A woman convicted of sexual assault against a man at a football match has avoided being jailed despite her victim requesting she be given equal treatment to a male sexual abuser doing the same thing to a woman.
Jemma Whiteside has managed to avoid being jailed by a court in Britain despite being found guilty of sexual assault, a report published on Wednesday has claimed.
The decision has been decried as demonstrating a “double standard” within the country’s justice system, with one NGO arguing that the ruling shows that men and women are not viewed as being “equal” when it comes to committing, and being the victim of, sex crimes.
However, the ruling is only one of many recent instances of soft sentencing seen in the UK recently, with the UK courts also refusing to jail a police officer found to be in possession of at least one sexually explicit image of a child earlier this year despite jailing another service member for sharing memes.
According to a report by The Telegraph, despite the individual who was sexually assaulted by Whiteside pleading in his personal impact statement that it “should not matter whether the assault was by a man or a woman, [the case] should be treated the same”, the judge decided to hand down a nine-month community order to Whiteside.
He is also said to have cited alcohol as a mitigating factor in the crime, during which Whiteside is said to have groped her victim’s genitals and rubbed her buttocks on his shoulder.
“In drink people can and often do things which are very out of character,” District Court Judge James Clarke reportedly said. “I am sure the lady had been drinking during the course of the afternoon. She was a lady in high spirits who was hurried by her friends and taking last sips of alcohol in the process.”
“The defendant was a joker, and this is a prank that has gone very badly wrong whilst committed in drink and perhaps showing off to friends on the occasion,” he went on to say.
However, Mark Brooks, who chairs the ManKind Initiative charity for male victims of domestic abuse reportedly did not agree with this interpretation of events, slamming the decision as displaying a “double standard”.
“This poor sentence shows the double standards that men face because society and some judges do not view the men as being equals to women when it comes to these types of crimes,” The Telegraph reports Brooks as saying.
“If the sexes were reversed, we would rightly expect a man to serve some form of prison sentence, so the outcome here should have been the same,” he concluded.
Despite Brooks’ distaste at the ruling, it is far from the only time the UK courts have handed down extremely lenient sentences to some criminals while throwing the book at others.
For example, while a police officer found to have in his possession at least one indecent image of a child was spared jail back in October, another member of British law enforcement was put behind bars for sharing memes depicting American felon George Floyd.
James Watts, a constable that had been serving with West Mercia Police, was sentenced to 20 weeks behind bars for sharing the memes, which were deemed to be “grossly offensive”.
“The hostility that you demonstrated on the basis of race makes this offending so serious that I cannot deal with it by a community penalty or a fine,” remarked deputy chief magistrate Tan Ikram during sentencing.
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