Chris Walkey

Eleven Rape Convictions. Not One Day In Custody. And Lammy Wants to Go Further. Two girls were raped in a New Forest town in November 2024 and January 2025. They were fifteen and fourteen years old. Their attackers filmed the assaults, shared the footage online and laughed. One of the girls was raped at knifepoint. Three boys walked out of Southampton Crown Court with youth rehabilitation orders and a three month curfew. Eleven rape convictions between them. Not one day in custody. The first girl read her victim impact statement at sentencing. I was caught off guard. I will never get that innocence back. All I want to do is die. I no longer have fear for when that comes. The judge praised her courage. He then told her attackers none of you need to go to prison today. Judge Nicholas Rowland cited their very young ages, their ADHD diagnoses, their low intellectual capacity and the importance of avoiding criminalising children unnecessarily. He was following the Sentencing Council's guidance precisely. Custody is a last resort. Rehabilitation is the primary purpose. The sentence is not the judge's failure. It is the policy's product. Which makes what David Lammy is simultaneously planning considerably more alarming than the sentences themselves. The Justice Secretary is weighing proposals to extend that same framework, treating offenders as children, prioritising rehabilitation over punishment, minimising custody, to all offenders under 25. The Scottish model he is considering produced a killer rapist who set a woman on fire receiving five fewer years than he would have otherwise. It produced a man who repeatedly raped a thirteen year old girl avoiding prison entirely. Lammy wants to bring that framework to England and Wales while Lord Hermer urgently reviews sentences that are its direct and inevitable consequence. The Attorney General who removed trial by jury for thousands of defendants has 28 days to decide whether filming a knifepoint gang rape and sharing it online warrants custody. The same man who ensured extra court capacity was in place for last weekend's Unite ghe Kingdom march is taking nearly a month to answer that question. The second girl's statement was read on her behalf. She described nightmares, inability to sleep and feeling ashamed and insecure in her own body. The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be. Under the framework Lammy is proposing, the boys who produced that grief would continue to be treated as children requiring support rather than adults requiring consequences. Former Met Police detective Peter Bleksley's call to bring back borstals will be dismissed in progressive circles as nostalgic authoritarianism. It deserves more serious engagement than that. The borstal system, whatever its flaws, operated on a principle the current framework has abandoned entirely. That young people who commit serious offences require structure, discipline and consequence rather than community orders and supervision. The evidence that rehabilitation focused community sentences deter serious youth offending is thin. The evidence from Scotland that treating young adult offenders as children produces lighter sentences for grave crimes is documented. The Fordingbridge victims are not statistics in a sentencing review. They are two girls whose lives have been permanently altered by three boys who will be back in their communities within months. The policy that produced their sentences is the same policy the government is planning to expand. Lord Hermer's shock is noted. His government's direction of travel tells a different story. The sentence was not a miscarriage of justice. It was justice as currently defined. That is the most alarming observation of all. "Lammy wants to bring that framework to England and Wales while Lord Hermer urgently reviews sentences that are its direct and inevitable consequence."