Crowd Cheers as Convicted Rapist is Eliminated in Olympic Beach Volleyball

https://lemmy.world/post/18293636

Crowd Cheers as Convicted Rapist is Eliminated in Olympic Beach Volleyball - Lemmy.World

Non-paywall: https://12ft.io/https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowd-cheers-as-convicted-rapist-is-eliminated-in-olympic-beach-volleyball?ref=home?ref=home [https://12ft.io/https://www.thedailybeast.com/crowd-cheers-as-convicted-rapist-is-eliminated-in-olympic-beach-volleyball?ref=home?ref=home]

As a Dutch guy I feel compelled to apologize for our national olypic committee selecting and sending this douche nozzle to Paris.

He’s still going to be representing the team in the next competition. You guys need to make sure your government knows it’s not ok to send child groomer rapists onto the world stage to represent you. And his teammates seem to be ok with playing aside him again.

“If I can speak for him, after the match we lost, we were disappointed,” Immers said of his teammate Van de Velde. “But we said to each other: ‘Look what we did together. Look how hard we fought with all the attention.’ We stayed together. We cried together off the field and said, ‘OK, let’s just enjoy this moment.’ And we did that. So I’m happy we did it that way.”

Van de Velde and Immers will play together next in the European championships in the Netherlands right after the Olympics, and then the Dutch championships.

Sorry, but this is kind of fucked up. No offense to you personally, but my opinion of the Dutch just took a nosedive.

You dislike the Dutch now because their system of imprisonment is based on rehabilitation?
He was imprisoned by the UK, not the Dutch. The Dutch got him out of prison. After a year. For raping a 12-year-old multiple times.
He was first extradited by the Dutch and also imprisoned in the Netherlands (as is normal in international crimes). It’s not like they sprung him from a UK prison.
And exactly how long was he in prison in the Netherlands? For repeatedly raping a 12-year-old girl?

I totally agree with you and fuck this guy, but there is some context to his sentence here in the Netherlands:

One legal distinction is that Van de Velde is unlikely to have been convicted of rape had he stood trial in the Netherlands rather than England. In England, sex with a 12-year-old is rape, regardless of the circumstances: an under-16 cannot legally consent. But after he was extradited to the Netherlands, having serving almost a year of his prison sentence, he was released after less than a month. Under Dutch law, his crime was deemed to be the lesser offence of ontucht, sexual acts that violate social-ethical norms.

From theguardian.com/…/netherlands-child-rapist-olympi…

Why the Netherlands seems unfazed by sending a convicted child rapist to the Olympics

Differences between English and Dutch law might be part of the reason why Steven van de Velde is seen differently at home than abroad, says Renate van der Zee, a Dutch writer and journalist

The Guardian
Oh I know. It’s disgusting, but it’s the law and you can’t retroactively change it. But they could, at the very least, not let the fucker on their Olympics team.
100% agree. I’m Dutch and he’s sent there to represent me/us/the country, it’s fucking disgusting.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that none of the people in this thread defending him being on the team seem to be Dutch.
Is it? What do you read into that?
That Dutch people are apparently not as supportive of a child rapist from their country than other people from other countries are.
You, like most people in this thread, are confusing support for a person with support for a form of punishment which is humanitarian and rehabilitative, rather than vengeful and punitive.

How is a year in prison for repeatedly raping a 12-year-old girl either humanitarian or rehabilitative?

He called it nonsense. He joked about finding 10-year-olds at this Olympics. He has never made a public apology. Where is the sign rehabilitation?

He joked about finding 10-year-olds at this Olympics.

WTF? Seriously?

Someone in another thread showed a deleted Instagram post, but I can’t find it now. I suppose it could have been a photoshop or something. Also, I don’t speak Dutch so I could only approximate that’s what it said. Anyway, the rest is definitely true.
The times article said he was very transparent and remorseful though. I find it really bad that you people think a country would be so desperate as to let a criminal off the hook just because he’s good at some sport, it’s not like he’s a powerful politician or something.

Oh, well if the Times article said so.

Did they show exactly how he was remorseful? Because it didn’t include a public apology.