[user104658]

Originally Posted by ThomasC

Who is everyone?

Their victims, yes, the families of those victims? Time served will never be enough for them.

It wouldn't be a good deterrent. People who engage in sexual activities with children are mentally unwell. Deport them and let them potentially continue in another country? It's not going to stop some from still engaging in this sort of activity.

Most of the men in these grooming gangs are not mentally ill they're just abusers and rapists. They're not targetting pre-adolescent children, they're targetting teenage girls who have biologically reached the age of sexual maturity, but are nonetheless clearly not adults, are vulnerable, and easily groomed or manipulated which is precisely why we have an age of consent and statutory rape laws.

There's nothing to be gained by conflating statutory rapists and grooming gans like these with paedophilia, it simply is psychologically speaking not paedophilia, and in legal terms there's a clear distinction between child molestation (pre-pubescent children) and statutory rape (post-pubescent but under the age of consent).

That's not to say that one is more severe or worse than the other, that would be a separate debate, in this sense though I think it can inadvertantly DOWNPLAY the crimes of these men by saying that they have a mental illness or deviant compulsion that they can't control, rather than calling what they are; predators who target vulnerable young girls simply because they're more easily manipulated.