‘Naive’ 20-Year-Old Student Spared Jail for Raping 12 Year-Old-Girl he Met on Tinder

A British court spared a 20-year-old man jail after being convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl he met on Tinder.

Jachin Joshua Mascall, 20, of Dunstable near London, raped a twelve-year-old girl multiple times between the 3rd and the 5th of May 2021, but avoided has jail due to being too “immature and naive” to realise the girl was not 16 years old. He was instead sentenced to a community order for three years to do 200 hours of unpaid work and has to pay £450 in costs.

Mascall, who was 19 at the time of the offence, met the unnamed 12-year-old on the online dating app Tinder and spent two days in her company in London where they had sex in multiple public locations including the car park of Westfields Shopping Centre. The court heard that while the victim could not legally consent to sex she acted in a “sexually suggestive” way towards Mascall, and the court decided the victim “wasn’t in distress” and wasn’t coerced into the acts.

Judge Freya Newbury of Inner London Crown Court opted not to jail the Mascall as she said he was “immature and possibly naïve” and that’s why she believed Mascall’s defence that he thought the girl “was over 16”, the UK’s legal age of consent, the Daily Mail reports.

The judge ordered statutory rapist Mascall to attend 48 sessions of a programme designed to encourage maturity and to 40 days of rehabilitation activity.

The prosecution also accepted Mascall’s defence saying that because he met her on Tinder and she had a car it was possible that he didn’t know her true age. This is despite the fact that Mascall met the girl in person, and spent two days with her.

Judge Newbery also ruled that there was “no suggestion” Mascall had “any paedophile tendencies at all” and accepted Mascall believed the girl was over 16 saying, “you’ve explained that because she had a car and a place to live that she was of course an adult”.

“In other words, you didn’t know that she was 12 or that she was under 16. You were shocked to discover that she was so young when you were arrested”, Newbury continued.

Billy Howarth, the founder of Parents Against Grooming UK, an anti-abuse, pro-children’s rights group based in Rochdale told Breitbart that he believes the judge “should be struck off” following her decision on Mascall’s case.

“It seems to be the mould as of late, that there is more empathy for offenders than survivors of these horrific crimes. The victim-blaming in the words of a serving judge is abhorrent”, he said.