Three teenagers who raped two girls avoid jail to support rehabilitation

Three teenagers who raped two lone young girls in separate attacks have walked free from court.

The first victim, then aged 15, started speaking with one of the boys, also 15, on Snapchat before meeting up in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, on November 26, 2024.

After engaging in consensual sex acts, she described feeling ‘cornered, trapped petrified’ when a second 15-year-old turned up and the pair raped her while another boy filmed it.

The second victim, then 14, was raped in a field near to Fordingbridge recreation ground on January 17 last year.

That attack was also filmed.

None of the three boys was given a jail sentence.

The court heard two have been diagnosed with ADHD and the judge said he needed to ‘avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily’ and ‘support their reintegration into society’.

To the girls whose lives have been ruined by the attacks, he added: ‘I hope when you look back on today’s date you will take some comfort from the fact you have shown that courage in coming along to court.’

The first victim bravely read her victim impact statement from the same witness box, as well as a poem she had written directed towards her attackers.

She described how her mental health had deteriorated since the incident, leading her to isolate herself from her friends.

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The poem included the line: ‘All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes.’

She added: ‘No one deserves the trauma of being raped.’

In a statement read on behalf of the second victim, she said her school attendance had suffered and added: ‘I often feel overwhelmed, anxious and emotionally exhausted to the point where sitting in a classroom becomes unbearable.’

She described suffering nightmares and struggling to sleep, and added: ‘I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body.’

The girl added: ‘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 first 15-year-old was given a youth rehabilitation order (YRO) for three years with 180 days of intensive supervision and surveillance (ISS) for the rape of each of the two girls and two indecent images charges.

The court heard that he had been diagnosed with ADHD as well as ‘long-standing anxiety’.

The second 15-year-old was given the same sentence for three charges of rape against each of the two victims and four counts of taking indecent images in relation to filming of the incidents.

The court was told his IQ was in the ‘bottom 1% of his contemporaries’ and that he had also been diagnosed with ADHD.

A third boy, aged 14, was given a YRO for 18 months for two charges of rape in the January incident by encouraging the second defendant and an offence of indecent images.

He was described as having ‘mild cognitive impairment’.

Judge Nicholas Rowland told the defendants: ‘I have to remember that you are not small adults.

‘I have to think how likely you are to do serious things again, and I need to make sure you do not do serious things again in the future.’

He added: ‘I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.’

He added that ‘peer pressure played a large part in what went on’.

The judge told the girls: ‘The sentence I am going to pass cannot possibly undo what happened to you.’

The boys were also made subject to a three-month curfew and given a restraining order for 10 years not to contact their victims.