Here is the question this case forces into the open. A grown man went onto an adults-only website, found a 13-year-old boy, and raped him in a car park toilet. The law has one name and one level for that crime — the same name and the same level it gives every other rape of a child. Should it? Should r.pe committed by a man against a boy — same-sex r.pe — be treated as a higher tier of the crime?
The honest starting point is what the law says today: no such tier exists. New South Wales' Crimes Act grades this crime by the child's age alone — sexual intercourse with a child aged 10 to 14 carries a maximum of 16 years in prison, 20 in aggravated circumstances, and it makes no difference in law whether the child is a boy or a girl, or whether the offender is a man or a woman. The statute is blind to all of it.
The case for the higher tier rests on the hunting. Amon did not stumble into this: he was on a same-sex hook-up platform built for adults, a place where a confused, insecure boy had gone looking for connection, and he pulled that child out of it. Many parents will look at this verdict and say a predator who targets a boy through that world commits a violation with its own extra weight — and that the law should say so out loud instead of pretending every one of these crimes is identical. That question is now on the table, and this verdict is what put it there.
A jury has found former New South Wales Liberal MP Rory Amon guilty of raping a 13-year-old boy he met on an adults-only website. After about four hours of deliberation on Friday, the NSW Supreme Court jury convicted the 37-year-old on one count of sexual intercourse with a person aged between 10 and 14, and one count of indecently assaulting a child.
The offences happened in 2017, when Amon was 27, working for federal MP Jason Falinski and campaigning for preselection as a local councillor — years before he won the state seat of Pittwater. The court heard he connected with the boy on an adults-only hook-up website, moved the conversation to Snapchat, exchanged explicit images with him, and then met him in the car park toilet of the boy's own apartment block.
This was Amon's second trial over the same events. In March, a different jury acquitted him of eight separate child sexual offence charges but could not reach a verdict on the two counts decided on Friday, and those went to a retrial. He has always maintained his innocence.
His defence was that he held an honest and reasonable belief that the boy was over the age of 16 — the trial heard the boy had inflated his age when signing up to the website and again while talking with Amon. The jury rejected that defence on the counts before it and convicted him.
Amon remains on bail and returns to court for a sentence hearing on November 27, facing what prosecutors and the court have flagged as a significant jail term. The boy — now a young man — was 13 at the time of the offences.
The warning in this case reaches far beyond Australia. The whole arrangement began with a child passing an age checkbox on an adults-only platform — the same self-declared age gates that American states are now fighting to replace with real age verification for adult websites, precisely because a determined child can click past them in seconds. For parents everywhere, the lesson of this verdict is blunt: a platform that asks “are you 18?” and takes a child's word for it is not protecting anyone, and the predators know it.
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