Revenge porn offenders won’t be locked up ‘if victim isn’t too distressed’
MEN and women who humiliate ex-lovers with revenge porn may be spared jail even in the most serious cases, under sentencing guidelines proposed yesterday.
Those who post sexual images online to cause their victim major distress can escape with just a community punishment, they suggest.
Only if the victim is considered ‘vulnerable’ will there be a prison sentence, under new court rules.
The first sentencing rules for disclosing private sexual images – which became a crime under laws passed in 2015 – were set down in a consultation paper by the Sentencing Council.
The revenge porn guidance is likely to go into operation later this year, following a three-month consultation period. It says the worst offences involve ‘conduct intended to maximise distress’, such as sending pictures to religiousminded parents or younger brothers and sisters, or ‘deep planning’, including setting up fake websites in the victim’s name and inviting abuse.
A large number of widely-distributed images will also count against an offender. In these cases the benchmark sentence should be w a year’s jail term if ‘the victim is particularly vulnerable’, or has suffered ‘very serious distress’.
The highest sentence should be 18 months, the proposals say, despite a maximum two-year term possible under the 2015 Criminal Justice and Courts Act. But the punishment is reduced to a ‘high-level community order’ outside jail in cases where ‘minimal distress or harm has been caused to the victim’.
The caveat comes despite despite the Council acknowledging in its paper that revenge porn always causes distress.
It follows the row over a Manchester judge’s remarks after he declined to imprison an abusive husband who had throttled his wife, forced her to drink bleach and hit her with a cricket bat.
Judge Richard Mansell QC was following sentencing guidelines when he said Mustafa Bashir should get only a suspended sentence for his attacks on Fakhara Karim because he was ‘not convinced she was a vulnerable person’.
But Kathy Gyngell, a fellow of the right-wing Centre for Policy Studies think tank, said: ‘To give an offender easier treat-
‘Punishment should always be the same’
ment because a judge thinks the victim can look after herself or himself is wrong.’
Earlier this month the Sentencing Council proposed that courts should be more lenient on ethnic minority criminals under 18 because they may have suffered ‘discrimination and negative experiences of authority’. Yesterday’s guidelines also proposed sentences for the new offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in a family or intimate relationship. The most serious offenders will face two years in prison.
Criminologist Dr David Green, director of the Civitas think tank, said: ‘We should go back to the basic principle that the punishment is the same whatever the characteristics of the victim.’ But Sentencing Council member Mrs Justice McGowan, a High Court judge, insisted: ‘The new guidelines we are proposing will help ensure sentences reflect the seriousness of these offences and take into account the increases in sentence levels for stalking and harassment introduced by Parliament.’