A 15-year-old girl who was threatened with a knife and raped by three boys in Hampshire has said she is being “punished for something that wasn’t my fault”.
Olivia, whose name has been changed for legal reasons, was 14 when she was “outnumbered” by the trio after she became separated from her friends in January 2025.
Instead of focusing on her GCSE exams, she is now struggling with flashbacks. She told BBC Newsnight: “I just want to be able to go on a walk without being scared that I’m going to see them and they’re gonna try to do something again.”
There has been a national outcry after the three boys involved avoided custodial sentences, with the judge saying he wanted to “avoid criminalising these children unnecessarily”.
After multiple complaints, the attorney general Lord Hermer referred the sentences to the Court of Appeal under the unduly lenient sentence scheme.
Olivia told The Times: “It just felt like I was being punished for something that wasn’t my fault because it just means I can’t go out,” she said. “I just wanted to be able to go out without the fear of seeing them or being around them.
“I just kind of thought, well why did I go through all of that for nothing to come of it? Why did I put myself through that much? To have to deal with this for the rest of my life with them being right, it wasn’t really fair.”
Despite the defence in the trial suggesting she was a rebellious child, her family said she had been raised in a protective and “quite strict” household, and that she had enjoyed going out with her friends before the attack.
At the time of the incident, she had become isolated from her friends with the first defendant threatening her with a knife, and ordering her to leave her AirTag tracking device and phone inside a shop.
She was then forced to walk to a secluded field near the Fordingbridge recreation ground, where her clothes were cut and she was raped.
The attack was filmed, with one video showing Olivia lying on the ground with “her face buried in her hands”. Some of the footage was later shared online by the boys.
A police investigation subsequently identified a second victim, aged 15, who had been raped by the two older defendants two months previously in an underpass.
Olivia’s father said it had been “traumatic” to watch his daughter change from a “bubbly, very outgoing girl” to being afraid to leave her own home, out of fear she may bump into the defendants.
He said: “We as parents do what we can to protect our children. When we get to a stage like this where you can’t really protect them, you have to put your faith within the justice system to do the right thing. And they’ve just completely let us down.”
Both 15-year-old boys received a three-year youth rehabilitation order with 180 days of intensive supervision, with one noted in court as having an IQ in the “bottom one per cent of his contemporaries”.
The youngest defendant, now aged 14, was given 18-month youth rehabilitation order for two rape charges, after encouraging the second defendant in the rape of Olivia and taking indecent images.
Olivia’s mother said the judge handled the sentencing “completely wrong”, while her father said he had to leave the court at points, describing the judge’s comments as “horrific”.
Olivia’s father said: “I think for me, with what’s happened, it is as good as a life sentence for my daughter. It will get easier with time but it will never go away.
“If they are given a custodial sentence, obviously it’s not going to be a life sentence. But I want to see the justice system do something that will impact them for life because this impacts her for life.”
