Boys convicted of attempted rape after ‘playing doctors and nurses’

LONDON - Two boys have been convicted of the attempted rape of an eight-year-old girl even though she admitted in court that she lied about her ordeal, a media report said Tuesday.

The defendants, who were both 10 at the time, are the youngest people ever to be convicted of the sex offence, Telegraph.co.uk reported.

Their case immediately provoked a debate over whether juveniles should appear in a Crown Court, either as defendants or witnesses, especially in a sex offence case where they may be too immature to understand the allegations involved.

The jury was not told that the trial judge had admitted to having misgivings about allowing the case to go ahead.

Justice Saunders conceded that the Old Bailey case would have been dropped if the victim had been an adult, because the evidence the girl gave via videolink was contradictory.

The judge also admitted that the system involving child witnesses was far from “ideal”, noting that the victim had been subjected to a string of questions which she may not have understood.

He said he would write to ministers suggesting “lessons” should be learned from the way the case was handled.

The girl had told her mother and police that the boys had “done sex” with her in a field near her home in Hayes, west London, last October. Under cross-examination, she denied that either boy had raped her, agreeing that they had just been playing a game.

One of the boys’ barristers suggested that they had been playing “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine”, or “that age-old game, doctors and nurses”.

After two days of deliberations, the jury cleared the boys of rape but found each guilty of two counts of attempted rape by a majority verdict. The defendants, who both denied the charges, could face lengthy custodial sentences and will be put on the sex offenders’ register, though the judge conceded: “I am not quite sure how it applies to children of this age.”

Senior lawyers and children’s charities described the trial as “horrific and absurd”.

Felicity Gerry, a barrister and author of the Sexual Offences Handbook, questioned the decision to take the boys to court, saying sex offences were different from crimes of violence, such as the murder of James Bulger by two schoolboys.

“A lot of children may know that to kill a three-year-old with an iron bar or to drop concrete on a child is wrong, but proper sexual awareness only comes with greater maturity,” she said.