Wave of ‘young men of prior good character’ on sex charges

Judge jails man for raping student and asks if porn to blame for surge in cases

A JUDGE has expressed concern about the number of young men of previous good character coming before the courts for rape.

Judge Paul Burns said that while there are school programmes in place to inform young people about consent and pornography, ‘one must wonder if more needs to be done in this regard’.

The judge made the comments while sentencing a young man who raped an acquaintance. The victim, a college student, was just 18 at the time and a virgin.

The now 25-year-old Cork man was found guilty by a jury of one count of anally raping the young woman in her apartment on February 11, 2019, following a Central Criminal Court trial in Cork last November.

He cannot be named, to protect the complainant’s identity.

Sentencing the man yesterday,

Judge Burns said the man ‘took advantage of the complainant’s lack of sexual experience and abused the trust she placed in him by bringing him into her home’.

The judge noted the man comes from a good family, is well educated and has no previous convictions. The man now accepts the jury’s guilty verdict.

‘One wonders what caused this young man – well brought up and educated – to act in such a way on the night in question,’ the judge said, querying whether the effects of pornography had played a role.

He noted there were ‘a number of young men of otherwise good character’ coming before the courts for sexual crimes, and suggested that while there are programmes in schools on pornography and consent, ‘one wonders if more could be done in this regard’. He said there are ‘catastrophic consequences for engaging in sexual activity without consent’ and expressed concern that young people feel under pressure to engage in sexual activity before they are comfortable to do so.

He handed down a five-and-ahalf-year sentence to the man and suspended the final year on a number of conditions, including that he undertake a course on sexual consent.

A local Garda detective told Thomas Creed SC, prosecuting, that the young woman was celebrating Rag Week when she met the male student in a nightclub. The court heard he told her a fake name before they started kissing.

She brought him to her apartment where they had consensual sex. The court heard it was the woman’s first sexual experience.

Afterwards, the man asked her for anal sex and she replied: ‘No, no way’ a number of times.

The man then forced himself on her, anally raping her and causing her ‘enormous pain’, the detective said. He then asked her to perform oral sex on him afterwards, which she did although she felt disgust.

The man also filmed her on his mobile phone, telling her it was for his ‘w*nk bank’.

The girl’s friends were in the apartment at the time and she told them what had happened before the man left. Some male friends knew him from a sports team and told her his real name.

The next day, she confided in one of her lecturers and was brought to a sexual assault treatment unit and made a statement to gardaí. The man initially denied raping the woman. He now accepts the guilty verdict and wrote a letter of apology to the woman.

In her victim impact statement, the woman said she has spent five years trying to recover from the events of that night and that she lost her passion for her intended career as a result.

She said reliving what happened to her at trial left her exhausted and anxious but she was glad she did it. Jane Hyland SC, defending the man, said he was 20 at the time and since then has changed his life completely. He is remorseful and expressed his shame and disgust. Judge Burns backdated the four-and-a-half-year jail term to last December, when the man was taken into custody.

‘What caused him to act in such a way?’