According to the prosecutor, the man should have verified the age of the young person he met, for example, from the HSL travel ticket.
Prosecutor applied for a punishment for a man born in 1999 for sexually abusing an underage girl.
According to the indictment, the man had had unprotected intercourse several times with a 14-year-old girl at the time of the act in his apartment in Espoo in the fall of 2021. The man was 22 years old at the time.
The man and the girl ended up spending several nights together. According to the district court’s verdict, the man was convinced that he was spending time with an 18-year-old university student.
The district court of Länsi-Uusimaa decided the case exceptionally in favor of the defendant, because according to the court, the man had no reason to suspect the girl’s age was wrong or consider her likely to be under 16 years old.
Therefore, the intent of the act is not satisfied and the charge of aggravated sexual abuse of a child was dismissed.
Girl and the man had met on the dating app Badoo. The interested party had declared his age as 18 in the application and said that he was studying at university.
In court, the girl said that she created the profile together with her friend to find adults who would buy them alcohol and cigarettes.
The girl and the man had met for the first time at a student party organized in the center of Helsinki. The girl had said that she lives in the house she inherited from her father and had sent the man a picture of herself from the driver’s seat. They were supposed to go for a drive, but the meeting was cancelled.
In court according to the heard accused, they had spent several days and nights together, watched TV, visited Ikea and the market. These meetings had also involved having sex.
They had also met the man’s friends together. According to the accused, the girl had never asked the man to buy her alcohol or cigarettes.
In court, the prosecutor appealed, among other things, to the fact that the accused could have verified which HSL ticket the girl was traveling with. The district court found the idea strange, because even 17-year-olds can travel with a children’s ticket.
In sexual crimes against children, it is quite typical for the defendants to plead that they were unaware of the actual age of the person concerned. It is rarer that the court concludes that the perpetrator did not act intentionally.
#Judgments #man #sex #preteen #court #acquitted #charges
