Why is convicted child rapist Steven van de Velde allowed in Olympics?
Global News
Steven van de Velde pleaded guilty to raping a 12-year-old British girl when he was 19, after meeting the minor online and chatting with her for months.
A beach volleyball player and convicted child rapist from the Netherlands is stirring outrage for his controversial inclusion on the Dutch Olympics team, sparking petitions and calls for the International Olympics Committee (IOC) to investigate why he is being allowed to compete.
Steven van de Velde, 29, will be competing with his partner Matthew Immers at the 2024 Paris Olympics, one of two men’s teams from the Netherlands that qualified for the Olympics beach volleyball event. Except, unlike most Olympic athletes, Van de Velde has a dark criminal background.
Van de Velde was sentenced to four years in prison in 2016 after he admitted to raping a 12-year-old British girl when he was 19. He had met the girl on social media and they chatted online for several months. He told a U.K. court that he was aware of her age when he flew from Amsterdam to London in 2014 to meet the minor.
He raped the girl several times at her home while her mother was out. Van de Velde was caught after he advised the girl to get a morning-after pill. Staff at the family planning clinic were concerned about the girl’s young age and alerted her family and the police, the Athletic reports.
Van de Velde pleaded guilty to three counts of rape. The court heard at his sentencing how his victim felt so wracked with guilt following his arrest that she had begun self-harming.
“The emotional harm that has been caused to this child is enormous,” Judge Francis Sheridan said at the time. “As she matures, she will have to come to realize that you are not the nice man she thought you were and hoped you might be.”
Van de Velde served a year in prison in the U.K. before being extradited to the Netherlands and resentenced according to Dutch law. He served one more month in a Dutch prison before being released in early 2017.
Despite his lawyers lamenting at trial that Van de Velde’s then-burgeoning athletic career was over, the beach volleyball player almost immediately jumped back into competing for the Netherlands the same year he was released from prison.
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