Three UK teens convicted of rape walked free. After a nationwide outcry their sentences will be reviewed

By Rupert Neate, CNN

London (CNN) — Three teenage boys who were convicted over the rape of two girls were last week allowed to walk out of a UK court without any custodial sentence, triggering a nationwide outcry.

Now the sentences handed down in the case, described by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “distressing” and “appalling,” are to be reviewed after the country’s attorney general on Tuesday referred them to the Court of Appeal.

Asked about the sentencing, which saw the teenagers instead receive community rehabilitation orders, Starmer said: “I think it’s distressing for everybody to see, to hear about,” adding that he had found it “distressing as a politician” and “as a father.”

“I can announce that the case will now go to the Court of Appeal, and the Court of Appeal will now review the sentence in that case, and that is clearly the right outcome,” he said Tuesday.

The details of the two attacks, in the small town of Fordingbridge in southern England, horrified members of the public, leading to multiple complaints under the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme, which allows anyone to ask the attorney general for a sentencing review.

One victim, then aged 15, was raped by two of the boys in an underpass next to a river, after arranging to meet one of them for a date. A video of her 90-minute ordeal was shared on social media, prosecutors told the court.

The other girl, aged 14 at the time, was threatened with a knife, and forced to leave her mobile phone and AirTag in a shop so her movements could not be tracked. She was made to walk to a remote field, where she was raped by two of the defendants as they again filmed the attack.

French rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot told the BBC she was appalled that the three boys had been spared custodial sentences. “(I am) deeply shocked that these individuals were in fact able to gain their freedom again when in fact the victims are suffering so hard they will never be able to heal,” she said. “Rape is a crime and justice has an essential role. It’s there to, in fact, name the crimes, to recognize the suffering of victims, and to remember that in fact they must not remain unpunished.”

Two of the boys, who were 14 at the time of the offenses and are now 15, were given three-year “youth rehabilitation orders” with 180 days of “intensive supervision and surveillance.” The third boy, who is now 14 but was 13 at the time, was given an 18-month YRO for two charges of rape by aiding and abetting the second attack. The two 15-year-olds were also convicted of taking indecent images of a child.

At the sentencing the judge said he wanted to “avoid criminalizing these children unnecessarily.”

The court had heard that one of the boys had an IQ of the “bottom 1% of his contemporaries” and had been diagnosed with ADHD. Another of the boys was also diagnosed with ADHD as well as “longstanding anxiety.” The third defendant was described as having a “mild cognitive impairment.”

One of the victims told the BBC that hearing the boys’ sentences “hit like a rock straight in my face.

“He (the judge) almost made it seem as if what the boys did was not OK, but it was OK in the eyes of the law, because they were still children,” she said speaking anonymously. “What was the point in putting me through that?”

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.