Judge says 13 year old girl seduced man online

[sethstarkaddersmackerel]

Daily Mail link

fgs. I thought you had to be intelligent to be a judge. Don't they at least give them basic training?

judge should be sacked.

LOL! Thank you for demonstrating my point so beautifully Dittany.

'That's your real problem here isn't it? People actually getting angry with men who do things like this.'

What an odd and completely unfounded thing to say.

Yes I do have some understanding of the law through my working life.

You said: 'Prison is a much bigger deal than community service. It would give him a clear message of how bad his crime was'

The point I was making is that he was sentenced to prison so he has been given a message and also anyone who had to sentence him in the future will understand that 'message'. I'm not saying I wouldn't like more severe punishments but in the existing legal system a 'message' has been sent by the suspended sentence being placed on top of the unpaid work and supervision.

Right, back to RL for me.

Turning men like this into social pariahs who should be punished for their actions is much more important than treating them as poor dears who just need a little rehabilitation and community service.

This guy is on a slippery slope at the moment, he is looking at child porn today, he might very well attempt worse in the future. The judge has the choice: throw him in jail, but then he will still have to come out within a few months and is likely to continue down the path he has taken. Or leave him out of jail so he can join the prevention program and there is hopefully a chance he can be stopped in his tracks. It's a horrible dilemma and if I read between the lines, the judge sounds quite frustrated as well.

In the current situation, the guy gets his punishment in the sense of having a criminal record, community service and, probably most far reaching of all, his face in the papers so he is likely to become a social pariah in his immediate area. He will also get better guidance to prevent future damage.

What is best? Who dares to say? If he starts reoffending again in a few years time, will it be any consolation to the victims that he was in prison previously? Or would they have preferred it not happening at all?

Tough choices and I don't envy the judge for having to make them.

Indeed, Ciske

That said, the judge does have some bloody strange views which rather undermine everything else

In the book I linked to earlier there is some stuff on treatment programmes for child sex offenders. I will go have a look for it...

But what evidence is there that prison works, dittany? The fact that society finds it necessary to put paedophile ex-prisoners on a register suggests - not much

I typed a huge long post trying to summarise the chapters in the book (Monsters and Men by Bob Long and DCI Bob McLachlan) about the Wolvercote Clinic, where intensive work is/was being done with sex offenders, but I accidentally caught some key or other and shut down the whole internet

Essentially the clinic is/was attempting to get the offenders to examine their behaviour and teach them techniques to control their urges to offend. The clinic's manager was very keen to point out that the purpose of the work was child protection.

My instinct is that sex offenders (of any stripe but especially paedophiles) are the most difficult, if not impossible, to rehabilitate. It's such abhorrent behaviour to most people, that to cross the line must indicate something fundamentally "wrong" in the psychological makeup of the offender.

The Wolvercote did seem to be doing really valuable work, I do wonder sometimes that it might be a good thing if people could self-refer to services like that, eg someone who is attracted to children but recognises that it would be wrong to act on that desire could go for some help and treatment.

In an ideal world I'd like to lock up sex offenders and throw away the key, but realistically rehabilitation is the thing to aim for.

The book is out of print (and a horrible read) but it's very interesting. ISBN is 0-340-86213-0 if anyone wanted to try the library for it.

LeninGrad I feel the same way. I am all for rehabilitation but ideally this would be in conjunction with LENGTHY prison sentences and offenders would be assessed for their suitability for rehab.
I am against capital punishment and I do not think that prisoners should be treated inhumanely, but there ought to be a price paid by those who harm others.

I also meant to say, if someone is a danger to others they should not be released (need to stop pressing post before I've finished typing!)

TheCrackFox Tue 05-Apr-11 11:33:48
I have come to the conclusion that some judges give out sentences that are derisory because they can imagine themselves commiting the same acts.

I completely agree with you. I think the reason these judges give such silly sentences or in this case non at all, is because they're all in the same club! Wankers the lot of em, sick bastards.

You simply cannot just sack a judge, provided his rulings are inline with sound legal practice and he has acted appropriately then there is nothing that can be done.

I love the way youi're more keen on her parents being punished, than the man who abused her being so, Mary88.

Honestly, people want to allocate the blame anywhere but on the perpetrator, don't they?

Thanks to HerBex for reminding us about this aspect of the case, which was getting drowned out by Daily Mail-type 'hanging's too good or them' rants.

This is the latest of several recent examples where a very young girl gets blamed for what adult male(s) have done to to her - an extreme case of the familair issue of victim-blaming.

Herbex - not at all, that is an utterly unreasonable statement.
He needs punishing to the full extent of the law. I've said I think he is an excuse for a human being. The blame lies entirely with him. I just hope I am doing a better job than that poor girl's parents of keeping my dc safe.
As parents it is our job to keep our dc as safe as possible, her parents have failed to protect her. Predators are out there, no matter how many are caught there will always be more.

But Mary, you know absolutely NOTHING about how the child managed to do it and keep it from her parents. Maybe they had internet blockers they thought were safe which weren't. Maybe it happened at the house of a trusted friend. By the time a child is 13 she needs to be allowed some freedom and usually that does not result in their being abused. Assuming that because something bad has happened to a child the parents MUST have been negligent is jumping to an unwarranted conclusion and I'm sorry but the fact that you readily came to that conclusion does make it look as if you are intent on trying to find somewhere to pin blame other than the perpetrator.
People do their best to protect their kids and sometimes they screw up; maybe you are 100% perfect as a parent and have never put your child at any risk of anything, but most parents have at some stage let their guard down or made a mistake. (And mostly they beat themselves up for it if something bad happens, but that doesn't mean they were criminally negligent.)

I think the 'I blame the parents' attitude is still victim-blaming, really; it displaces it slightly from the victim but it is still about finding a get-out for the perpetrator.

It's just a variation on the "she was walking home alone when she was raped and I never walk home alone so I am safe" theme.

Oh FGS I have said only the paedophile is to blame for the offence. Not the victim, not the parents.

The article says she was performing cyber sex then I think it is fair to assume that she was not at school or on a public computer. She may have been at a friend's house but in that case why was there unmonitored use of the computer there. Why weren't the friend's parents watching? My dc are too young to have unsupervised access to the computer (primary school) but I have friends with teenagers and they have the computers in family areas and keep an eye on what their children are doing. It is inconvenient for them, life would be easier if their teenagers had their own laptops to use in their own rooms but they feel that is not safe.

I am in no way blaming the victim for what happened to her.

I do not think it is acceptable for parents to fail to protect their children. This is not a case of fussing over a child but being an informed adult who knows that the internet is a very dangerous place for an unsupervised child. I will protect my children to the absolute best of my ability and that will include not allowing them unsupervised access to the internet. I take responsibility for the safety of my children, I am not a perfect parent but I take that role very seriously. No I won't be able to protect them from everything but the same as I teaching them how to cross the road safely and not to talk to strangers I will be teaching them about the dangers of the internet and while they children they will be safe from internet predators and so will any other visiting child in my care because I will control their access to the computer.

'Mary1988 Tue 05-Apr-11 12:40:03

I would also like to know why a thirteen year old girl was left unsupervised for hours and hours in order for this to happen. Her parents should be receiving punishment for utterly failing to protect her, poor child.'