How can gang-raping schoolgirls at knifepoint not lead to a prison sentence?

‘I think of you as very young’, said Judge Nicholas Rowland to a trio of Traveller teenage boys in Southampton Crown Court yesterday. ‘None of you have been in any big trouble before… You have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial.’ He assured the minors – the youngest of whom was just 14 years old – that ‘none of you need to go to prison today’.

This show of empathy might have been commendable, had the unnamed teens been convicted of graffitiing a bus stop. Given that the trio are, in fact, guilty of the premeditated gang rape of two schoolgirls, the three youth-rehabilitation orders that were given out instead of jailtime feel sickeningly inadequate.

The aforementioned rapes took place in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, in late 2024 and early 2025. The first victim, 15, had been engaged in an online ‘relationship’ with one of the boys, and had agreed to meet him in person for the first time. They spent time together in town. They then made their way to an underpass by the River Avon, where they engaged in consensual sexual activity. That’s when two of the boy’s friends showed up with the intention of joining in.

The victim relayed to a jury the pressure exerted on her to have a ‘threesome’, fearing that she would be hurt if she did not agree. ‘I was so scared’, she said of the 90 minutes of sexual abuse to which she was subjected. The boys took it in turns to humiliate her, laughing and filming the attack on their phones.

The second victim, 14, was approached by the three boys in town. They encouraged her to spend time with them, and told her to drop off her phone and portable tracking device in a local supermarket so her mother wouldn’t know her whereabouts. They then took her to an empty field and threatened to kill her if she ran. One of the boys produced a knife. He later used it to cut holes in her clothing so he and his friends could rape her.

This attack, too, was videoed by the perpetrators. It was then shared on social media, inviting members of the victim’s peer group to mock her and call her a ‘slag’.

That those who conducted such vile assaults have earned little more than a slap on the wrist is horrifying. Yes, these boys are minors. But this was not a drunken fumbling encounter between teenagers. These attacks involved grooming, premeditation, threats of violence and sustained humiliation. ‘#Gangsters’, one of the boys, suited and booted, posted to his social-media account a month after the first rape. Clearly, these teenagers felt neither shame nor remorse.

Why on Earth were these boys given youth rehabilitation orders as ‘punishment’? These are community-based sentences. They typically involve supervision, curfews, unpaid work or some combination of the three. They are certainly not an appropriate response to rape and assault at knifepoint. Judge Rowland, however, wished to avoid ‘criminalising’ the boys, who he added had ‘limited understanding of consent’ and were susceptible to ‘peer pressure’.

Jess Phillips, the former Home Office minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, has remarked that the sentencing ‘seems unduly lenient’, and warned against the ‘message that it sends’.

This was a welcome stand from the Labour MP. All too often the likes of Phillips have preferred to focus on misogynistic language and Andrew Tate videos rather than violent sex attacks against women, especially if they’re committed by the ‘wrong’ type of perpetrator. Indeed, the soft treatment of the three teens involved in this case points precisely to this warped sense of priorities – a world in which horrific, real-world sex attacks are no longer seen for the grave crime that they are.

‘All I want to do is die’, the first victim said in an impact statement. ‘I no longer have fear for when that comes… No one deserves the trauma of being raped.’ The second victim added in her own statement that she has suffered nightmares since the incident, at times finding herself unable to attend school. ‘I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body.’

These girls suffered immeasurably at the hands of these violent teenage rapists. That they have been denied justice by a system sworn to protect them brings shame on our legal system and the culture that supports it.

Georgina Mumford is a content producer at spiked.