The government is urgently reviewing the “unduly lenient” sentences given to three teenage boys who avoided custody for the rape of two girls.
The MP Jess Phillips, who was the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls before resigning this month, said that giving the boys youth rehabilitation orders sent a “bad message”.
The government said it had received multiple requests for the sentences to be reviewed.
The two girls were raped in two separate incidents in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, in November 2024 and January last year.
In the first attack a 15-year-old girl was raped by two of the defendants, both aged 14 at the time.
In the second assault, the three boys threatened a 14-year-old girl with a knife and two of them took it in turns to rape her while the others encouraged the offending and filmed the assaults.
On Thursday, at Southampton crown court, two boys, both 15, were each sentenced to a three-year youth rehabilitation order and made subject to intensive supervision and surveillance (ISS). The third boy, 14, was given an 18-month youth rehabilitation order.
Phillips told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It seems unduly lenient to me and has wider public interest beyond just the case itself in the message that it sends.
“For those young women, going through a rape trial like this will not have been a simple thing to do, it will have been many, many months, if not years, to achieve any sort of justice, and I am afraid to say it sends a bad message.
“These young people, it seems, were essentially raping for content in order to put it on social media and share it to their friends, gloating about raping these poor young women.”
Her criticisms of the sentences were echoed by the Hampshire police and crime commissioner, Donna Jones, who offered to support the families of the victims if they wished to appeal against the sentences.
“This is an extremely disturbing case,” said Jones. “I’m deeply concerned these boys felt they could carry out such terrifying acts and share them online and not go to prison.
“Their sentences reflect a clear focus on rehabilitation rather than criminalisation. They are far too lenient.
“As they stand, they offer little comfort to their victims as they try to rebuild their lives after such harrowing experiences.
“The education of young people about sexual violence and misogynistic attitudes is vitally important if we’re to prevent crimes like this from happening again.”
A government spokesperson said the attorney general’s office had received “multiple” requests for the sentences to be reviewed under the unduly lenient sentences scheme.
They added: “We share the public’s shock at the details of this horrific case, and our thoughts are with the young victims during this distressing time.
“The law officers are urgently reviewing the case with the utmost care and attention.”
The court heard one of the 15-year-old defendants had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder as well as “longstanding anxiety”, while the other had an IQ of the “bottom 1% of his contemporaries” and had also been diagnosed with ADHD.
The 14-year-old was described as having “mild cognitive impairment”.
Explaining the sentences in court, Judge Rowland said: “I should avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily and understand the effects of their behaviour and support their reintegration into society.”
He added that “peer pressure played a large part in what went on”.
The girl who was the victim of the second attack said in a statement that she continued to suffer from nightmares. “The person I was before the incident has completely gone and sometimes I feel like I am grieving the person I used to be,” she said.