A 14-year-old Iranian boy who raped a teenage girl within three months of arriving in Britain on a small boat has been spared custody and handed a rehabilitation order requiring him to attend consent awareness sessions — a sentence that has left his victim’s family “furious” and sparked fierce political criticism.
The boy, who cannot be named due to his age, entered the UK last June as an unaccompanied child migrant and was living in foster care when he attacked the 14-year-old girl in Bedfordshire in September last year. The two had met at school before encountering each other on 23 September, when the boy led his victim to a row of bushes near a skate park and forced her to the ground. She repeatedly told him to stop, saying “get off me” and “no,” but was ignored, prosecutor Cassandra Roberts told the court. In the hours that followed, the attacker wrote about the assault on social media.
He was convicted in January of rape and two counts of sexual assault. In mid-March, he was sentenced to a rehabilitation order — not a custodial term — on the grounds that custody is considered a last resort in the youth justice system. The order requires him to complete specialist sessions on “the understanding of consent, boundaries, and victim awareness,” and he was also given a two-year exclusion order banning him from returning to the area where the attack took place.
A source close to the victim’s family told The Sun on Sunday the sentence had been met with disbelief and anger. “The victim’s family are furious. They’re outraged. This sentence is a total joke. There has been no punishment. This isn’t a deterrent at all. The rapist is still free and could just do it again. The victim has to carry this for the rest of her life, while he can just go out as if nothing has happened.”
Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called for the attacker to be jailed, saying custody was “the only punishment for rapists” and accusing the Labour government of losing control of the country’s borders. There are no fixed sentencing guidelines for youths convicted of rape, though teenagers of the same age have previously received custodial sentences of up to four years in young offenders’ institutions.
Complicating any future deportation is the fact that Britain does not remove individuals to Iran given the country’s designation as too dangerous, and that unaccompanied child asylum seekers carry additional legal protections that generally prevent deportation regardless of offending.
The Home Office said sentencing was a matter for the independent judiciary but confirmed that “foreign nationals who commit these vile crimes will be deported at the earliest opportunity.”
The case, reported by The Sun on Sunday, is one of several involving migrant offenders to have emerged in quick succession. Three men were convicted this week of a gang rape in Brighton — including Karin Al-Danasurt, 20, who admitted during proceedings to being wanted for murder in Egypt — all of whom had been housed at a hotel in Horsham. Separately, Afsar Safi, 30, a former Taliban member who dragged a seven-year-old girl into his asylum hotel room and sexually assaulted her, is expected to be released from prison before the end of the year.
