Two Argentine judges are under fire for reducing the sentence of a convicted child abuser on the grounds that his 6-year-old victim had suffered earlier abuse and therefore had already been traumatized. In the newly publicized 2014 ruling, the judges cut the sentence of Mario Tolosa, a sports club vice president, from six years to 38 months. They ruled that his acts should not be considered “gravely outrageous” in legal terms because the boy already “was making a precocious choice” of his sexuality, apparently a reference to homosexuality. One of the judges, Horacio Piombo, defended the ruling in interviews on Monday, saying that before Mr. Tolosa molested the boy, the child had already suffered “the initiation by his father into the worst of worlds, leading him to depravation.” The judge said that as a result of that experience, the boy had showed “signs of a transvestite conduct, of conduct we had to take into account.”
