Boys, aged 10 and 11, guilty of attempted rapePair cleared of raping eight-year-old girl in Hayes, west London, last year
(27)Tweet this (18)Sam Jones guardian.co.uk, Monday 24 May 2010 15.03 BST Article history
A court artist's drawing of the case in which two boys were found guilty of attempting to rape an eight-year-old girl. Photograph: Julia Quenzler/Central News
Two boys aged 10 and 11 were today found guilty of attempting to rape an eight-year-old girl, but were cleared of raping her.
The boys, who have sat next to their mothers in the well of a court at the Old Bailey for the last two weeks, were among the youngest ever to be charged with rape in England and Wales.
A jury found them not guilty on two charges each of raping the girl in Hayes, west London, in October last year. They were later found guilty of two charges each of attempted rape, by majorities of 10 to two.
As a concession to the defendants' age, the judge and counsel dispensed with wigs and gowns and reporters were asked to spread out around the court rather than congregate in an intimidating huddle on the press bench.
Proceedings were also kept short to help the boys follow what was going on; the day was divided into two 40-minute sessions in the morning and two 30-minute sessions in the afternoon to mimic a primary school timetable.
Opening the case almost a fortnight ago, Rosina Cottage, prosecuting, told the six-man, six-woman jury that they would hear evidence of a most serious crime.
"This case concerns rape by two boys still at primary school of a girl even younger than them," she said.
"Together they took her to different locations near where they lived in order to find a sufficiently secluded spot to assault her. The events leading to the alleged rapes all took place in and around a block of flats and they ended in a field."
Cottage told the court the girl had been playing with a five-year-old friend near her home in Hayes on 27 October when the defendants arrived and suggested visiting another friend.
But Cottage said that when the four children arrived at the block of flats where the friend lived, the defendants pulled down their pants and those of the girl.
After the scene was repeated in the lift of the block of flats, the girl and her younger friend were trapped by the older boys in a shed that held rubbish bins, Cottage said.
Once again, said Cottage, the girl's pants were pulled down and she was sexually assaulted before eventually being taken to a nearby field and allegedly raped.
The jury was then shown a recorded interview shot by specially trained police officers the day after the alleged assaults.
In it, the girl played with a teddy bear she had named Mr Happy while she told one of the officers how the boys had exposed themselves, pulled down her pants and raped her.
However, the girl's story changed radically when she was cross-examined via a videolink.
She said she had lied to her mother because she had been "naughty" and was worried she would not get any sweets.
In a series of questions, she was asked if any parts of her body had been penetrated by the boys. She replied each time: "No."
She also admitted that she had agreed to play with the boys and had pulled down her own underwear while the boys exposed themselves to her.
Linda Strudwick, defending the older boy, asked her: "Did you ever tell your mum it was not you but it was [the boys] who took your knickers down? You didn't want your mum to think you had been naughty?"
The girl replied: "Yeah."
The judge asked what the girl had been worried about and she replied: "No sweets if it [sic] found out I had been naughty."
The problem, as one of the defence barristers told the jury, was that everything hinged on the girl's testimony.
"Apart from saying that the girl said it had happened so it must have, Ms Cottage provided you with absolutely nothing to support the allegation of rape and attempted rape," said Chetna Patel, counsel for the younger boy.
"No useful medical evidence, no DNA evidence and no forensic evidence: nothing."
Strudwick said that her client was "a normal boy … not a monster", adding that a children's game appeared to have got out of hand.
"What this case is about is not a serious crime," she said. "It is about children. There is a game called 'You show me yours and I will show you mine'.
"Maybe it went too far, maybe it went to touching, maybe they were doing something they had seen on television, maybe they were playing that age-old game, doctors and nurses.
"They are kids. If [my client] had been a few months younger, he could not have been charged."
But in her closing speech, Cottage warned the jury not to trivialise what had taken place.
"On the face of it, wouldn't it be so much easier and so much nicer to believe that this was all a case of innocent sexual experimentation, a game of you show me yours and I will show you mine, a case of [the girl] misunderstanding what had happened and innocently exaggerating it?" she said.
"Just because it would be easier, just because we don't really want to consider that these things really did happen, is not the way to decide this case. You have to look at the evidence."
