Justice is a balancing act. When the state considers sending someone to prison, three general questions are asked. Is this person a danger to the public? Is the crime they have committed serious enough that a prison sentence is necessary to properly punish them and 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 lives in a different direction?
These objectives – protection, punishment and rehabilitation – will inevitably come into conflict with each other. The problem is where to put the emphasis. In the most difficult cases, this balancing act is especially vital to get right, and especially dangerous.
I don’t know if Judge Nicholas Rowland got the law right on May 21 when he ruled that three teenage boys convicted of multiple counts of raping two teenage girls should not receive prison terms. It is clear that the Attorney General has doubts, as the case has been referred to the Court of Appeal to consider whether the sentences were unfairly lenient. What I do know is that even if that decision turns out to be within the acceptable legal framework, it is still a miscarriage of justice.
The chilling details of this case continue to be repeated. 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 cell phone and air tag so she could not be tracked. They then took her to an isolated area, where “two defendants took turns raping the victim, while the others encouraged the offense and filmed the attacks.”
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After the girl reported the incident to police, it emerged that two of the defendants had raped another teenage girl – 15 at the time of the attack – two months earlier in November 2024. She had traveled to meet one of the boys for what she thought was a first date after chatting with him on Snapchat. The rape happened in an underpass by the river; the girl told the court how scared she was that she would be thrown into the river.
The boys were so proud of these attacks that they shared them on social networks.
For this, youth rehabilitation orders were issued. If you’re struggling to understand why, consider Judge Rowland’s sentencing remarks: “I must avoid unnecessarily criminalizing these children and understand the effects of their behavior and support their reintegration into society.”
I’ve thought a lot about that line – in particular one word, “unnecessary”. I’ve been thinking about what it means for our justice system, and more broadly for how our society thinks about sexual violence.
I also thought about the children. There is a complex interweaving of frameworks and principles around how the law treats defendants between the ages of 10 – the age of criminal responsibility – and 18. The developmental and emotional age of the defendant is taken into account and the court is encouraged to take an “individualistic” approach that is “child or young person focused as opposed to offence focused”. Above all, the sentencing council states that “imprisonment should always be a measure of last resort for children and young people and the statute provides that a prison sentence can only be imposed when the offense is so serious that no other sanction is appropriate”.
The boys’ ages formed the basis for their lenient sentences, with a judge noting their “very young” ages. And this principle exists for a reason. Enormous harm is caused by incarcerating teenagers – harm that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
But in this story there are two other children who have suffered great damage. And a justice system that does not properly consider the impact on them, both of the rapes themselves and the subsequent ordeal of seeing their attackers walk free, cannot be said to be working.
Change the emphasis, change the perspective. Put yourself in the shoes of a teenage girl who still has nightmares about being dragged into a river or threatened with a knife, whose body still bears the scars, visible or otherwise, of an assault that will take her the rest of her life to deal with. Whose trauma has been uploaded to the internet and shared at her school as grotesque entertainment, making it impossible for her to move on. (3) I would imagine someone whose schoolwork has fallen off a cliff, who gets anxious in new places or panics if people get too close. 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 being forced to review what happened time and time again, re-traumatizing herself each time, hoping that one day it will be worth it.
One of the girls told the BBC after the sentencing: “What was the point of putting me through this?” What really?
The sentencing aspect of prison cases. It is not about an eye for an eye, but about recognizing the damage that has been done and dealing with it. Somewhere along the line, the damage these girls will live with forever seems to have been taken out of the equation. The judge’s emphasis on the defendants’ lives not being completely derailed by their actions has ignored the derailment on the other side of the book. And only one side had a choice in what happened.
“Rape is a crime and justice has an essential role. It is there to name the crimes, to recognize the suffering of the victims and to remember that in fact they should not go unpunished.” This was the assessment of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman whose name became known around the world after she waived 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 is a reason to listen to Pelicot. The horrors of her case were undisputed because the assaults on her drugged body were filmed. There was no ambiguity, no he-said-she-said argument about what had been done to her. You could see it. As I wrote when her memoirs were publishedshe was a perfect rape victim against whom the usual excuses could not be thrown. And yet — from the defendants who objected to the use of the word “rape” because they had not been violent, to the mayor who downplayed the case on the grounds that “no one died,” to the attorneys’ attempts to suggest that Pelicot brought her husband’s behavior on herself or, worse, enjoyed it — the trial of her many attackers revealed an assailant at the center of many attempts to downplay sexual violence against women. that.
Even in the case of teenagers, we have no doubt about what happened: the perpetrators filmed their crime. There is no ambiguity about consent. The victims were threatened and injured. This wasn’t an accident, not a case of mixed signals, not awkward consensual sex gone wrong. The boys planned both attacks. They made sure a victim didn’t have her phone. They took the other to an underpass. If you were looking for a case of text rape where there could be no excuses or uncertainty, this is it. And it still wasn’t enough.
So let’s get back to that word: “unnecessary.” No need for who? Of course, it is necessary – no matter how darkly indescribable – to reflect that the punishment for a crime of this nature carries consequences and implications not only for young perpetrators. It is necessary to consider the message it sends to boys, their teenage victims and everyone else. These guys’ kids were trying to impress them with their naughty videos. The men in those children’s lives who gave them the impression that girls and women could be used as playthings for violent entertainment. Other girls – at this school and any school – who have been raped or assaulted but who have no video evidence, who are reluctant to come forward because they’re not sure if they’ll be believed or taken seriously. The women these girls will grow up to be, going through life with the cold, dark knowledge that if they are raped, there is no level of violence or evidence that will ensure their rapists are punished. The men those boys will grow up to know the same thing.
We all know the statistics, but they bear repeating: according to the charity Rape Crisis, one in four women in this country has been raped or assaulted by the age of 16, as have one in six children. To say that the vast majority of incidents do not result in a conviction is a ridiculous understatement. In 2021, only 1.3 percent cases of rape registered by the police resulted in charges. About half of rape trials end in convictions – and prison terms 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 extremely slim. An author can be sure that the odds are in his favor. A victim will suffer the consequences throughout his life.
When teenage boys plan and execute two brutal attacks, there are many dire questions we must ask—about their upbringing, their influences, their ability to understand their actions, and yes, their prospects when they grow up. But these questions cannot come at the expense of the other two pillars of the prison system: protection and punishment. Trying to minimize the harm these boys will face by being sentenced to prison risks another kind of harm that goes deeper than just this case. The balance is wrong, underestimating not only the danger they may still pose, but the danger of the message sent by not punishing. As Gisèle Pelicot said, when it comes to how we see and react to rape, justice has an essential role. And this time justice has failed.
(Further reading: Oxford trust accused of inappropriate access to birth campaigners’ records)
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