It is a very poor Sentence, I think, considering the seriousness of the offence. Such behaviour should be punished harshly, with none of this nonsense about poor health resulting in him receiving a lighter punishment. Children must be protected from such people.
I would imagine that the Judge did not come to the decision about the sentence lightly, nor in an uninformed manner. They're obliged to take into account all the information available, which will include psychiatric reports, medical reports, social reports and anything else which the defence team considered pertinent. He will know the precise details of the case, including the age of the boys, their proximity to the defendant, whether any physical contact was initiated and, if so, by whom, the likely impact on the boys and a great deal else, We, on the other hand, know next to nothing, other than what we can gleam from the Daily Post article so perhaps it could be seen as a little unwise to wax lyrical on how lenient the sentence was.
In this country we do have a procedure through which criminal cases must pass and - fortunately - we have abolished the ducking stool, the stocks and lynch mobs, although certain tabloids clearly wish we hadn't. We do not know anything about the 'seriousness of the offence', either, save what we glean - again - second hand from the Daily Post. Can anybody seriously believe that this man was anything other than, at best, mildly deranged? He was sitting in a car, naked, except for a bra, we are told. He offers two boys £250.00 to take his photo. I cannot conceive of any reaction other than hysterical amusement on the part of the boys (being a father of two boys myself I know that's exactly what reaction they'd have had) and far from any sentence being insufficient I imagine this man is now being closely supervised by mental health professionals - as he should be.
It's all too easy to be members of the armchair judiciary, especially when our only source of information is a sketchy (at best) newspaper article. Perhaps we ought to be concerned with more obvious crimes towards children, such as the Stephen Lawrence affair, which resulted in the Met Police being condemned as institutionally racist. Or the thousands of children being brutalised, starved, raped, beaten and maimed in countries like Syria, or the children who attempt to flee countries like N Korea who are recaptured by the N Koreans and who then face torture and possible death.
