Liberal Forum

It is no big deal to the Dutch who sentence someone to 4 years for child rape.

A convicted child rapist is competing – it is one of most shameful episodes in Olympic history (msn.com)

The sunlight bathing the Eiffel Tower felt an incongruous backdrop to one of the bleakest Olympic stories ever told. Beach volleyball under a pristine sky, at the foot of the great soaring symbol of Paris: what was not to love? The boos from the crowd, sporadic at first but then insistent, soon told you. For there in his vivid orange strip was Steven van de Velde, a Dutch player defined by less by his top-10 world ranking than by his status as a convicted child rapist.It beggared belief, frankly, that this moment had come to pass. Eight years earlier, a judge in Aylesbury, sentencing him to four years in prison for raping a 12-year-old girl he had travelled from Amsterdam to Milton Keynes to meet, had told him: “You were training as a potential Olympian. Your hopes of representing your country now lie as a shattered dream.” And yet here he was, chosen by the Netherlands to uphold their honor on the loftiest stage of all.The message endlessly repeated by the Dutch delegation is that Van de Velde is a changed man. Aged 19 when he committed the rape, he is now 29, having completed what his nation’s Olympic Committee describe as a “closely supervised path of rehabilitation”. He is married to Kim, a German international in beach volleyball, and the couple have a two-year-old son. Such are the principles of restorative justice, the Dutch argue, where even an offender whose crime triggers profound revulsion is allowed to rebuild his life and be reintegrated into the community.
The difference in cultural sensitivities is striking. Where Van de Velde’s elevation to the Olympic stage has drawn astonishment in Britain, the United States and Australia, the prevailing reaction in the Netherlands is one of bewilderment at all the fuss. 
Due to the spinelessness of the authorities who created this situation. Van de Velde’s history is such that he should have been nowhere near these Games. In the end, he not only took center stage, but found himself exempt from cross-examination. It all added up to the grisliest day of shame.