Gang charged for beating teen rape suspect

IF (and thats a BIG if) the boy raped the girl then what is the problem here?

again, IF its all true, the ten boys should get a nice little medal instead.

protecting criminals and giving them rights is one of the largest downfalls in modern times.

@Liquidmonkey

Once the rules of law and due process are replaced by the rules of vigilante justice and vengeance, then society rapidly degrades. It becomes an unsustainable situation. The whole reason we in the west have spent the past 500 years developing our democratic laws, human rights and legal processes is to move out of the Dark Ages where a rumor could stir an angry village mob to burn a witch. I understand your sentiment, but do you really want to go back to the 1400's? What if a playground chum falsely accused your child of molestation? Would you feel it justified if he were beaten by a group of teens? It becomes a "he said, she said" circus and people will quickly lie and spread rumors to eliminate rivals for trivial matters. Leave the police work to the cops, the judgment to the courts, the sentencing to the judges and the punishment to the penal system. It isn't perfect, but it is better than what you propose and much easier to improve.

StockholmSam... excellently written and your point is more than justified but commendable.

I say if he´s found guilty Im relieved he got the beating and If he is found not guilty then go beat the girl!!!

By the way, we still animals!!!

It sounds like justice was served.

@StockholmSam,

Though you're right, the biggest problem is that the punishments these days are to low for real crimes. I'm all for having the police and judiciary do their jobs, but punishment for things like theft, rape and murder have to go up a lot.

If what happened is true and it's real and not just Swedish rape then the offender needs to go to jail for at least 30+ years.

Of course vigilantism should not be condoned...but not really feeling a huge amount of sympathy for the alleged rapist if he is guilty

@#2

yeah, your right and let me be more specific.

IMHO, once a criminal has committed murder, rape or pedophile (i consider these the worst crimes) and is totally proven guilty, then they should no longer have any more human rights and we should simply get rid of them.

why should we (the taxpayers) pay to have these people fed and kept healthy?

with all the complaining about money and the economy i get sickened every time i hear that a 100% proven criminal has rights and is being protected.

i really don't see society degrading if we get rid of the sick and diseased criminals, i only see it improving.

If evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible and the criminal admits to the offense, then I agree that such a person should lose his rights and perhaps even his life if the crime is heinous heinous enough. Society would not degrade if we got rid of such criminals for good. But that should still be carried out by the legal process, not through mob justice.

Unfortunately, the story is not clear about whether the alleged rapist was ever charged and found guilty under the law or if all of this was based on what the girl said to her friends. Vigilante justice has no place in modern society regardless of how strong the evidence.

I also agree that the punishments in Sweden are a complete shame. Some of the judgments handed down recently are apalling. But again, these are the things that can be changed if enough pressure comes to bear on the politicians from the constituents.

Some of you wouldn't no doubt like to introduce the system of criminal justice that prevailed in China under the rule of that enlightened humanist, Mao.

If a suspect was apprehended in the course of a serious offence (attempted robbery, say), an examining magistrate would come to the scene of the crime, interrogate the suspect and witnesses on the spot, and then pronounce sentence. There was only one option: death. The police would then shoot the condemned man in the street, and leave the body right there.

I have some interesting pictures of such procedures. I'm not sure they had that big a deterrent effect in China, but the meek Swedes would certainly be impressed.

Never judge a person, without knowing what exactly happened to him/her in the life. You might have been worse than him/her if you have faced with the similar situations. That is exactly the reason that I never wanted to be a judge!

@ StockholmSam

Your point is commendable, but the stark reality, as you and others have noted, is that the fines and sentences are a joke for even the most violent crimes in Sweden.

Accordingly the public can be expected to react in different way, and it is not surprising that teenages take matters into their own hands in some cases.

As adults, we hope that politicians will make sentences tougher, but have you ever heard of a single politician in a ruling coalition government getting anything accomplished with regard to increasing sentences for rape and murder in the past decade?

There is a basic problem in the Swedish sentencing culture. As I once noted in a previous post, I met a judge who sent all minor offenders (vandalism, theft) home because, he told me, 'What else can we do?'. 'How about at least sentencing them to some community service, like cleaning the courthouse bathrooms or cleaning up the parks', I suggested. He just shrugged and said nothing.

I knew a lad that got accused of rape by a girl (they were both 15 at the time), she rounded up a lot of lads to kick this boys head in and they duly obliged. Turned out a little while later she had lied and the victim had a cast iron alibi which was the whole reason why the girl never went to the police in the first place.....sounds rather similar to this story here, the girl clearly didn't have a problem telling people about her 'ordeal' so why not go to the police first?

@lilsocks

The girl in question may even be the local bicycle ( ridden by everybody). I wonder what delights she offered the boys who did the beating ?

If she had been raped 'repeatedly by this same boy, there must have been DNA evidence that would have convicted him of the rape. Why not go to the Police?

Whereas there are many cases of genuine rape which should be pursued and the perpetrator brought to justice, there are also suspicious cases such as this one. A friend of my sons was accused of rape after he rather publicly dumped a girl he had been going out with for a couple of years. What had been consensual sex, all of a sudden be came rape when she was dumped.

A woman scorned and all that....

The problem with having a slam dunk rape case is that DNA evidence exists in both rape and consensual sex. Even evidence of being roughed up is not necessarily clear cut. There is too much doubt and he said/she said.

Rape is rarely punished in the sense of real justice. Moreover, Swedish justice is pathetic in almost every instance. Viking blood overrides the civilized veneer that all pretend exists here in Sweden in situations when justice goes awry.

Once the rules of law and due process stop working and rapists are free to rape with almost no sentences and people lose respect for fair treatment of victims the only way to justice left to victims are the rules of vigilante justice and vengeance.

it is the politicians and judges who are responsible not the vigilantes who represent the victims.

@Stockholmsam

"Once the rules of law and due process are replaced by the rules of vigilante justice and vengeance, then society rapidly degrades. It becomes an unsustainable situation. The whole reason we in the west have spent the past 500 years developing our democratic laws, human rights and legal processes is to move out of the Dark Ages where a rumor could stir an angry village mob to burn a witch."

Excellent piece of revisionism there. Very few women (always women) were burned for being witches in or since the Dark Ages. A couple here and there and those that were suffered the fate because no one knew what other punishment to inflict. Plus the real persecution of witches did take place some 500 years after the dark ages in that progressive land known as America in a place called Salem, MA when intelligent people exhibited mass hysteria. In the Dark Ages villages could not afford to persecute those who might have non-standard beliefs. They relied upon them as members of the agrarian labor force in order to get the crops sown and harvested. Academics currently estimate that in the 300 years of Dark Age witch hunting some 40,000 people were executed. That's an average of about 100 or so per year across the entire European continent! Using the number of states in the EU as a rough estimate of the countries in which the Roman Catholic Church's inquisition would have had control and therefore been instrumental in those executions we have less than 5 people/country/year executed. Not the real angry village mob reaction you believe there to have been.

"...do you really want to go back to the 1400's? "

Those figures really don't stack up in comparison to the more recent history (mid 18th to 21st centuries) and the number of people subjugated into slavery. More Africans died on each boat taking them to the "New World" than had died per year for being a witch!

"What if a playground chum falsely accused your child of molestation? Would you feel it justified if he were beaten by a group of teens? "

The protagonists here are a 17 year old and a 16 year old; hardly "children". Both over the Swedish age of consent; even if not quite considered to be adults. If they were 7 and 6 respectively accusations of molestation would be different.

"It becomes a "he said, she said" circus and people will quickly lie and spread rumors to eliminate rivals for trivial matters. Leave the police work to the cops, the judgment to the courts, the sentencing to the judges and the punishment to the penal system. It isn't perfect, but it is better than what you propose and much easier to improve."

Except that as The Local has been at pains to demonstrate recently the Swedish justice system does not prosecute sexual offences with any rigor. Drunk girls can be stripped naked and photographed but because they are insensible and unable to object the courts rule it is NOT molestation.

Wow, I totally understand where you got the handle "opinionfool." :P

The witch-hunt reference was an allusion. Accuracy of historical era was of secondary importance in making the point since this story is not about what happened in American or in European history. The primary importance of this story is on witch-hunt mentality or mob justice.

The only specific angry village mob reaction to which I refer was that of the mob of teenagers beating this guy on the playground. Are you saying that the angry village mob reaction I describe does not exist if there is only one victim of their fury? Or five victims? Or 40,000, as long as they are spread out across all of Europe and over a course of several centuries?

You said, "The protagonists here are a 17 year old and a 16 year old; hardly "children". Both over the Swedish age of consent; even if not quite considered to be adults. If they were 7 and 6 respectively accusations of molestation would be different."

How would anything be different? Accusations of rape or accusations of molestation...apples and oranges...if a mob of teens beats the rapist and another mob of eight-year-olds beats the seven-year-old molester, is one reaction more or less justified than the other? Again, I was alluding to a hypothetical situation. A 17-year-old boy accused of rape or an eight-year-old accused of molestation...it makes no difference...it doesn't matter what the accusation, a mob mentality bent on vengeance without due process is not a characteristic of a functioning western democracy.

We agree that the punishments meted out by the Swedish system are laughable and that perhaps the people have a right to be upset. But in a group of ten teenagers, at least one should have had the wherewithall to question what they were doing and perhaps call the police to report the rape. That is a failure in parenting and in the community as much as a failure of the politicians.

Finally, during its first 350 years of history, a span of time during which the Salem witch trials fell, America was hardly considered "progressive." Talk about revisionism.

'Finally, during its first 350 years of history, a span of time during which the Salem witch trials fell, America was hardly considered "progressive." Talk about revisionism.'

We can at least agree on the progressivism of America. Twas not revisionism but sarcasm.

If the guy is guilty, I'd like to be happy about this, but I agree with those above that these accusations sometimes get thrown around for convenience especially by young people.

I've seen it happen to a friend by a girl who simply got caught cheating with him. He almost had his life ruined before she came clean and dropped the charges.

@StockholmSam, @Opinionfool, and all the others who have added interesting new thoughts to this debate:

A 2nd look at this story reveals a massively dysfunctional microcosm of society. Not a great sign that teenage gangs can be summoned to pummel someone (although not much sympathy if the victim is truly guilty), but truly bizarre in my opinion that this girl was supposedly repeatedly raped by this guy, and that this guy, after already having been beaten to a pulp once and burnt with a cigarette, gets lured into yet another ambush by the girl who presumably orchestrated the previous beating.

Add to this the case of a 20 year old who murdered a school teacher (and recorded the event on video) because his teenage girlfriend said that the teacher had made a pass at her at school, and also the two very recent seperate incidents of imbeciles (at least one of whom was a teenager) who tried to kill armed police officers by accelerating to run over them them with their cars, and one gets an immensely dismal view of teenagers in Sweden today.

We are nearly unanimous in this series of posts that the Swedish justice and sentencing system has proven itself to be utterly worthless and irrelevant to preventing the spread of violent crime. Maybe this spineless sentencing system is here largely because the more senior sleepy judges who handle the more serious cases all grew up in well-to-do families at a time when their greatest exposure to violence was a mild tug of war under the Christmas tree for the latest Astrid Lingren book.

A lot of people point to the multiple murders in Mälmo, and to Muslim men and women being murdered or threatened with murder in honour killings, and blame the decay of Swedish society on immigration from warn torn lands, but I for one am wondering if we are seeing the first generation of teenagers who grew up spending 99% of their free time on the internet, rather than forming normal social relationships.

Some sociologists have pointed out that excessive internet time results is an underdevelopment of a normal appreciation for the consequences of misbehaviour. Add to this a Swedish legal system that if too afraid to punish anyone for anything, and which will in fact throw adults into prison for spanking their children, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Sadly in some ways it would appear that the breakdown in society prophesized by StockholmSam fears has to a large extent already established itself.

Maybe time for all of us to start translating our remarks into Swedish, and posting these on Swedish news sites, and/or emailing them to Swedish politicians, in the meagre hope that they will start to make changes to sentencing laws that may improve this mess.

@Reason abd Realism

"A 2nd look at this story reveals a massively dysfunctional microcosm of society."

On the contrary for me the 1st look at the story revealed a massively dysfunctional global society.

The few anecdotal examples you give here are not microcosmic but are minor symptoms of a serious problem in 21st century earth. (That's not to downplay the seriousness of the reputed rapes of the 16 year old girl involved or the beatings of her 17 year old accused attacker; both *crimes* should be punished in appropriate ways.) But these are minor manifestations of serious underlying issues in societies today. Whether this be the sick making sexual crimes in Sweden or US troops dishonoring Afghan war dead or flying planes into the WTC.

@ Opinionfool #22

A microcosm is a small system that is representative of what is going on in a larger system, so I was not suggesting that this gang beating behaviour was limited to the individuals who partook of it, nor do the other specific incidents that I referred to limit the scope to those criminal incidents to the perpetrators. In that sense we have no disagreement, unless one feels a need to distinguish between the decay of Swedish vs. Global society.

The decay of Global society is too big a fish for me to attempt to tackle, but Swedish society might just start to change a bit with some adjusted legislation.

The new TL article about the increasing crime rate among girls between 15-20 further supports my view that an increasing fraction of teenagers in Sweden are going downhill. Racists cannot convince me that these increases are simply due to immigration.

Human nature is human nature, and a society where the law no longer takes any meaningful steps to discipline or limit criminal behaviour should not expect to witness a new and more law-abiding generation. You reap what you sow.

Sorry for the boys, they did no wrong......