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Child rapist Steven van de Velde weeps in first interview since Olympics outrage (www.mirror.co.uk)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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'.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

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.