Outcry over unduly lenient sentencing routinely features in the British media. Nonetheless, the sentencing of three teenagers for rape is a new low. The boys were convicted of a total of 10 offenses, linked to the rape of two girls aged 14 and 15 in Fordingbridge, Hampshire in 2024 and 2025. The rapes, which were carried out at knifepoint, were filmed and the footage posted online. These mitigating factors are specifically mentioned in sentencing guidelines to support custodial sentencing.

In this case, however, sentencing guidelines have collided with youth justice principles. Since the 1993 James Bulger murder case, these principles have been heavily influenced by liberal penal reformers and policymakers. Add in a judge previously accused of indulgent sentencing, one who wished to “avoid criminalising these boys unnecessarily”, and you have a scenario sadly familiar to those who take an interest in criminal justice. In Britain’s impeccably liberal courts, victims are too often an afterthought.

Judge Nicholas Rowland can claim to have acted within youth-justice orthodoxy, whereby prison should be a last resort for minors. The boys were also described in court as having significant learning difficulties, ADHD and exceptionally low IQ. In many cases involving young offenders, such factors routinely feature on the defense lawyer rolodex of sentencing-report tactics. Still, Rowland’s hands weren’t completely tied: the use of weapons, and the boys’ filming of the offenses, meant he could have imposed custodial youth sentences. Unsurprisingly, the case has been referred to the Attorney General for undue leniency. Questions must be asked — not only of the processes involved, but also of those charged with operating them.

Can any reasonable person look at the circumstances and say, with a straight face, that justice was served? What does the principle of “the purpose of a system is what it does” say about English courts? The victims’ words have brought Cabinet ministers to tears on television. One of the girls’ fathers made the most salient point of all: the terrible impact of these crimes on his daughter’s life. “I understand that we may not be able to lock these boys up for a life sentence,” he said. “But it starts with a custodial sentence and I feel they have to have something in there, going forwards, that impacts them for life.”

What kind of permanence will three-year Youth Rehabilitation Orders and 180 days of “Intensive Supervision and Surveillance” offer? One suspects the sentence will be little more than a process-driven formality. The role of implementing Rowland’s decision now falls to a “shambolic” probation service with a chequered history of managing sex offenders.

Another factor in the case involves ethnicity, with the Daily Mail reporting that the rapists are from the travelling community. Britain’s criminal-justice elite has long sought to introduce “equity” into sentencing, addressing racial disparities in the prison population. Unsurprisingly, the concept is bitterly contested, running contrary to the principle of the law being “blind”. Does the debate, though, reveal a ghost in the machine, one desiring “protected characteristics” be reflected in sentencing outcomes? Rowland never referenced the rapists’ backgrounds, but the case has only fueled suspicions of “two-tier” justice. Are we seeing another decision influenced, either consciously or unconsciously, by racial disparities?

The case, to many, reveals a judge prioritizing the needs of offenders over those of victims. What, then, is justice? The state’s monopoly on punishment is a core feature of the social contract, one we expect to see fairly exercised. Yet overly lenient sentencing is seldom as newsworthy as miscarriages of justice, with victims too often at the back of the queue. Critics argue that state legitimacy is fraying, partly due to identitarian-focused legislation. As one of the victims said of Rowland’s decision, it was like a “rock straight in my face”. And so they must suffer their trauma, their families bereft, while politicians mouth platitudes about “violence against women and girls”.