Punishing Bad Acts

In  May 2014, two 12 year old girls lured a third into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. This was the utterly bizarre Slender Man case. One blow connected with Payton Leutner’s heart; a millimetre the other way, and she would have been killed, but incredibly she survived and made a miraculous recovery, though of course no one recovers totally psychologically from something so horrific.

It was years before Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier were brought to trial, but a Wisconsin judge would hand Weier a complex sentence including 25 years to life. Geyser would eventually receive a sentence of 40 years to life, again with psychiatric treatment.

These are terrible punishments to impose on two girls who committed their crime at such a young age, but what was the alternative? Some people believe the female of the species should never be punished for their bad acts, however dreadful, certainly if their victims are men. These people are overwhelmingly, but not entirely, third wave feminists. Consider the following:

In June 2008, Jodi Arias murdered Travis Alexander, stabbing him more than two dozen times, nearly hacking off his head, and putting a bullet in his brain for good measure, yet according to her so-called expert witness Alyce Laviolette, Jodi rather than Travis was the greater victim of domestic violence. Incidentally, regardless of the question raised in this video, there is no credible evidence that Travis ever so much as struck Jodi Arias in anger; it is clear he was infatuated with her, and made the fatal mistake of letting her back into his home after he had broken off with her, she having hacked into his e-mail account to send obscene messages to people, including his boss, and vandalised his car.

Trevor Armitage made the same mistake. Emma Humphreys was a teenage prostitute he had taken in. Humphreys had been living with her mother in Canada; when she returned to England she moved in with her father and his new wife; then she moved in with her grandmother and aunt, but she didn’t like that arrangement either. There was some evidence that Armitage had acted as her pimp, but Humphreys was selling her body before she met him. After trashing his home, he kicked her out, but took her back. She ended up stabbing him through the heart, and was convicted of murder, but after a contrived appeal a few years later, she was sprung from prison only to overdose accidentally or otherwise three years on.

Cyntoia Brown was another teenager prostitute who murdered a man in cold blood, this time a total stranger. Because she was sixteen and the age of consent in Tennessee is eighteen, her supporters claim she was a victim of child sex trafficking, but when she was arrested for the murder of Johnny Allen, she told the police she was nineteen, and there is no reason to believe she told Allen otherwise. Brown was freed from prison last year.

Yet another alleged victim of child sex trafficking is the former Virginia Roberts, who has slimed many public figures from Alan Dershowitz to Prince Andrew. Roberts claims to have been “forced” to have sex with the Prince, and forced to accept a large sum of money for doing so, but the notion that she was pressured or mesmerised into crossing the Atlantic with Jeffrey Epstein, forced to rub shoulders with celebrities at a world famous nightclub, and forced to travel to Thailand alone at his behest, is too stupid to comment on. Rather than being a victim of Epstein, she was  an accomplice, recruiting underage girls for him.

The latest innocent female victim is Shamima Begum. This odious young woman, who was born in the UK, left the country five years ago aged just 15. Travelling to Syria via Turkey, she married a jihadi, and quickly bore him three children, who are all dead, something that is hardly surprising considering the conditions in which they were born. Her husband, who was captured some time ago, appears to have seen the error of his ways, but Begum has not, although she says she would now like to return to Britain. She was stripped of her British citizenship last year, and told she would not be permitted to return,  but this month, the Court Of Appeal overruled her exile and said she must be allowed to return, although it did not rule on her citizenship status.

Last year, Begum’s lawyer claimed she had been “groomed”, the same claim made by Virginia Roberts albeit in an entirely different context.  Who is paying for Begum’s appeals? The answer appears to be the British taxpayer.

Regarding the grooming claim, this may be true, but just as two 12 year old girls can be held accountable for their terrible act, so at some point must genuine victims of grooming when they go too far. Rosemary Letts was only l5 when she met her future husband, Fred West. He was some 12 years her senior, and there can be no doubt she was groomed by him. She went on to become first his equal then his superior in the depravity stakes. At some point the special pleading has to stop. Shamima Begum should not be allowed back into the UK unless it is to spend the next twenty or more years in a prison cell.