The three boys accused of taking it in turns to rape a girl have been found not guilty

[Lougle]

The three boys accused of taking it in turns to rape a girl have been found not guilty on all counts despite some of the incident being filmed. How could that be? That poor girl. I believe in justice, I wasn't in court. I just can't understand it though.

And how are you funding that?

I actually think a panel of judges could be worse, they all have the same training and probably similar backgrounds.
In theory with a public panel you have a range of views.

Remember the jury discussed it for 9.5 hours before returning Not Guilty.

Agree.

Come on female pop stars have been dressed like hookers for decades.
Madonna was hardly Miss Jean Brodie.
Abba could their skirts get any shorter?
Spice Girls the union Jack dress / well top really.

The defence barristers comments propagating the myth it’s only rape if you screamed and shouted no and struggled is appalling.

This is very disturbing indeed, the fact that this rape myth is still being repeated in court. It's no wonder that conviction rates are so low.

Who would seriously believe that she’d consented to 3 as well?? Perhaps she never even engaged with the abuse she got on the bus. And then to get the label of ‘slag’ from a passer by… we have been shown exactly what a girl is worth in Britain once again and exactly what males can get away with.

We do need some kind of protest. Either a full on strike like Iceland’s women did or a specific local withdrawal protest.

Unfortunately, the prosecution guidelines say that if the offender and the offended are both young, then consent is taken into consideration even though consent isn't a legal defence. I guess that has been extended into the courtroom and if the jury believed there was consent then the fact that the boys were a similar age to the girl may have been seen as 'getting up to naughties' rather than assault.

Even if this girl had intended for something to happen, I just can't imagine she intended what happened to happen. I can't imagine she consented to that.

Mind you, I'm questioning just how sheltered I am, because I genuinely didn't think that the s* it was 'suck it'. I thought it was 'shut it's as in, 'stop whining/making a fuss.'

When I was a kid that age, we played snooker in a boy's garage and sang Queen songs (badly) arguing over who sang it best... What has happened to childhood?

I think she may have said yes to one, but not gang sex.

What troubles me also is the defence barrister's implication that if she DID say yes, that means everything was consensual.

People are allowed to change their minds. A girl that age may have thought they wanted 'sex' and changed their mind during this horrific encounter. The boys don't seem bothered by that.

I think she's thought they were joking, not actually being serious. She's said Yes but not really meant it. Or thought about what she was saying.

Tbh I bet the boys weren't honestly thinking any girl would say Yes to the 3 of them either.

But I just don't think there is enough to say the boys forced her.

I don't understand why people are saying that she said yes. If she had explicitly consented - whether or not she meant it - then why wouldn't the perpetrator's barrister have made that point? Why the convoluted argument that consent is "more nuanced" and that it begins with banter and flirting.

Since when did banter and flirting equate to wanting to have sex with three people in quick succession? Why is that even part of the argument?

The banter / conversation on the tram was about shagging and there was something said about condoms.

Its might have been said as a big laugh and joke but this really isn't as clear as some posters are making out.

On Mumsnet threads, there are some where pps compare virginity loss age and I've seen posts where some say they knew people at school (often with lack or supervision at the least) who were having sex at 13.

There's threads on here too where the OP's 13yo DD is having sex. Ofc some could be made up but I don't think it's impossible for this to be happening, esp if the children don't have much parental guidance.
Definitely porn has made things much worse.
But as we've said, that's totally different from consenting to sex with all 3. Was the prosecution barrister poor quality? I wish the arguments they made were included in more press releases

Yes there should also be a specific protest about this case.

Imo there should be rules about what arguments the defence can use. They should not be able to ignore the freeze response, for one.

The footage was only 10 seconds. How much can you likely tell from that?

But the claim is that she had sex with 3 boys, not 1. How likely is that??

The ITV article claimed one of the boys had had no sex education at school.

I agree mainly - surely it should be obvious to the jury that this isn't 2 teens who knew each other having consensual sex, it was 3 boys having group sex with a girl they reportedly didn't know from Adam a few hours before? That's much less likely to be consensual.

Also re hardcore porn : girls certainly do get exposed to this too, though. Sometimes at a young age. Often inadvertently. Tanith Carey's Girls Uninteruppted was onto the porn crisis in 2014, and she noted this in her section.

I don't think that relates to this particular case though.

How could they tell, necessarily? They may just have been a nasty person...

😢 Yes, I agree.

A woman doesn't have much chance of physically fighting a rapist, often.

But they could have called the police. I agree with you re disconnection.

I'm not sure how new this is though (bystanders not intervening in rape). I bought a copy of A Streetcar Named Desire yesterday & at the climax where Stanley assaults the protagonist Blanche, she threatens to shout 'fire'. In the notes at the back, it said that women when the play was written (US 1940s) were advised to shout 'fire' if in fear of rape because people were more likely to intervene if the danger could potentially affect them too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect

Exactly. I did a thread about this a few weeks back. A lot of posters didn't seem to understand the stakes.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485129-to-think-parents-en-masse-should-have-tried-to-hold-the-line-and-not-give-under-16s-social-media

Is this new though? The age of perpetrators is getting worse, getting younger.

But rape trials weren't better in the past, I don't think.

I don't think sexual lyrics by men or, shock horror, women, are necessarily a problem, though excessively crude stuff seems to have got more common, and stuff seems more pornified.

What I do think thr real problem is is that this is too often targeted at children, and parents too often allow them to look/listen.

Yes, I think this too. Gen Z are famously not having much sex overall. And I think that's good honestly. There's so much harmful material out there, it's better to take a step back and think things through, esp in this kind of environment.

I love Like A Prayer, had no idea about that double meaning. As you say, there is innuendo but the overall message doesn't seem to be pornified or about female submission.