Justice failed teenage Hampshire rape victims
Justice is a balancing act. When the state considers sending someone to prison, three broad questions are asked. Is this person a danger to the public? Is the crime they have committed serious enough that a custodial sentence is necessary to properly punish them and to act as a deterrent? And will prison provide an opportunity to address whatever issues led them to commit that crime in the first place and set their life on a different course?
These objectives – protection, punishment and rehabilitation – will inevitably come into conflict with one another. The quandary is over where to place the emphasis. In the most difficult cases that balancing act is both especially vital to get right, and especially hazardous.
I don’t know whether Judge Nicholas Rowland got the law right on 21 May when he ruled that three teenage boys convicted of multiple counts of rape against two teenage girls should not receive prison sentences. Clearly the Attorney General has doubts, as the case has been referred to the Court of Appeal to consider whether the sentences were unduly lenient. What I do know is that even if that decision proves to fall within the acceptable legal framework, it is a miscarriage of justice all the same.
The harrowing details of this case bear repeating. In January 2025, three boys – aged 13, 14 and 15 – threatened a 14-year-old girl with a knife. According to the CPS report, they separated her from her friends, forcing her to leave her mobile phone and airtag behind so she could not be tracked. Then they took her to a secluded area, where “two defendants took it in turns to rape the victim while the others encouraged the offending and filmed the assaults”.
After the girl reported the incident to the police, it transpired that two of the defendants had raped a different teenage girl – 15 at the time of the assault – two months earlier, in November 2024. She had travelled to meet one of the boys for what she thought was a first date after chatting to him on Snapchat. The rape took place in an underpass by the river; the girl told the court how scared she was that they would throw her in the river.
The boys were so proud of these attacks they shared them on social media.
For this, they were given youth rehabilitation orders. If you are struggling to understand why, consider Judge Rowland’s sentencing remarks: “I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about that line – in particular one word, “unnecessarily”. I’ve been thinking about what it implies about our justice system, and more widely how our society thinks about sexual violence.
I’ve also been thinking about children. There is a complex nexus of frameworks and principles around how the law treats defendants between the age of 10 – the age of criminal responsibility – and 18. The developmental and emotional age of the defendant is considered, and the court is urged to take an “individualistic” approach “focused on the child or young person, as opposed to offence focused”. Above all, the sentencing council stresses that “a custodial sentence should always be a measure of last resort for children and young people and statute provides that a custodial sentence may only be imposed when the offence is so serious that no other sanction is appropriate”.
The ages of these boys formed the basis for their lenient sentencing, by a judge who stressed their “very young” ages. And that principle is there for a reason. Immense damage is caused by incarcerating adolescents – damage that will affect them for their entire lives.
But there are two other children in this story who have suffered immense damage. And a justice system that does not properly consider the impact on them, of both the rapes themselves and the subsequent ordeal of watching their attackers walk free, cannot be said to be functioning.
Switch the emphasis, change the perspective. Put yourself in the shoes of a teenage girl who still has nightmares about being dragged to a river or threatened with a knife, whose body still bears the scars, visible or otherwise, of an assault it will take her the rest of her life to process. Whose trauma has been uploaded to the internet and shared around her school, as grotesque entertainment, making it impossible for her to move on. [3] Whose schoolwork, I would imagine, has fallen off a cliff, who gets anxious in new places or panics if people get too near. Who (as one victim has revealed) is struggling with suicidal thoughts. Who has waited a year and a half for justice, sweating in police interview rooms and excruciating sessions with lawyers while forced to go over what happened again and again and again, retraumatising herself each time, in the hope that one day it would be worth it.
One of the girls told the BBC after the sentencing: “What was the point in putting me through that?” What indeed?
The punishment aspect of prison matters. It’s not about an eye for an eye, but recognising the harm that has been done and addressing it. Somewhere in this case, the harm these girls will live with forever seems to have been taken out of the equation. The emphasis the judge put on the defendants’ lives not being completely derailed by their actions has ignored the derailing on the other side of the ledger. And only one side got any choice about what happened.
“Rape is a crime and justice has an essential role. It’s there to, in fact, name the crimes, to recognise the suffering of victims, and to remember that in fact they must not remain unpunished.” This was the assessment of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman whose name became world-famous after she waived her anonymity during the trial of her ex-husband and the 50 men he invited to rape her, when asked about the sentences given to these boys.
There’s a reason to listen to Pelicot. The horrors of her case were indisputable because the assaults to her drugged body had been filmed. There was no ambiguity, no he-said-she-said wrangling about what had been done to her. You could see it. As I wrote when her memoir was published, she was a perfect rape victim, at whom the usual excuses could not be thrown. And still – from the defendants who objected to the use of the word “rape” because they had not been violent, to the mayor of the town downplaying the case on the grounds that “no one died”, to lawyers’ attempts to suggest Pelicot had brought her husband’s behaviour on herself or worse, enjoyed it – the trial of her many assailants revealed an inescapable urge to minimise sexual violence and de-centre the women subjected to it.
In the case of the teenagers, we also have no doubt about what happened: the perpetrators filmed their crime. There is no ambiguity about consent. The victims were threatened, they were hurt. This was not an accident, not a case of mixed signals, not clumsy consensual sex gone wrong. The boys planned both the attacks. They made sure one victim didn’t have her phone. They took the other to an underpass. If you were looking for a textbook case of rape, where there could be no excuses or uncertainty, this is it. And it still wasn’t enough.
So let’s go back to that word: “unnecessarily”. Unnecessarily for whom? Surely it is necessary – unspeakably grim as it is – to reflect that the sentence for a crime of this nature carries consequences and implications not just for the young perpetrators. Necessary to consider the message it sends to the boys, and to their teenage victims, and to everyone else. The children these boys were trying to impress with their depraved videos. The men in those children’s lives who gave them the impression girls and women could be used as playthings for violent entertainment. The other girls – at this school and every school – who have been raped or assaulted but who don’t have video evidence, who are hesitating about coming forward because they’re not sure if they’ll be believed or taken seriously. The women these girls will grow into, going through life with the cold, dark knowledge that if they are raped, there is no level of either violence or proof that will ensure their rapists are punished. The men those boys will grow into who will know the same.
We all know the stats but they, too, bear repeating: according to the charity Rape Crisis, one in four women in this country have been raped or assaulted since the age of 16, as have one in six children. To say the overwhelming majority of incidents do not result in a conviction is a laughable understatement. In 2021, just 1.3 per cent of rape cases recorded by the police resulted in a charge. About half of rape trials end in convictions – and custodial sentences are another matter entirely. These figures do not take into account the victims who never went to the police, aware that their chances of ever seeing justice were vanishingly slim. A perpetrator can be confident the odds are in their favour. A victim will suffer the consequences their entire life.
When teenage boys plan and execute two brutal attacks, there are many awful questions we must ask – about their upbringing, their influencers, their capacity to understand their actions, and yes, their prospects when they grow into adults. But those questions cannot come at the expense of the two other pillars of a prison system: protection and punishment. The attempt to minimise the harm these boys will face by being given a prison sentence risks a different kind of harm that runs deeper than this case alone. The balance is wrong, under-weighing not just the risk they might well still pose but the risk of the message sent by not punishing. As Gisèle Pelicot said, when it comes to how we view and respond to rape, justice has an essential role. And this time, justice has failed.
[Further reading: Oxford trust accused of inappropriately accessing maternity campaigner’s records]
