Young boys guilty of trying to rape girl, 8

Two boys aged 10 and 11 were found guilty today of attempting to rape a girl of eight in the UK.

They were among the youngest boys to be prosecuted for rape in Britain. They were both aged 10 last October when an eight-year-old girl complained to her mother that she had been assaulted.

The youngsters had been playing together in Hayes, west London, when the girl said she was taken into a block of flats where her ordeal began.

The boys sat with their mothers and solicitors in the well of the court at the Old Bailey, and lawyers dispensed with their wigs and gowns for the two-week trial.

The boys were each found guilty of two charges of attempted rape, but both were cleared of two alternative offences of rape.

They had denied assaulting the girl and their barristers claimed they were just being naughty or playing a game.

But the judge Mr Justice Saunders refused their pleas to throw the case out after the girl admitted she had not been truthful about some of her evidence.

He said it was the jury’s job to decide if the witness could be trusted and he added that the girl had been consistent in what she told adults, including police and doctors, soon after the incident.

The girl’s police video interview was played to the court and then she was questioned by barristers through a videolink to an ante-room.

The judge remarked that she looked exhausted at the end, when she began to answer “yeah” to most of the questions.

Rosina Cottage, prosecuting, told the court that the boys approached the girl when she was playing with a friend.

She said: “Together they took her to different locations near where they lived in order to find a sufficiently secluded spot to assault her.”

The girl was assaulted in a block of flats, a bin shed and a field.

The girl’s mother told the court she had found her with the boys near a field after another child said the boys were hurting her.

“She said (the boys) have been doing sex with me,” said the mother. The girls' mother asked her what she meant, and she gave more detail.

"She told me she wanted to go home but they made her do it," the mother said today. "They told her not to tell anyone. I was still sitting in the car because I was absolutely stunned by what she had told me. She was very, very embarrassed. She was squirming.”

In her police video interview, the girl clutched a teddy bear as she said she was playing with a five-year-old boy when the older boys offered to take her to her friend’s home in the flats.

But in the hallway, she said: “They pulled their pants down and showed me (themselves). Then they pulled my pants down. I didn’t want to and then they put me into the lift and then they done it again.”

The girl said she was taken to a bin shed and assaulted before being taken to the field where she was assaulted again.

In a second video interview two months later, the girl said one of the boys had thrown her scooter into a bush.

She said: “They said if I didn’t pull down my pants, they won’t get my scooter from the bush.”