No justice without punishment

I was not raised to be worried or scared of being born female but what my parents didn’t instil in me, life certainly taught me. I learnt early to avoid nighttime runs and that people would use what I wore as an excuse to justify unthinkable things but what took longer to sink in was the realisation that unfathomable trauma wasn’t always going to be enough to guarantee my gender justice.

This week in the UK, three boys were found guilty of raping two girls at knifepoint and filming them. However, despite the guilty verdict, they face no jail time because the judge stated: “I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.”

He reportedly said he didn’t want them defined by what happened, so it wouldn’t impact their futures. Yes, their futures. Apparently, it’s their futures that need to be protected not the futures of the girls they have traumatised.

The judge went on and on about the boys’ youth, low intelligence, the fact that they had a “limited understanding of consent” and had not “been in any big trouble before”, while apparently disregarding the fact that one of the victims was literally forced to leave her mobile phone and AirTag in a shop so that her movements could not be tracked and made to walk to a secluded field.

I read things like this and I am equal parts saddened and enraged. People always somehow find the audacity to bang on about how inequality is a myth and how much women have it better than men, and, then, both locally and a short plane ride away, we see rulings like this that remind us that if a boy’s future hangs in the balance, a girl’s trauma becomes negotiable. These boys raped two girls at knifepoint and filmed them. This was not a mistake. It was a planned, violent attack.

Rape is not a youthful mistake. It is a heinous crime that ruins lives

Crimes call for justice and justice calls for accountability and responsibility. The message sent by rulings like this is that what these girls went through just wasn’t enough to warrant a real punishment. We have all these campaigns telling women to speak out and, then, when it comes down to brass tacks, the underlying message remains that, perhaps, they would be better off having said nothing.

The cherry on this already collapsing cake has to be that it literally took thousands of people going ballistic online for the attorney general to review the cases.

Rape is not a youthful mistake. It is a heinous crime that ruins lives and has a ripple effect on everything and everyone touched by it. It alters relationships and the courses of people’s lives. It is a wound that people struggle to heal day and night, possibly forever.

I will leave you with some of the words the first victim, who isn’t even 16, read as her attackers were handed their slap on the wrist: “All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes.”

Now, tell me again how we should avoid “criminalising these children unnecessarily”.