Here is a report I have found on the BBC. In late 2024 and early 2025, in the Hampshire town of Fordingbridge, three boys—two aged 14 and one aged 13—committed a series of depraved sexual assaults on two girls, aged 15 and 14. One attack occurred in a graffiti-covered underpass beside the River Avon. The boys were convicted on ten counts of rape between them. The facts, as outlined in the full sentencing transcript released after BBC pressure, are grim but increasingly familiar in modern Britain: initial consent to some sexual activity withdrawn after coercion, including the filming of acts on a phone, pressure, and exploitation of vulnerability. Despite the jury’s verdicts, Judge Nicholas Rowland spared all three custody. Instead, they received youth rehabilitation orders (YROs)—three years for the two older boys with 180 days of intensive supervision, and 18 months for the youngest—allowing them to return to the community under monitoring.

This was not mercy born of doubt about guilt. It was the predictable outcome of a sentencing philosophy that places the “complex needs” of young offenders above what ordinary people see as their just deserts. The judge’s remarks reveal a painstaking effort to individualise the process: expert testimony on neurological impairments, ADHD, profound intellectual limitations (one boy with an IQ in the bottom 1%), inability to cope with ordinary schooling, and one described by his mother as functioning like an eight-year-old. Custody was deemed damaging and contrary to guidelines treating it as a “last resort” for children, with rehabilitation the priority. “The approach to sentencing should be individualistic and focused on the child or young person, as opposed to offence-focused,” Rowland stated. One boy’s culpability was explicitly reduced due to his “profound impairments” and “limited understanding of what went on.”

This case illustrates better than almost anything else why England is in a state of institutional and cultural collapse. A society that cannot—or will not—protect its daughters from predatory boys, then returns those boys to the streets citing their stupidity as mitigation, has lost its grip on reality. Leftist judges, steeped in therapeutic ideology and human-rights abstractions, have transformed the courts into social-work clinics. Public outcry prompted an Attorney General review and referral to the Court of Appeal, but the damage is symbolic of deeper failure: girls raped in public spaces, terrified of re-encountering their attackers, while the system agonises over the offenders’ mental deficiency.

Not punishing criminals because they are “too stupid to understand what they were doing” inverts justice. Judge Rowland acknowledged the crimes involved pressure after consent withdrawal and filming, yet found no “additional violence or exploitation” sufficient for custody—despite knife allegations (dismissed after reviewing evidence). The boys had already served equivalent time in local authority detention or on curfew (18 and 16 months for the older two), counted in their favour. The third boy aided and abetted. All this, and the outcome is “intensive supervision” in the community. Victims described the decision as a “rock in my face”; one remains scared of seeing her rapists again.

This approach treats low intelligence and poor impulse control as get-out-of-jail cards. It should not. Stupidity—manifest in profound neurological impairment, extremely low IQ, limited grasp of consent—should be an aggravating factor in sentencing for serious crimes, not a mitigating one. Low cognitive capacity often correlates with higher risk of impulsive, violent behaviour. Excusing it signals that society has no expectations for basic decency, disproportionately harming the law-abiding who must share space with the unchecked.

Historically, the criminal law grasped this. We are expected to be shocked that, before Sir Robert Peel’s 1824 reforms, the “Bloody Code” prescribed hanging for a vast array of offences, including many now deemed trivial. This is a misunderstanding. The hangman’s rope was not crude barbarism but a pragmatic tool for social order in an age without modern policing or prisons. Severe, visible punishments deterred and, crucially, removed habitual threats. For the incorrigibly stupid and criminal, execution prevented reoffending and halted transmission of character. Liberal historians sneer at “disproportionality,” ignoring the context of high time-preference populations and limited state capacity. The rope worked because it was certain and final.

The main cause of stupid children is stupid parents. Intellectual capacity, including IQ and executive function, is overwhelmingly heritable—estimates from behavioural genetics place it at 50-80% in adulthood, with substantial shared and unique environmental influences, but the genetic component dominates long-term outcomes. These boys did not materialise in a vacuum. Their impairments—ADHD, extreme neurological deficits, very low intellectual capacity—cluster in families shaped by generations of patterns that welfare states have subsidised. Post-war Britain expanded benefits, single-parent support, and non-judgmental “inclusion” without parallel emphasis on responsibility or selection. The result? Dysgenic fertility: the less intelligent outbreeding the more capable, a trend documented across Western societies as cognitive classes diverged.

Hanging seriously stupid criminals served multiple purposes. Practically, it prevented reoffending entirely. A dead rapist commits no further assaults. It carried genuine deterrence value, especially in tight-knit communities where executions were public spectacles. But it also had a eugenic dimension, quietly acknowledged by earlier generations unafraid of biological reality. Hang them young enough, and they leave fewer offspring likely to inherit the same deficits and criminal propensities. The hangman’s rope, liberally applied from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, removed roughly one percent of each generation from the gene pool. Over centuries, this exerted strong selective pressure against criminality. England’s relative stability and rising civility into the Victorian era owed something to this winnowing, alongside cultural and economic factors.

Abolition of the death penalty, combined with expansive welfare, removed these brakes. Post-1965 (and fully in 1969), Britain embraced rehabilitation as dogma. The welfare state decoupled reproduction from economic viability, encouraging higher fertility among the criminal and the stupid. The consequences compound: rising violent crime by ever-younger offenders, eroded trust. The Fordingbridge case is a microcosm—boys too impaired for “ordinary schooling” yet capable of coordinated rape, set free because experts deem custody “damaging.” Judge Rowland’s two-phase sentencing—simple language for the boys (“serious things”), then complex legal justification for lawyers—exemplifies the condescension and disconnect. He insisted the case differed from precedents warranting youth custody due to “very different” facts and offender characteristics. No knife coercion, initial consent elements: these nuances became excuses.

Scorn for such judicial reasoning is warranted. Leftist judges fetishise the “child or young person” as a redeemable project, not an agent accountable for grave harm. Guidelines prioritise rehabilitation; “individualistic” assessment trumps offence gravity. This inverts natural justice, where protecting the innocent precedes pity for the perpetrator. The victims’ trauma—fear, violation in a public underpass—is secondary to the boys’ “prospects for rehabilitation” and neurological profiles. One expert from the Youth Justice Service warned custody would harm an impaired boy. Society’s collective safety? Subordinated.

Critics will decry eugenics as pseudoscience or moral horror. Yet ignoring heredity is the true denialism. Twin and adoption studies confirm substantial heritability of intelligence and antisocial behaviour. Crime clusters in families; low IQ predicts poorer life outcomes and higher offending. Pre-modern societies, through execution, transportation, and harsh sanctions, inadvertently practised eugenic selection. Modern policies do the reverse: generous benefits for single motherhood, de-stigmatisation of dependency, and soft sentencing amplify reproduction of high-risk traits. The abolition of capital punishment removed the ultimate filter. We now reap barbarity—teen rapists in underpasses, judges wringing hands over IQ scores.

Restoring sense requires viewing stupidity as aggravating in serious crime. For rape, especially involving multiple victims, coercion, and filming, low capacity should heighten concern for future risk, not reduce blame. Justice is not vengeance but proportionality and protection. Deterrence works best with certainty; rehabilitation fails most for the profoundly impaired. Permanent removal—via execution for the worst, or lifelong imprisonment—serves both victimsthe genetic and cultural health of society. The rope’s historical utility lay in its economy: swift, final, eugenically beneficial without modern bureaucratic overhead.

England’s collapse manifests in crumbling standards: grooming scandals, knife crime epidemics, feral youth, and now this. Compassion for the deficient has become cruelty to the decent. Girls cannot walk safely; communities absorb predators under “supervision.” The Fordingbridge sentences—three boys convicted of multiple rapes, none imprisoned—expose the farce. Public outrage and appeals offer faint hope, but without rejecting the underlying ideology, more cases will follow.

Stupidity in the commission of grave wrongs demands harsher, not lighter, response. It signals unfitness for liberty among others. Justice, unclouded by sentiment, agrees. The hangman’s lessons, discarded in favour of expert reports and YROs, stare back at us from the River Avon underpass. England must choose: reclaim proportionate severity, or descend further into excused savagery. The victims deserve no less; the future of the nation demands it.

Related posts:

Trial by Jury and the Logic of Abolition Britain and the End of the Illusion of Plenty The Duke of York: A Parasite and a Warning

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