WTF?! Serial rapist (victim was 13 yrs old) receives sentence of 270 hours of unpaid work??

[Furyistoomild]

What the hell is going on in Scotland? This girl has been raped multiple times, completely traumatised and he gets a couple of hundred hours of unpaid work? How on earth is this just? Women in Scotland must be so afraid right now.

Teenager living in fear after rapist Sean Hogg walked free https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-65298929

Madness - the theory is that they don't want to criminalise younger people, so to allow them to not ruin their life at an early age.

Its ok for minor theft offences or criminal damage (graffiti) etc - but not for this

The Scottish judge has taken this as being the case for all offences and clearly its wrong.

It causes people to lose faith in the judicial system even more, less victims/survivors will come forward. He should have received a custodial sentence.

As I say - Madness!!!!!

Exactly! As it says in that article - JKR is right, rapists will think the first one is free.

Young rapists should be criminalised and punished so that they don’t continue to be rapists. That’s the idea of justice as far as I understand it.

Again the law minimises violent crime against women. When will it ever change? <sigh>

BTW I do recognise there are male rape victims but obvs the statistics are that the vast majority of rape victims are women.

Such a slap in the face for that girl. To have gone through the trauma oof going to court, him to be found guilty but still have no semblance of justice. Time and again we here from judges that the lives of young men should not be ruined for a mistake/horseplay/immaturity (I don't think any of these words are appropriate but they are words judges have used to describe male violence against girls) with not a second of concern shown for their victims whose lives have been torn apart.

Yes absolutely the 'young men just made a silly mistake, we mustn't ruin their lives for it' rhetoric is still live and kicking. Young women have been traumatised and it will impact the rest of their lives but that bit is irrelevant. I just despair.

And how do we ensure such 'mistakes' don't happen, if we don't deal appropriately with people who make such mistakes?

How are they to understand the severity and impact of what they have done, if there's no punishment?

It's very convenient for men that the justice system takes youth into account when sentencing as a huge amount of serious crime is committed by young males. The justice system doesn't seem to realise that early leniency doesn't make these young males see the error of their ways but rather teaches them that they can get away with it. The entire system is designed to benefit men.

You need a principle that victims deserve retributive punishment of offenders.

We have moved away from that because it's seen as backwards by many people.

What a travesty of justice. Does the right to appeal against unduly lenient sentences not exist in Scotland?

Did I just read he’s appealing the conviction?

I think our Justice system was initially meant to be rehabilitative rather than punitive, and if that were possible then it obvs would be preferable. It would require completely rejigging and vast amounts of money to do it now.

Every public service in this country is so broken. If only we could just chuck everything away and start again.

Why would it be preferable?

Why not say that both the aims of rehabilitation and punishment can be good things?

Yes, apparently he is. I am actually speechless at the ....everything, really.

The judge may well have done this in the assumption that it will be appealed by the Crown in order that the guidelines can be tested by the Appeal Court.

PorcelinaV, mmmmm, good question. I think because rehabilitation will probably result in a more productive end in the long run than punishment.

Would it not be better for society as a whole if a criminal member of it was turned into a non-criminal member? Imo it would be, anyway! But it seems to be a bit of a pipedream, frankly, and doesn't happen often enough, surely enough. It might be that we need tougher sentencing - well, actually I think it's quite clear that we do - going hand in hand with more effective and more plentiful rehabilitation programmes. I confess I don't know how this all is atm, so for all I know there are swift, effective and plentiful rehab programmes running in every single prison in the UK, all producing model citizens at a rate of knots; it just doesn't look like it from where I am.

I also think that if punishment is the only point, or main point, of bringing someone to Justice, then we find that sentencing becomes inadequate, we increase sentences, prisons get more overcrowded and more expensive, leading to more prisoners who hold a grudge against society as a whole, leading to more crime, leading to harsher sentences, and all the while crime is increasing.

Dh, otoh, thinks that criminals generally just want to be criminals and nothing you do will change that, regardless of sentences or rehab measures.

Of course it would be good if rehabilitation worked, but I was suggesting that you could do both rehabilitation and punishment.

If you think the "preferable" thing is rehabilitation rather than punishment, then that sounds like you maybe don't think rapists deserve to be punished for their crimes?

If you do think that rapists deserve to be punished, then presumably the aim should be both punishment and also rehabilitation if possible.

I would say it's also designed to keep the public safe, which given the fact he's raped a 13 year old child, I would say he is not.

This is heart breaking, an utterly immoral verdict.

Punishment!

A considerable element of punishment is as a deterrent. 270 hours of unpaid work is not going to deter any young man from pushing his luck, overstepping the mark or however else you want to define violating a woman's body to the possibly permanent detriment of her physical and mental well-being.

Although note that it would be unethical to punish as a deterrent unless the person first deserved to suffer for their crimes.

Without someone deserving punishment, they shouldn't be used for the public good of deterrence as that is pretty much equivalent to punishing the innocent.

I was told many many years ago that the problem with 'rehab' as the aim of the justice system is that people can end up indefinitely detained for not agreeing with the state.

So we have 'punishment' as the end is clearly defined.

I'd quite like a mixture- cut their knackers off, and make them do community service would work well for me.

Luckily I'm not in charge.

Who is talking about punishing innocent people as a deterrent? That's a completely different and irrelevant discussion.

If a person thinks that if they commit a crime they will be punished harshly, the idea is that that will put them off doing it.

In this case a guilty rapist is given a pathetically light sentence. The situation now in Scotland is that any potential rapists out there have now had the barrier of fearing serious punishment, removed, so that they can rape without fear of any serious consequences. The situation is an absolute nightmare. Women are less safe than ever because of this judgement.

I don't think you understood the point in question.

I think I don't understand why you brought this up when the person is clearly guilty. This isn't a theoretical situation or an area where a higher level of debate is required, this is a very real situation where young men in Scotland have been told by the judicial system that rape is not a crime requiring serious, effective levels of punishment. There is no world in which the threat/deterrent of, for example, having to work in a charity shop for 270 hours is equivalent to the deterrent of going to prison for 5 yrs.

I