Man admits to rape of a 12 year old

kindai said:
The issue I have though is that younger girls can look a lot older, and as this case has shown, the judge, the police and everyone around genuinely had no reason to believe they weren't 16 and 17.

Even asking for ID isn't safe, as a good fake can fool even people trained to spot them, plus if youve come out of a bar/club which would have ID'ed on the way in, there would be no reason to suspect different.

This is one of those rare cases where statutory laws have put someone in a position they shouldn't be in and there hasn't been a benefit to anyone, individual or public.
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Easy solution - don't **** girls you've just met.
 
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Mark A said:
but I do find it hard to believe.
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When I was at secondary school there were at least a dozen girls who looked older than 20, but then there were also girls who looked about 8.

There was one who looked about 25 and I caught her sucking my mate's **** behind the mobile classrooms when I went there to smoke lol.
 
Teenagers, not that she even was quite a teenager, can look all sorts of ages. There's girls in my daughter's year 6 class who are getting their periods and growing breasts, and there's girls in their late teens who look like children. It happens. Adolescence is weird.
 
Burnsy2023 said:
I've dealt with a 13 year old girl for stabbing a similar aged boy in the hand with a knife. Her mum and dad were absolutely normal, supportive and decent parents. The reasons she went off the rails were complicated but she certainly wasn't from a broken home. Things are rarely as simple as you suggest.
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Yes, Some people are just Bbbbborn to be Bbbbbad!

And no, I am not kidding.

My Mum spent over 20 years as a teacher, she started out all liberal (as it were) but as time went on she realised that actually you can pick out the ones who are going to be little ***** all their lives by the time they are 5.

And she also realised that there is actually very little, in practice, that you can actually do to change the otherwise inevitable outcome.

Sad really, but really, some people are just born to be ***** and there really isn't a great deal one can do about it.

(There are things one might do, but they would have to be proactive rather than reactive, and really we are not very good as a socioty at doing that with young children)
 
robgmun said:
I read one eye witness said he thought she was 18! How developed was she to look like an 18 year old at 12!?!?!
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Make up, height and if you have a good diet then you develop further at a younger age.

Doesn't really work for males. But then there's considerably less hand wringing about underage males getting some action from legal age females. Law doesn't care either way ofc.
 
asim18 said:
When I was at secondary school there were at least a dozen girls who looked older than 20, but then there were also girls who looked about 8.

There was one who looked about 25 and I caught her sucking my mate's **** behind the mobile classrooms when I went there to smoke lol.
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When I was at school at 12 I don't remember any of the girls looking 20. The kids in year 12 looked like adults to me at that age and none of my year looked anything like the year 12 kids.
 
Must be something in the water.

I see the girls my younger brother hangs out with and they all look about my age in their 20s, but have just turned 16... It's strange. When I was 16, the girls looked 12. :p
 
Evangelion said:
How was this girl buying vodka underage? Even if she looked 16, that's still too young.
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Get men to buy you everything, though that wouldn't solve getting checked at the door, so fake ID and most bouncers extreme willingness to let just about anything with pointy chests in.
 
The problem here is that nobody seems to be at blame. I agree that with facts as reported the guy should have been treated as leniently as possible. But that then leaves a 'crime' with no one at fault.

The response should be:

1) Parents taken to task - my daughter is 11. There is NO WAY ON EARTH she would be out with a mate at that time of night going to parties with strangers.
2) Get CCTV. The club/bar - gets it's licence suspended for a period of time. They will start checking ID a lot more carefully after that.
3) The off licence - harder, if it sold vodka to a 21 y.o. who gave it to a 12 y.o. off the premises, it's teh 21 y.o. that needs to be punished.
4) The 12 year old needs help - her behaviour if left unchecked will not end well.

Bottom line there should never be a situation where no-one is at fault. If my 5 y.o. steals something I'm at fault. If my 11 y.o. does we are both at fault. If my 17 y.o. does they at fault.
 
He's effectively been tricked into being a pedo which, if the judge hadn't applied some common sense, would have destroyed the guys life, yet legally nothing will happen to the girl who caused this which is an extremely strange situation.
 
Energize said:
I think this case is ridiculous in that the law allows no defence, there should not be any crimes that do not have a reasonable defence.
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I think that's a very important point. A legal system which explicitly states "it doesn't matter if you have a reasonable defence against a charge" is not a fair legal system.

I also think it's a bad idea to classify consensual sex as rape. A distinction between consent that carries legal weight and consent that doesn't carry legal weight is needed. Using an age as a crude and wildly over-simplified line is justifiable as the least bad option available. But some other word should be used because it's extremely misleading. This person, who is guilty only of being fooled by a very plausible lie, will now be marked for life as someone who used violence to overpower a 12 year old and force sex on them against their will, because that's what people will think when they find out he was judged guilty of raping a 12 year old.
 
Evangelion said:
How was this girl buying vodka underage? Even if she looked 16, that's still too young.
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The taxi driver thought she was about 20. Some police officers apparently thought she was at least 18. Maybe the person who sold her the vodka thought she looked 21 and therefore didn't ask for proof of age. Maybe they did ask for proof of age and she showed them a convincing forgery or genuine proof of age for someone else who looks similar enough to her.

Human development varies wildly from person to person. It's possible for a person's appearance to be like the average for a very different age and it's that average that we judge age by. i.e. when we say that a person looks X years old what we really mean is that the person looks like what we think the average person of X years old look like in terms of aging. It's normal for people to get my age wrong by over 10 years, for example, simply because I haven't developed visible signs of aging at the average rate. With a large enough sample of individuals there will be some a long way off the average.
 
I must be the only one here who thinks he and her should be punished.

I understand why the Judge did what she did, but ignorance can't be used as an excuse in the eyes of the law.

It's not the first time this sort of thing has happened where a girl has looked older then her age and lied about her age, the guy still ended up with the book thrown at him.

Some sort of punishment should had been given, community work order, bound over to keep the peace, house arrest, suspended prison sentence or something along them lines.

That said, his life is ruined since hes on the front page of the BBC NEWS and every other media site, it will follow him for life.
 
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