Can an 11-year-old be a sex offender?

To tell it one way, on Wednesday, a British judge let the two accused sexual assailants of an 8-year-old girl go free. Or to put it another way, a pair of little boys have been put on trial for their innocent curiosity, and now carry the stigma of being registered sex offenders. In this story, nobody wins.

On Oct. 27, in West London, a little girl told her mother she'd been assaulted. She said that two local 10-year-old boys lured her out of her home, exposed themselves to her, pulled down her pants and attacked her. She said they threw her scooter into the bushes and told her she had to do what they said. She said they raped her.
Later, under intense questioning, she said she had lied about being raped, but that she had been "naughty," and that she had been afraid to tell her mother. Attorneys in the case described it as a game of "show me yours and I will show you mine." In her testimony, the girl said she had not been penetrated, and there was no forensic evidence to suggest she had been.
The boys, who now have the distinction of being Britain's youngest registered sex offenders, received three years probation. They will be supervised, and work with social workers who will "train, guide and educate" them. In handing down the sentence, the judge said, "The jury decided that you did something very wrong which if you had been older would have very serious consequences for you. But you are very young and while I do not accept what happened was a game, I do accept that you didn’t realize how serious what you were doing was."

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Because of the age of the three parties involved, the details of exactly what went on during the alleged attack are very sketchy. Back in May, the barrister for one of the boys, Linda Sprudwick, told the jury, "Maybe it went too far, maybe it went to touching."...

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Mary Elizabeth Williams @'Salon'