir up disquiet about sentencing in such cases using a few isolated examples.
To put the matter in context, this may interest you: I.googled "armed robber jailed" and then "gang rape jailed". The first fifteen sentences for armed robbery for adults produced an average sentence of 5.8 years' imprisonment. The first fourteen sentences for gang rape produced an average sentence of 8.6 years' imprisonment.
I excluded one of the fifteen sentences imposed for gang rape as the sentence was an indefinite sentence and so could not be used to calculate a mean average.
I also did not include the term of nineteen years imposed this week in Liverpool.
Thus I hope you now realise that these offences are not seen as less serious than bank robbery, and that, happily, the opposite is the case.
2/ Some of the girls involved were in the care of the local authority. How on earth were these monsters allowed to gain access to these vunerable youngsters? Teenagers in care are another topic I keep reading about in terms of their seeming vulnerability to predators - is there anything society can do to ensure they are better protected?
I hope so. But teenagers in care will of course often be there because they are vulnerable and may also have lead a chaotic lifestyle in the past. Such girls will often have self-esteem issues which draw them to those who would seek to subjugate and control them. Add to this the fact that care homes are not prisons and the difficulties become all too evident.