After an 18-month-long trial, three boys aged 14-15 have avoided jail time for the rape and filming of a now 16 year old girl. Two of the boys on trial also had charges for the rape of a second young girl.
Content Warning: This article contains discussions of rape and sexual violence that some readers may find distressing.
Boys will be boys. That’s the putrid chestnut that came to mind when I saw the news that a group of teenage boys who raped and filmed a young girl had been given a legal slap on the wrist for their crimes this morning. It is something that so many of us grew up hearing. To many of us, it was socialised as an innocuous statement, of course, boys will be boys. Beneath it is a long history of excusing men, both young and old, for the most repulsive and egregious acts that we, as women and femme-presenting people, can imagine.
Speaking exclusively to Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, the girl described the verdict as a “rock straight in my face”. I have to agree. The things that she experienced at the hands of these boys cannot be minimised. The fact that her assault was videoed led to her being bullied through messages online and anonymous calls referring to her as a “whore” and a “slag”. Even after she had already endured a violent assault, she was then subjected to the ostracisation of her peers, while the boys in question faced no such social backlash. If she hadn’t spoken up, six months after the rape happened, she would still be carrying the unwarranted shame of the videos as they continued to bounce from phone to phone with no consideration for the violation that they depict.
That is what our culture is. It is a culture that, at every level, allows for rape to happen. Sure, we know that it is wrong, but still it happens. That is because our culture is one that does not give true weight behind the severity of what it is to have your consent violated. We all have stories about catcalls and gropings on club floors, and many of us have stories of more serious sexual assaults, too. It is a symptom of a patriarchal meat grinder that takes our bodies, commodifies them, and then, when we’re violated, reminds us that a good girl doesn’t make a fuss about it all. Even when that message isn’t explicit, as it so often isn’t, it is woven into the way that young women are treated when they are victims of crimes like this.
A slap on the wrist
At the trial, Judge Nicholas Rowland in one breath emphasised the severity of these crimes while praising the behaviour of the boys during the trial in the next. He also went on to state he wanted to avoid “criminalising” the “very young boys” and so handed them sentences that included Youth Rehabilitation Orders (YROs) of varying lengths. According to the UK Sentencing Council, a YRO is issued when “the offence must be deemed ‘serious enough’ for a community penalty, but need not be imprisonable.”
Let’s take that in for a minute. Two of these boys have twice raped young girls and distributed child pornography of these acts across Snapchat, where the videos will have inevitably been taken and shared to other platforms across the internet, where they will live on and on. These are the actions that, in the eyes of Nicholas Rowland, are not serious enough for a prison sentence. No wonder then, that if this is the state of our justice system, the boys in question felt so emboldened as to do something so horrific, not once but twice to begin with. It is a deeply disturbing reality to live with.
The girl and her family have described the sentences as a “slap on the wrist”, and the girl has stated in her conversation with Kuenssberg that the verdict felt like the judge was basically saying that the actions of these boys in the eyes of the law were “just fine”. It is something that cannot be understated. What more did they have to do for this to be treated with the actual weight that it truly warranted? How much did the girl have to suffer for the boys to actually be meted out the hand of justice in a way that validates and recognises the depth of the violation the girl endured?
“What was the point in putting me through that?”
“What was the point in putting me through that?” the girl asked in her conversation with Kuenssberg. The boys who raped her will have a few years of light level interaction with the criminal justice system, and by the time they hit 18, will be free to go forth into the world without so much as a second thought about the heinous acts they committed in their youth. Perhaps they will go on to do it again – they certainly have been given the chance to do so with their sustained freedom. They even have Judge Rowland’s glowing praise for how well they behaved during the trial.
Rape prosecution rates in the UK, like the rest of the world, are alarmingly low. Only 1.7% of rape cases reported to the police make it to court, where prosecution rates are lower than the average for other crimes. This doesn’t even take into account the fact that five in six women who are raped do not report it to the police. Largely, this is because of results like this one, which is still rare, given that it received any sentencing at all. For so many of us who have been victims of rape, the reality is that the system that is supposed to protect us is polluted with lethargic police who don’t care, extremely long wait periods for trials, and social pressures that sway people away from seeking legal help. It is a cancer on our justice system that is still largely ignored by the powers that be.
When I hear her words as she questions why she just allowed her most intimate trauma to be dragged out for 18 months across a court case, for it to end with the insult of this sentence, I cannot help but question it too. Her family have called for an immediate review of the sentencing and called directly on Keir Starmer to intervene. The Attorney General has 28 days to determine if the case and the sentences should be sent to the Court of Appeal.
Where are the consequences?
So often when news like this hits the headlines, I am reminded of the case of Brock Turner. Turner raped an intoxicated peer at Stanford College, California, and as a result received a six-month sentence, which was later commuted to only three months. The rage that people felt around the world was palpable. Forever etched into my brain are the words of his father, who called for Turner’s life not to be ruined over “20 minutes of action.” In that flippant statement, a whole history of men dismissing the pain they inflict on women came crashing down on us all. To him, the fact that his golden boy violated a woman who was in no position to consent wasn’t an abhorrent crime but a lighthearted mistake. Why would he have to face real consequences for that?
Turner isn’t the only case that comes to mind. In the 2024 Paris Olympics, Dutch volleyball player Steven van de Velde, a convicted child rapist, was allowed to compete. Men can rape women and children, do it brazenly and openly and go on to live life with essentially only the slightest ding in reputation as a consequence. Even at that, is there even reputational damage when a man like Donald Trump, a known sexual predator, has been able to lead the United States into a pit of despair and fascism that will take decades of hard cultural reform and deconstruction to recover from.
It feels like we are screaming at the top of our lungs, and no sound is coming out. In research conducted by UN Women UK, we know that 97% of young British women have experienced sexual harassment in some form. 52% have experienced it at work. It is not an abstract and extraordinary issue that faces only a handful of unlucky women and girls. What happened to the girl at the heart of this story is so appalling because it is not rare, not even a little. That’s what makes this even more devastating. Right now, there will be girls all over this country watching this news as they tend to their own trauma and internalise that if they do speak out, their pain will be dragged out across the course of months. This will be the real chance that when they go home at the end of it all, their rapists will get to go home too. The girl at the centre of this story, and the countless girls like her all across the UK, deserve so much better than this.
But aren’t they just kids?
Yes, they are kids; that doesn’t mean that their actions should not have proportionate consequences. There is no excuse for this behaviour that youth, or in the case of two of the boys, having ADHD, can justify. I have little faith in the criminal justice system, and realistically, prison rarely achieves the supposed goal of character reform that it should centre as its main goal. That still does not negate the fact that the leniency given to this group of young men should not have been extended to them.
Young boys are in a crisis. This behaviour is a symptom of that. Algorithms propel them at breakneck speed towards the murky waters of the manosphere. While it has not been reported on, I would be unsurprised if the rapists in this case have been devouring the content of figures like Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, or any of the other patriarchs of online misogyny. These men teach impressionable boys that women should, nay must, be treated like they are objects with no autonomy to reject their advances. This content trains young men to navigate the world with an inherent hatred of women, ignoring their consent and taking from them what they see fit.
As Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere displayed earlier this year, the lead voices in the manosphere have armies of teenage boys who worship them. It also exposed that the figures who are the heads of this many-headed hydra do not care about men; if anything, they hate them more than they hate women. They sell a fantasy of hypermasculine wealth and power that is deeply unobtainable for the majority of the men who consume this content. In the case of many young men, it breeds a frustration that manifests itself in behaviour like this. Without an actual proportionate response to that behaviour, we send a message that it is okay. No amount of empty words talking to the severity of the crime from a judge like Nicholas Rowland speaks more clearly than his sparing a rapist who shares videos of his crime from jail does.
The victims are the ones suffering
In response to the verdict, the partner of the girl’s mother told Kuenssberg that “It seems to me like the victims are the ones suffering and the perpetrators are the ones that have seemingly got away scot-free.” That is what lies at the heart of the rage that I and so many people across the UK feel about this case. This girl has already been through the worst thing that you can do to a person while sparing their life, and she will live with that forever. Rape does not define a survivor or their life, but it does leave its imprint on how they go forward and navigate future intimacy, relationships, and their sense of self. It is something that stays with you in ways you cannot imagine. Knowing that the boys who did this to her will be on the streets, equipped with the potential to do this again to someone else, will not be lost on the girl. She deserved so much better.
I care about this so much because, like so many of us, I have been there myself. I was raped when I was 16, and I didn’t get justice – neither did the brave young woman at the heart of this story. We are conditioned from such an early age to understand that rape is wrong, but not truly process why it is wrong. In the months and years after I was raped, I chose unhealthy ways to process the guilt and shame that I internalised. In the tangled web of rape culture that we are all ensnared in, that is the way victims feel in the aftermath. We are taught by a culture of rape jokes, of misinformation about false accusations, of casual sexual harassment on the streets we walk down, that to speak about it is pointless. Know that even when the courts do not do their job, it is never pointless to speak about your experience.
The world around me told me in no uncertain terms that if I made a fuss about what happened to me, I would be overreacting. The conditioning of rape culture made me believe that I had deserved it; the dreaded thought that I was asking for it rang in my head like a death rattle for years. I felt like I was broken after what happened to me, and while I am 12 years down the line from the first time it happened, eight from the last, the weight of it is something that I carry with me every day. Sometimes it feels like a pebble in my pocket, barely perceptible, and sometimes it feels like a boulder on my back. You learn how to process and forgive yourself for things that were never your fault to begin with. As an adult with a lot more enlightenment about the world and about the rape culture that defines so much of it, I know that I am not, and was not broken, and I know that I did not deserve it. The girl this case centres on will, I hope and trust, know that one day too – even if it isn’t immediate.
We deserve real justice
No verdict from this trial would have changed the unnecessary suffering of the victims, but an appropriate and concrete sentence that matches the severity and the inhumanity of their actions would have confirmed to the girl that she hadn’t gone through the public unpacking of her trauma for nothing. That she had the strength to speak out at all speaks to her own bravery in the face of a world that still does not care about people who have been raped. The judge, in his dismissive comments, proved that he is one of the arbiters of that world. Men like the judge in this case prop up a system that defines the experience of survivors after the rape, minimising it and peppering it with statements about the innocence of youth and the good behaviour of rapists as they sit in court for a crime they committed. Note that no praise was given to a brave young woman who, in the face of social marginalisation from her peers and the internalised pain she felt, advocated for herself.
That is the rub in all of this: these boys, cloaked by anonymity and with a mere slap on the wrist, can go out into the world unburdened by the trauma they inflicted. The girls that they raped will walk away from this with a pain that nearly all women know, that we are still not encouraged to talk about. As I discussed this with friends of mine, the same statement came up so many times – we are so tired. We are tired of reading headlines like these every few years. We are tired of yet another ‘promising young man’ spared from the full extent of the law because he knows how to sit quietly in court, because his father knows the right people, because he is talented, because he is rich, because he is too young to know better, because boys will be boys, because he is a man. God, I am so tired of it.
If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article, Rape Crisis England and Wales runs a free 24/7 Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Line on 0808 500 2222, with phone and online chat for anyone aged 16 and over. The Survivors Trust can be reached on 08088 010818 or at helpline@thesurvivorstrust.org. In an emergency, always call 999. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by email at jo@samaritans.org, and you can text SHOUT to 85258 at any time.
