A teenage traveller gang who filmed themselves raping lone schoolgirls in two separate sex attacks have avoided jail.
Two 14-year-old boys targeted one of their victims, 15, on Snapchat before luring her to an underpass where they laughed and filmed themselves as they raped her.
Two months later the pair, this time joined by a third boy aged just 13, gang-raped a second schoolgirl at knifepoint while again recording the attack on their phones as they goaded each other to degrade her further.
The trio - all from the traveller community - were convicted of rape in March following a five-week trial, with the two older boys also found guilty of taking indecent images of a child, relating to the recordings they made of their attacks.
But all three defendants were today handed youth rehabilitation orders instead of jail sentences during a hearing at Southampton Crown Court - as a judge told them 'none of you need to go to prison'.
The soft-touch sentence quickly provoked a furious backlash, with a senior Tory MP telling the Daily Mail it was 'a sickening case of soft justice'.
The first 14-year-old assailant, who is now 15, was given a three-year youth rehabilitation order with requirements of 'intensive surveillance and supervision' for 180 days, after being convicted of two counts of rape and one count of taking indecent images of a child.
The second 14-year-old attacker, also now 15, was likewise given a three-year youth rehabilitation order with the same requirements for six counts of rape, while the 13-year-old attacker, now 14, was handed an 18-month rehabilitation order after being convicted of two counts of rape.
Youth rehabilitation orders are a community sentence for under-18s which can carry a range of different requirements such as unpaid work.
Judge Nicholas Rowland told the boys: 'None of you need to go to prison today.'
He said the boys are 'very young', had low intelligence, a 'limited understanding of consent' and were susceptible to 'peer pressure'.
The judge also praised the boys for their conduct during the trial, saying 'I think of you as very young and none of you have been in any big trouble before.
'You have all done very well with the restrictions put in place throughout the trial. (The second boy) and (the third boy) your problems are quite bad.'
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp condemned the sentence, telling the Daily Mail: 'These despicable traveller youths should have been jailed. This is a sickening case of soft justice.
'Repeated gang rapes against schoolgirls deserve the harshest penalties - as a punishment and as a deterrent.
'This soft judge is sending a signal that these appalling crimes will go without proper punishment, encouraging other offenders.
'The Labour Government claimed it wants to halve violence against women and girls. But rape is up almost 10 per cent under Labour, and with soft sentences like this it’s no surprise.
'The Labour Government needs to urgently grip this situation and ensure proper sentences get handed down.'
Judge Rowland said that the first boy had been diagnosed with ADHD and long-standing anxiety, which made him more open to 'peer pressure'.
He said that the second boy fell into the bottom one per cent in IQ for his age, and he had been diagnosed with ADHD, while the third boy had 'low intellectual capacity' and he had a 'limited understanding of consent'.
The judge told the defendants: 'I have to remember that you are not small adults. I have to think how likely you are to do serious things again and I need to make sure you do not do serious things again in the future.'
All three boys have been made subject to a 10-year restraining order against their victims.
The victim of the first incident came to the court for the sentencing hearing and, screened from the view of the boys, read her victim impact statement as well as a poem she had written directed towards her attackers.
She described how her mental health had deteriorated since the incident leading her to isolate herself from her friends.
She said: 'I was caught off-guard, I never want that to happen again, I will never get that innocence back again.'
The poem included the line: 'All I want to do is die, I no longer have fear for when that comes.'
She added: 'No one deserves the trauma of being raped.'
In a statement read on behalf of the second victim, she said her school attendance had suffered and added: 'I often feel overwhelmed, anxious and emotionally exhausted to the point where sitting in a classroom becomes unbearable.'
She described suffering nightmares and struggling to sleep and added: 'I feel ashamed, insecure and uncomfortable in my own body.'
She added: 'The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be.'
In the twin attacks, which happened just seven weeks apart last winter in Fordingbridge, a wealthy and genteel Hampshire town on the edge of the New Forest, both girls targeted were older, at 15.
One girl described feeling 'trapped' and that her abusers 'laughed' while they raped her and filmed it. In both incidents, prosecutors said that the girls were 'outnumbered'.
The defendants - one of whom had previously styled himself as a 'gangster' - laughed at the girls and filmed their horrifying ordeal on a mobile phone.
The first attack came when a girl had caught a bus to the town on a Tuesday afternoon, in November 2024, after arranging to meet the boy after he had messaged her a few days previously on social media platform Snapchat.
They had not met in person until that day.
After spending time together in the town, the boy had persuaded her to accompany him to a quieter area in an underpass by the River Avon where they had some consensual sexual activity.
But the atmosphere changed dramatically when two of the boy's friends turned up - apparently by arrangement, and with one having the intention of joining in.
On this occasion the third boy took no part but the other two boys began to pressurise the girl into having a 'threesome' in the squalid outdoor setting.
The girl would later tell a jury how she had no desire to do this but was already feeling threatened by both boys and feared she would be in danger if she tried to stop them.
She would later describe the humiliating assault she was subjected to over the following 90 minutes alongside the river.
She said her tormentors 'kept switching', taking turns to abuse her, and laughing at her as they filmed each other.
In a video of her police interview which was played to the court, the girl told the officers she feared being hurled into the river if she didn't comply with their demands, explaining: 'They could have pushed me in there. It was raining and the current was really bad.
'I was so scared, disgusted.'
After the sexual attack finally ended, the boys asked her, 'Why do you look so sad?' and bought her a soft drink to 'cheer her up' - before leaving her by a bus stop.
The boy who had initially groomed her on Snapchat then soon afterwards blocked her on social media, the court was told.
Prosecutor Jodie Mittell KC said the victim told police in an interview how she was 'petrified' and felt 'sick' at not knowing how to get herself out of that situation.
Ms Mittell KC said: 'She told the police that all three of them were taller than her and she felt that it was the three boys against her alone.
'The word she used in describing that was "petrified". She said she agreed [to the sexual humiliation] because she didn't know what would happen if she didn't say yes.
'She was so scared that she stopped listening to them and just tried to think what she could do to try to get out of that situation, but there was nothing she could do.
'She felt cornered and trapped with three boys in the underpass.'
Footage of the attack was later found by the police on one of the boy's phones, which, over six separate videos and pictures, showed her being forced to perform sexual acts on the boys.
In the videos, the boys can be heard 'laughing' and one of the boys saying 'don't film it mush'.
The girl said later that at this moment she had been trying not to cry.
The two defendants would go on to rape another girl in the same area some two months later, this time with their younger friend also taking part.
The second victim, who was 14, was targeted on a Friday afternoon in January 2025.
She had been hanging out with a female friend out in Fordingbridge when she was approached by the trio after they had seen her arguing with a friend and wanted to know why she had been shouting.
They suggested the girl accompany them - and when she said that she'd get in trouble with her mother if she did this they overrode her objections. They told her to drop her phone in a local Co-op supermarket along with an AirTag that her mother had given her to check her whereabouts.
And soon the underlying sense of menace became overt: the boys threatened to kill her if she tried to run away as they marched her to a field behind Fordingbridge Recreation Centre.
She would later describe how terrified she had been by these threats, which became more credible when she realised that one of the two older boys was carrying a knife, and as she was led away to the field away from any potential help from others.
He then used it to cut holes in her clothing to facilitate the ensuing attack.
Again the two older boys took turns to sexually molest here but this time the third boy accompanied them - not the same boy in the previous incident.
This time the third boy, aged just 13, did take part in the ensuing gang rape which saw the boys encourage each other as they filmed her ordeal.
They then walked away from their victim, who, with her clothes torn, would later recall how she just sat there for another '10 to 15 minutes just trying to process it all' before trying to find someone to help her - which saw her walking to a Tesco where she was found by her sister.
After speaking to this girl, she then called the police to report that she had been raped.
But her ordeal was far from over.
The girl revealed that a few days after the incident, she began to be abused by members of her peer group who were calling her a 'slag'.
It transpired that videos of her terrifying abusive encounter with the three boys in that bleak field had been widely shared on social media and were being commented on by others who apparently believed the incident had taken place with consent.
Little has been revealed about the official background of the boys who took part in the two very similar attacks.
But the Daily Mail revealed in March that they already appeared to be revelling in a bad boy image.
The youngest of the three rapists posted a photograph on his TikTok account just two weeks prior to the rape which showed him out late at night hunting rabbits and hares with his lurcher dog, a practice known as 'lamping' which is a criminal offence.
In the photo – thought to have been taken close to the traveller camp where he lived some 10 miles from Fordingbridge – a cartoon rabbit obscures the body of the real animal after it had been chased down and killed.
Rabbit and hare coursing is an illegal blood sport in the UK and is punishable by up to six months in prison.
Three days prior to that rabbit photo, the baby-faced teenager shared an 'inspirational' meme New Year's Day post, which read: 'What boys always want' before listing five goals.
It was a particularly grim irony that one of his supposed goals was 'make mom proud' just behind 'money' and above 'loyal girl'.
Both the older boys are understood to come from traveller communities further away: one has links to East Anglia while the other has ties to Somerset.
The boys' social media posts showed them repeatedly clad in clothing with prominent designer branding including Boss, American Eagle and Canada Goose.
The latter posed for a picture posted onto Facebook which showed him standing outside a travellers' camp next to a sign that reads 'Gypsy Lives Matter'.
On the boy's TikTok account he has pinned a photograph of himself and two relatives at a wedding in December 2024, a month after his first victim was raped.
He wears a smart grey suit and has his black hair gelled back Peaky Blinders-style. The caption reads '#Gangsters'.
The boys attempted to portray their victims as liars in court.
One claimed of the second victim: 'She was flirting with me. She made it up for a story to make up why she went missing to her mum and dad.
'It stopped her getting into trouble with her parents. I hadn't used a knife at all.'
However, Ms Mittell KC, prosecuting, told the jury: 'We say that you will be sure that those two girls were not consenting to oral or penetrative sex.
'They used those two girls for their own sexual gratification without a care in the world for how they were feeling.
'So we say they raped those two girls who found themselves alone, outnumbered and scared.'
R expensive to set up but ultra-reliable. but 'Nuclear renaissance' of building multiple Small Modular Reactors by waiving the restrictions. SMR's are cheaper to set up and companies can do so without state funding [I believe its EDF who are huge on nuclear and wanted to open new plants? So I imagine they would jump at the opportunity]. Focus on energy independence and it is worth 'paying the premium' for nuclear energy as its the most secure option long term.
