A gang of teenage traveller boys who filmed themselves raping lone schoolgirls on two occasions have been spared jail. It seems from Judge Nicholas Rowland’s remarks that ‘none of you need to go to prison today’ that he didn’t find this a difficult decision to make.
I can only imagine what the two girls must have felt when they learned that their rapists would walk free
The details of the case as reported make the judge’s choice incomprehensible. Two of the rapists, both 14 at the time, targeted a 15-year-old girl on Snapchat and lured her to an underpass where they filmed themselves laughing as they raped her. On one video one of the boys is heard saying ‘don’t film it mush’. Two months later the same two boys, joined by a 13-year old, gang-raped a 14-year-old schoolgirl, this time at knifepoint. They filmed that attack on their phones, goading one another to degrade their victim. The first victim attended the sentencing hearing. She read a poem which included the line ‘All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes’.
In the second victim’s statement, read in court, she said ‘I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body…the person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be’. The harm to the second girl was exacerbated by the rapists’ decision to share videos of her assault on social media, under the pretence it was consensual.
