Van de Velde was booed and jeered while competing at the Games. Dutch Olympic officials went to lengths to protect him from the press during the event.
He has now opened up to Dutch publication NOS about his experience, admitting that while he anticipated backlash, the intensity of it took him by surprise. "I definitely had a moment of breaking down, both before the tournament and during it. But I thought ‘I’m not going to give others the power to bully me away or get me away’.
Sure sign of mental illness is the idea that somehow you are the victim when you raped a child.
Well maybe you shouldn’t have raped a child, dipshit.
I’m sorry… you feel like you’re the wronged party here?
Is this dude a fucking sociopath?
He’s pulling out a smaller version of the DARVO tactic. Sexual predators do that quite a bit when they get caught.
Deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.
“The audience was wrong to boo me! They’re the bullies!” Meanwhile he completely ignores why he got booed.
Probably, considering he groomed a child in another country over the internet before he traveled there and raped her repeatedly.
He was proclaimed innocent of grooming. Because he did not groom her. Do people not know basic details of a case before they start spouting nonsense on the internet?
This is a bit of an interesting conundrum …
Granted, I do not know the details of the crime for which he plead guilty and was sentenced. Was it a violent rape? Or was it a concensual get together but she was far to young and he was slapped hard for it? Now I don’t condone it either way but it might give nuance to how he feels about it.
On one side, he, and society overall see it as he served his sentence (not all of it but that is not his fault) and is rehabilitated, he made changes to his life after that and made sure he is not near minors alone again, now even has a family of his own.
But, I really think it’s wrong to think rehabilitation means you can stand on a podium for admiration, or be in a place that strives for excellence in rhe public eye.
This is where he and the people around him should have realized that, no, no matter how good he is in his sport, he should just not be a competitor in the olympics as a shining example of greatness.
Rehabilitation means to be allowed back into society, in a menial job out of view and not in a spotlight of any kind.
It is definitely not a full reset on your life and you can do whatever, thinking people mostly forgot what you did.
So the bullying boo’s are quite justified imo and he should have expected this backlash because he sought the spotlight and admiration for his greatness in sport. And it shows he thought it a deserved thing for his ego following the years of hardship he went through after making a big mistake when he was young.
He was a 19 year old man in the Netherlands talking to a 12 year old child in the United Kingdom on Facebook. He traveled to see her in the UK, got her drunk, raped her, and then attempted to get a hotel room with her. They couldn’t, so they slept under a stairwell and he raped her twice the next day. She had told him at one point that he was hurting her, but that didn’t stop him. After that, he flew back to the Netherlands and told her to go to a clinic for contraception.
So they were essentially strangers to each other with a significant age gap. I don’t know what her exact intentions were when speaking with him, but she was 12. Even if she were thinking about sex, it would not have been with an understanding of what that actually meant. She wasn’t just under age, she was well under the legal age of consent. There’s a reason that children cannot legally consent to sex.
Also, he’s never really shown any remorse for his actions. At best, he’s said that it was the biggest mistake of his life, but his overall stance seems to be that he regrets getting caught rather than raping a child. He’s much more angry at people calling him a pedophile than he is at himself for doing wrong. So your final points may be true, but they aren’t really relevant to his case because it doesn’t appear that he could be considered rehabilitated. He’s merely completed a prison sentence which was made lighter by Dutch law not classifying his actions as rape at the time.
Thank you for elaborating on the backstory, seems I did not know half of the past of the case.
Tried a short google but there was no old in depth information about the case back then.
All in all it is at least a strange thing that the people around him thought it was a good idea for him to attend the olympics and enabled him to do it.
Alright… now I’m willing to bet that most people on here, if asked, believe strongly in criminal rehabilitation. But the comments here make me think ‘maybe not’.
Would someone please explain that?
Sure. He hasn’t taken any real responsibility nor faced adquete consequences for raping a child. He blames others for “bullying” rather than making any attempt to understand the outrage.
If his crime had been committed decades ago, and he faced appropriate sentencing, and made steps at reconciliation with the community this would be a more nuanced conversation.
He was arrested, prosecuted and convicted. He pled guilty. He served his prison sentence and underwent psychological treatment. He has taken extensive measures to avoid contact with children. This all happened over a decade ago. He repeatedly reflected on what happened and regrets it to this day.
The child in question only seems to regret he was arrested, and cut herself because of it. She doesn’t seem to think negatively about him at all, and because of that he was not convicted of grooming.
At this point, what the fuck more do you want from him? He’s fully rehabilitated. He knows what he did, why it’s bad and has done more than enough to prevent it from happening again. This “moral outrage” is just stupid and seems to be largely fuelled by right-wing British tabloids, because here in the Netherlands nobody seems to give a shit.
What’s your message here? “Rape a child, rape a dozen, we don’t care because we’re going to ostracize you from society forever?” Why would anyone bother to rehabilitate then?
“Rape a child, rape a dozen, we don’t care because we’re going to ostracize you from society forever?” Why would anyone bother to rehabilitate then?
Sounds fine to me. Put them all in a cage forever. We don’t need people in society that have to have “raping kids is a bad thing” explained to them. If I was confident the justice system wouldn’t falsely convict people I’d be arguing to execute them.
So lock them up forever, or kill them?
What do you do when innocent people end up getting convicted?
Why do we need people in society who need “raping adults is a bad thing” explained to them? Or “killing kids is a bad thing”? Or “killing adults is a bad thing”? Or “drinking and driving is a bad thing”? Or “robbery is a bad thing”?
So lock them up forever, or kill them?
I already covered this in my post. If we could determine guilt with 100% accuracy kill them. We can’t so settle for locking them up forever. If they’re found to be innocent later they can be released and compensated for their time. For raping adults and killing kids the same criteria as raping kids should be applied.
Or “killing adults is a bad thing”? Or “drinking and driving is a bad thing”? Or “robbery is a bad thing”?
These are all very different from rape or harming children and there can be other factors to consider regarding motive that would have to be taken into account when doing the sentencing. For instance in the Gary Plauché case. He murdered the man who kidnapped and molested his son. If that’s his threshold for murder, it’s unlikely he would re-offend (and he didn’t for the rest of his life).
So we don’t need rapists (incl. of adults) or child murderers in society because they can’t be rehabilitated. But people who murder adults can serve their time and be welcomed back into society…am I following what you’re saying?
Are we counting it as the age of majority? Murder a 15/17 year old, imprisoned for life, murder a 16/18 year old, regular sentence?
Rape an adult, life imprisonment, murder an adult, regular sentence?
So we don’t need rapists (incl. of adults) or child murderers in society because they can’t be rehabilitated. But people who murder adults can serve their time and be welcomed back into society…am I following what you’re saying?
Apparently not. I said you have to look at the context of the murder to determine how to handle them appropriately. I even gave you an example of one where with mitigating circumstances. If it’s unlikely the murderer can be rehabilitated lock them up forever too. As for what’s considered a child I don’t have a good answer, I suppose again, it would have to be contextual.
