Rapist faces nine years in prison for attacks on prostitutes

Published on Wednesday 10 February 2010 21:13

A MAN who raped two prostitutes was jailed for nine years yesterday, as a judge said that sex workers were as entitled as anyone else to the protection of the law.

Fraser Summers, 22, handed himself in after the second incident when police issued CCTV images in their hunt for the attacker.

He claimed that sex with the women had been consensual, but a jury convicted him of rape.

Imposing the nine-year jail term at the High Court in Edinburgh, Lord Brodie said: "Both (women] accepted they were working as prostitutes at the relevant time, but that is in no way a factor which reduces the gravity of the offences."

Summers, of Robroyston, Glasgow, struck first in November 2007 at a building site in the Broomielaw area of the city. He approached a 37-year-old woman for sex, but struck and slapped her, and forced her to the ground. He held his hand over her mouth and threw her on to a pile of bricks and stones. He thrust gravel into her mouth and repeatedly raped her.

The woman said: "He got angrier and angrier. He wanted to hurt me."

The woman managed to flee, naked from the waist down, to the street, and stopped a taxi for help.

The second rape occurred in April last year, on waste ground at Carrick Street, near Broomielaw. Summers put his arm around the neck of a 28-year-old prostitute and threw her to the ground. He repeatedly called her abusive names and demanded that she repeat them. Later, detectives released CCTV images of a man they wanted to trace, and Summers attended a police station.

Defence counsel Louise Arrol said Summers had been drinking before the offences and while he rarely drank, he accepted that when he did, he had "a propensity to become aggressive".

In November 2008, Summers assaulted two women by punching them in the face in Glasgow.