It Was Never Just One Bad Judge

The petition with 236,642 names on it [1], calling for the judge in the Fordingbridge case to be investigated, is still climbing. If you haven't already, please join me in signing it.

But getting rid of this judge will not magically fix the issue. Because it was never just one bad judge, it's so much more than that.

I wrote last week about the two girls, about how they did everything we tell women to do and the system failed them anyway. If you read it, you know my rage.

If you don't know the case, here it is, with a heavy SA trigger warning. Three boys, 13 and 14 years old, raped two girls, 14 and 15, in two separate attacks two months apart. [2] One girl was threatened with a knife and made to leave her phone behind so she couldn't be tracked. The boys filmed it. A jury believed the girls and convicted the boys ten times over. And then, last month, at the sentencing, a judge sent all three of them home. [2] Not one single night in prison. One of the girls said his decision hit her like a rock straight in the face.

The sadness is overwhelming. I have not stopped thinking about those two girls, because whatever happens now, the rest of their lives have been carved into a different shape, and the sentence didn't undo a second of it. It just told them, out loud, in a courtroom, exactly how little the law thought it was worth. My own kids get a bigger consequence for lying to me than those three got for rape.

So yes. I am furious, raging, incandescent. And here's where it's easy to say lock them up and throw away the key. But

I'm not going to.

To be completely clear, I do want these particular boys locked up. What they did, and the danger they pose, demands it. What I don't want is a system that does nothing but lock people up. I do not want a country that puts every wrongdoer in a cell for twenty-three hours a day and throws them back out worse than they went in. The evidence could not be clearer. Norway used to have a reoffending rate of around seventy per cent, about the same as America now. [3] They stopped warehousing people. They built prisons around education and around getting someone out able to live a life, and their reoffending fell to around twenty per cent, less than half of ours. That's not a small decline, that's a significant, massive drop. [4] Additionally, restorative justice, done properly, cuts reoffending and leaves victims more satisfied than the courts do. [5]

And locking people up forever is not even the cheap option. It costs close to fifty thousand pounds a year to hold one person in a cell, many times what a community sentence costs, and we burn around eighteen billion a year mopping up reoffending we never prevented. [6] Punishment on its own might feel good in the moment, but actually it isn't tough. It's lazy, it's expensive, and it makes more victims, not fewer. And that's what we should be focused on, the victims.

So on one hand I'm raging about the lack of sentence for these boys and on the other I'm also saying we need to stop locking people up and throwing away the key. And that's ok.

Because the world is not black and white, and pretending it is, is a problem. Everything now is a side. Lock them up or let them off. We have lost the ability to hold two true things at once, and the internet has trained us to pick a team and scream at the other one. I think that same poison is in this story twice over. It's in boys who absorbed enough of the internet to believe that what they did was a thing you could do. And it's in the way we react to it, all heat, little thought, everyone certain, nobody actually looking at the machine.

So let's look at the machine. Because the real question is why this happened.

Let's start with the easy one, the answer most of those two hundred thousand+ signatures are aimed at. One bad judge. And there's absolutely something in it. He had discretion. Nothing forced his hand. The prosecution stood up and told him this case was akin to one where a teenage rapist was jailed for eight years, and he still chose the very softest end of everything in front of him. [7] That was a choice, and it's why the Attorney General is now sending the case to the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient. [7] The system itself thinks he may have got it badly wrong.

But one bad judge is the one we default to, because it's easy. Remove the man, feel like something was done, move on. And if two hundred thousand+ of us stop there, he goes, we feel better for a fortnight, and the machine that pointed him this way carries on completely untouched. So sign it, be loud, but don't stop at the man. It is so much bigger than him.

Because the system gave him the room. For children, the law says prison must always be a last resort. [8] The whole framework is built, deliberately, to keep kids out of cells, and it warns against criminalising children unnecessarily. And that is a good principle. I believe in it. It exists for the fourteen-year-old who shoplifted, who got in one stupid fight, the child who shouldn't have one bad day define the rest of their life. But it was never built imagining a thirteen-year-old who rapes a girl at knifepoint, films it, and does it again to someone else two months later. So when a case like that occurs, the system's own instinct is still: divert, rehabilitate, don't criminalise, and a judge who simply follows that instinct falls exactly where this one did. That is far more frightening than one bad day, because it isn't a glitch. It is the default setting, working as designed, on a case it was never designed for. And it can happen again, with a different judge, following the very same logic.

Additionally, why is there room, in 2026, for rape to be treated as a last-resort-to-imprison offence at all? Why does the framework have that blind spot in the first place?

Because the whole machine was built in a world that has never taken violence against women and girls seriously enough. A system built with girls at the centre would have a line that rape obviously, unarguably crosses, every single time, no discretion required. Ours doesn't, reliably. And the same blindness runs through every part of it. Fewer than three in a hundred reported rapes even reach a charge. [9] The ones that do take years to even get to court. The police still have misogyny stitched through them, with the official review into the Metropolitan Police finding it institutionally misogynistic. [10] And women still aren't believed when they walk in to report. And at the very top, the minister whose actual job was violence against women and girls walked out last month, saying real change only ever came when she forced it in the wake of a catastrophe. [11]

So no. The Fordingbridge sentence is not the system failing. It is the system working exactly as it was built to work. It is the machine being honest, out loud, where we could all finally see it, about whose future it instinctively protects and whose safety it does not. One judge pulled the trigger. But the system loaded the gun, and it was pointed at the girls long before he ever walked into that courtroom.

And here, strangely, is where the hope is. Because if this really were one bad judge, we would be powerless. Luck of the draw. Nothing to do but cross our fingers for a kinder one next time. But it isn't one bad judge. It's a system built on the wrong priorities. And anything built on the wrong priorities can be rebuilt on the right ones. And that's why I'm here, shouting about it.

That is not a wish. It is a direction. A justice system built with girls at the centre would believe women the moment they reported. It would have sentencing that treats rape as the line it is, not something left to whether one man fancies being lenient that day. It would have prisons that genuinely rehabilitate, because that is what protects the next girl, fewer reoffenders, not more. Proper support on the way out, because a third of people reoffend with stable housing and two-thirds without it, so support quite literally halves it. [12] It would rebuild the probation service we have gutted, judged unsustainable and running on roughly half the staff it needs after a botched privatisation we are still cleaning up. [13] And a government that acts before it is shamed into it, not after.

That is not the weak option. It is the harder, braver, more honest one. It wants fewer victims instead of just more cells.

There is an irony in all this… I'm raging about it on social media. We dragged that petition to two hundred thousand+ names on social media. The same machine I think helped teach those boys that a girl was a thing you could do what you liked to. But social media isn't neutral. It's built to pull people to the extremes and keep them scrolling, and left to its own current it carried those boys somewhere monstrous. The petition is us turning it the other way on purpose. Same water. Opposite direction. Where boys learn this in the first place, who is feeding it to them, and why nobody seems to be stopping it, that is what I want to talk about next. It needs its own piece, and it's coming.

Because here is what I keep coming back to. Ten years ago this sentence would have passed in silence, in a regional paper, gone by Tuesday. It didn't. A whole country recoiled, the story travelled the world, the Attorney General was forced to look again, and hundreds of thousands of us put our names down. That collective “no” is the ground moving under our feet, right now.

So sign the petition. Be loud. Then aim that loudness at something bigger than one man, because the rage is right, it just deserves a bigger target than him. He was only ever the face of it.

We did this. We forced this. And if we can force a review, we can force the rest. So share this, send it to someone who needs to read it, and keep going.

Because it's already working. And we are nowhere near done.

The receipts

1. Petition to investigate the judge, signature count of 236,642 recorded at 6:35am on Thursday 4 June 2026 Change.org

2. The case, the ten convictions, the non-custodial sentences and the two separate attacks two months apart: Crown Prosecution Service, Wessex, 2026.

3. Norway's reoffending rate of around 70% before its prison reforms, comparable to the US: reporting on Norway's prison system, UCSF Magazine, 2021.

4. Norway's current two-year reconviction rate of around 20%, less than half the UK's, and no demonstrated link between more punitive regimes and lower reoffending: evidence submitted to the Justice Committee, UK Parliament.

5. Restorative justice reducing the frequency of reoffending by 14%, with 85% victim satisfaction: Ministry of Justice evaluation, via the Restorative Justice Council; economic evaluation, National Library of Medicine, 2023.

6. Cost of around £48,000 a year per prison place: Ministry of Justice and National Audit Office figures. Total cost of reoffending in England and Wales estimated at around £18 billion a year: Ministry of Justice.

7. The prosecution's comparison to a previous case in which a teenage rapist was jailed for eight years, and the referral of the sentences to the Court of Appeal as unduly lenient: ITV News Meridian, 28 May 2026; Attorney General's Office, gov.uk, 2026.

8. Custody as a last resort for children, and the warning against unnecessary criminalisation of children: Sentencing Council, "Sentencing children and young people: overarching principles," definitive guideline.

9. Fewer than 3 in 100 reported rapes resulting in a charge: Home Office and ONS crime outcomes data, year ending March 2025.

10. The Metropolitan Police found institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic: Baroness Casey Review, March 2023, commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard by a serving officer.

11. Jess Phillips's resignation as a Home Office minister on 12 May 2026, and her stated reasons: her resignation letter, via Politics.co.uk.

12. Around one-third of people reoffending when released to settled accommodation, compared with around two-thirds without it: Prison Reform Trust, written evidence to UK Parliament.

13. The probation service judged unsustainable and operating with around half the staff it needs, and the part-privatisation under Transforming Rehabilitation in 2014, reversed in 2021: National Audit Office, 2025; House of Commons Justice Committee.