Teen boy avoids jail after rape of girl, 12

[Imnobody4]

A TEENAGE boy has been handed a youth rehabilitation order after raping a 12-year-old girl who has since died in Kidlington.

Addressing the boy, Judge Lamb said: “I’m not sure it’s right to say that you were selfish but you were not kind and you need to understand that women and girls need to be treated with respect…respect and care.”

https://www.thisisoxfordshire.co.uk/news/24234880.teen-boy-avoids-jail-rape-girl-12-kidlington/?ref=twtrec

What sort of idiotic language is this. Rape isn't a very kind thing to do.

The age of criminal culpability in the UK is 10, one of the youngest in the entire world by quite a lot.

Incorrect. The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is ten. In Scotland it is 12. On both sides if the border, this boy is deemed old enough to know right from wrong.

I personally would like to see it raised I don't think it's high enough.

In Scotland, James Bulger's ten-year-old murderers would not have been deemed criminally responsible for his death. I would not be happy with that. At ten, a child without learning disability is old enough to know that killing someone is wrong.

No I’m not saying that at all. But im
not going to make lots of comments on a very minimal piece of information, that’s all.

This. Men now expect credit for absolute bare minimum human decency. It would be like me wanting a head pat for not murdering anyone this week.

This is why I wouldn't have children even if I wanted them and could care for them. I couldn't inflict this world on a daughter and I refuse to bring a son into the world in case he became part of the problem.

When my grandson was born you would not believe how relieved I was that he was not a girl.

I'd hate to bring a girl into this mad, misogynist world at present. It's always been bad for women and girls, but now it's beyond the pale.

I felt similar when I had my son, and I'm doing my best to make sure that he doesn't become the sort of arsehole that thinks that rape is merely 'unkind' or 'disrespectful'. Because that's a fucking low bar right there.

That poor girl, and her poor family. Perhaps if her shit head rapist had pleaded guilty and spared her a trial, or if it had been processed faster, maybe she'd still be with us.

Look, most boys know very well that rape is wrong. By around age 5 or 6 they will have a basic understanding of bodily consent - that you can't hit people, or take things just because you want them. Boys older than this who persist with violence or coercive behaviour are in clear need of intervention, guidance, discipline, and support.

By puberty they will be very aware of the issue - spiking someone's drink shows intent and forethought. Carrying out a rape of a distressed/drunk girl is way, way beyond any kind of 'misunderstanding'. It's calculated violent abuse.

Yes its an enormous red flag for personality disorder, aggression, future abusive behaviour, and shows a need for serious intervention.

That poor girl, and her poor family. Perhaps if her shit head rapist had pleaded guilty and spared her a trial, or if it had been processed faster, maybe she'd still be with us.

THIS. ⬆

He didn't just rape her, and hurt, humiliate and degrade her - he laughed in her face and rubbed her nose in it. He could have admitted it, not dragged her and her family into court, genuinely apologised - but he didn't. And I'll put money on him doing it again one day, because he's got off with it.

I hope his parents are very proud of the POS they've raised. I couldn't live with myself if I'd raised something like that.

Edited to add a bit

i assume his parents think he is a hard done by little angel. Or a good boy led astray.

I'm not sure I fully agree with you on that, I understand what you're saying about them being old enough to understand right/wrong but I do think there are some factors in early years experiences and exposures those boys had that potentially predisposed them to an extent to what happened. Again I'm not saying there should be no accountability- of course there needs to be. But to me, when a 10 year old is raping or killing another child something has gone seriously wrong. That's not the normal behaviour of a well adjusted, emotionally adjusted mentally well and boundaried child. So I think it's important to understand why things went so wrong, why they felt the need to do what they did - if for no other reason but that we can provide better intervention earlier so that children can get support needed before they seriously harm someone else. I don't believe that criminalisation is necessarily better then intensive rehabilitation and therapeutic work when we're talking about children. I don't think you can treat it the same as say a 40 year old doing the same thing.

Literally no one is suggesting that a child be put in adult jail. A secure care facility with therapeutic intervention would be appropriate.

Kind?
Rape and subsequent death of the girl.
Disgraceful by Judge.

So this poor young girl self-harmed then died by suicide after she was raped, and this bloke gets off Scot-free??? Ridiculous.

I know he was only 13 when he raped her, but that is over the age of criminal responsibility. And she was so badly affected that she took her own life. That poor girl.

He deserves prison.

Not adult prison.

I wonder if he had learning disabilities... I feel like something is missing here. How can a rapist just be let off like that?

Rapists and child sex offenders frequently walk free from court, even when they are found guilty. There's a Twitter account that lists some of them;

https://twitter.com/Wommando/status/1762517990728212696

The situation feels desperate for women and girls. How can this be an acceptable outcome?

I don't think it's minimizing to say that it's not clear what the sentencing considerations were in this case, or why the judge used such an odd way of speaking, and that without that information it's difficult to comment on their suitability with much confidence.

I understand that some posters think that every 13 year old boy who rapes is really just a man who should be put to death or locked up in an adult prison for life, but the law doesn't actually support that. Judges are supposed to consider things like age, the circumstances of what happened, and the mental capacity of the criminal, when sentencing.

Thirteen year olds are barely teens and in many ways function as children still, that's why grooming them sexually is so heinous. We can't have it both ways, either they don't have adult capacities in their decision making and need extra protections that adults don't, or they do. That will apply to the ones that commit crimes too.

It's possible for someone to both be guilty, but also lacking full capacity. I do't really understand why anyone would think that is the same as saying that rape (or murder, or whatever) isn't a crime.

Between capital punishment (wow!) and being let free because 'you know circumstances' are some other options.
Rehabilitation is a proces. institutions have a role in this process.

But I will say it again: girls and women are granted much less of understanding when it comes to sentencing and suffer in prisons twice as much only because they are female. He is free, his actions drove someone to suicide. A 16 years old girl whom baby girl died in a cell, who had to give birth handcuffed to the wall was guilty of being homeless orphan without family support.
When you listen to stories of women how prison, in which they wouldn't be for the crimes they commit if they were male, is the place when for the first time they feel like human beings, how it is the first time in their lives they are free form domestic abuse you really look at the institutions differently.

There is nothing complicated about rape..The time.it took to come to court, the mental health of that poor girl were the complications here.

@deragod I fully agree with you that girls and women suffer from harsher sentencing and that's totally wrong. But I don't think that making all sentencing harsher is what we need to even the scales. We need there to be fair and appropriate sentencing for women and girls so it probably needs to be more lenient (or at least in proportion to the crime committed) in line with what happens to males who commit crimes. Making 'an example' of men and boys doesn't get women a better deal, what we need is a full system overhaul and better funding and resourcing for community services both at early intervention stage, and at post offending stage. I would also say that if the case has taken 3 years, due to his age its very unlikely that he hasn't already been engaged in some level of rehabilitation work due to the need for statutory bodies being present due to his age. The vast majority of young people I work with who are involved in youth justice will be doing a lot of rehabilitation and therapeutic work before they even get to trial and that is then taken into consideration as part of sentencing but its never ever reported on publicly.

@Lavender14 what angers me though and happy to be proven wrong, do you think the victims of these crimes get the same level of therapeutic support as the perpetrators do?
You've mentioned he'll have had 3 years of rehabilitation and therapy, my (not personal) experience for rape victims is they'll get handed a number to contact for 'support' unlike the hand held, personal touch that it seems the rapists get?

The victims can't even be certain of a male-free Rape Support Centre. They are expected to "re-frame their trauma" if they don't want to relive their assault in front of a man.

Thirteen year olds are barely teens and in many ways function as children still

Yet had he been a girl who wanted to change gender, many clinics would have rushed him towards surgery and life-altering hormones because "the kids are never wrong".

Edit - spelling.

I absolutely agree there should be much greater support for survivors of such crimes, but equally I think it's essential that perpetrators are 'hand held' as a means of supervision as well as support. They need to closely managed and watched. That in part means being actively engaged with a number of services who are then able to feed back on their engagement/progress/highlight emerging concerns/feed into the justice system to ensure sentencing is fair and appropriate. Having a number of services also means you've a number of professionals assessing that person and the risks around them rather than it falling to one or two people.

In my own experience I wasn't ready to access support for quite some time after my experience of SA, I didn't even really process it fully for at least a year and I would have really struggled had that been forced on me as something I HAD to engage with or if someone kept contacting me to follow up. I wouldn't have been able to use the support properly because I wasn't ready. It was important to me that it was in my time on my terms and that's unique to each individual.

Someone who has shown themselves to be a danger to society doesn't get to have that same flexibility. And if they don't engage then they should expect harsher sentencing as that signals a lack of remorse or personal awareness or being prepared to make active change to prevent the same thing happening again, and is a sign that work maybe needs to happen in a much more secure setting. Similarly if someone has actively and consistently worked hard to demonstrate remorse, to cut out certain social networks, to become a safer and more productive member of society and who has shown that they fully understand the implications of their actions and their responsibility for it and are genuinely remorseful and are living very differently, you'd also expect that to be fed back into the courtroom as well. That really becomes more about actually reducing the risks of that person reoffending than just punishing them.

So I don't think you can necessarily offer the same levels of support to people affected by crimes because it serves very different purposes, but I do absolutely agree that support should and could be so much better than what it is and particularly funding should be so much more secure and waiting times should be reduced significantly and it should be more widely available geographically so that when someone is ready, the help they need is ready to go and they can access it straight away. I do also think the support offered to minors is different to support offered to adults, again whether or not they are ready or able to use that support is a different matter.

So we are supposed to believe this rapists home life is so terrible we need to feel sorry for him - but not so terrible that he cant reform better at home than in a young offender institution. No, just no. There speaks people who will always put a male first.

It's highly likely this poor girl killed herself because of the rape. His refusal to admit to it wont have helped. He should have been given a custodial sentence.

He wasnt "pressurised" into this by adults, no adults were present. There are no circumstances that would lead me to believe he didnt deserve a custodial sentence.