Uni predator who raped student is jailed for five years
Burns bragged that he meant to have sex with 100 women
A UNIVERSITY worker who boasted he was going to have sex with 100 women was jailed for five years yesterday for raping a student.
Duncan Burns, 24, was meant to help vulnerable students in his role as an accommodation liaison officer at Stirling University.
But he was a sexual predator who forced himself on a 20-year-old student after meeting her on Tinder.
Burns claimed that the sex was consensual and continues to protest his innocence.
But at the High Court in Glasgow yesterday, judge Lord Mulholland told him: “You were convicted by a jury of rape. The jury rejected your explanation.
“You ignored this woman’s wishes and raped her. This court takes a very serious view of this.
“You are sentenced to five years in prison.”
Lord Mulholland also placed Burns on the sex offenders’ register.
Burns’s victim admitted she had gone back to his room willingly a number of times and had wanted a relationship with him.
But she consistently refused his demands to have sex with him and said “No” repeatedly as he finally forced himself on her on March 23 last year.
Speaking through tears, the woman, who had never had a boyfriend, said: “I always perceived rape to be more like with a stranger or with violence.
“I knew I’d said no and he knew I was saying no.
“I had no doubts in my mind but don’t think at the time I knew it was rape.”
The jury at the High Court in Livingston heard that another woman who also had sex with Burns went to the police with an almost identical account of him physically, verbally and sexually abusing her then raping her.
But they found Burns, of Birkhill, Angus, not guilty by majority verdict of twice raping the second woman.
Asked by Mark Stewart QC, defending, if she was pressing Burns to have a relationship with her, the first woman replied: “Sometimes he would say he wanted to sleep with 100 women and then he would commit to me.”
He also told her that when she was famous and on TV, he would say: “Oh, I took her virginity.”
The jury heard that the woman was in a “distressed state” when she told friends and university officials what Burns had done.
Of the rape, she said: “I remember it hurting and I told him that it was hurting. He didn’t stop. It didn’t change anything. He just carried on.”