260 historical abuse cases probed in year Specialist West Midland unit formed after Savile scandal
ATEAM of detectives has investigated more than 260 cases of historical sex attacks against children in just 12 months.
The dedicated unit at West Midlands Police was created in December 2015 to track down paedophiles who have escaped justice for decades.
So far the team has secured sentences of more than 70 years from 11 cases including against 101-year-old Ralph Clarke – the country’s oldest ever criminal.
The unit was formed following the Jimmy Savile scandal, which sparked a huge surge in historic abuse allegations.
Clarke became the oldest person in UK legal history to be convicted of a criminal offence last month. He was handed a 13-year jail term after convictions for sex attacks against children in the 1970s and 1980s. Detective Constable Emma Fennon, a member of the team who helped bring Clarke to justice, described him as one of the worst offenders she had ever interviewed, calling him “utterly remorseless”.
Detective Sergeant Ruth Boddy said the workload her officers faced in dealing with people like Clarke was “increasing not diminishing”.
The reporting of historical sex offences in the West Midlands rose by 25 per cent in 2016 compared to the previous 12 months.
DS Boddy said each team member was looking at between 20 and 30 cases at any one time and had to rely on old fashioned detective skills to build up a picture of a specific point in time.
“We have to look back at social service records, medical records, school records, employment documents and anything that can give us a bit of a clue about what was going on in that person’s life at the time,” she said.
“We have to be a little bit more inventive and we have to look at information that would perhaps not be as relevant in live cases.”
The team was launched in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scan- dal, but also because there was a recognition from police chiefs that historic cases were complex and time-consuming.
DS Boddy added: “There was a recognition of the increase in reporting, probably from the Jimmy Savile effect, and a recognition that we needed to deal with these reports differently to how we had dealt with them in the past. We find that one person comes forwards and then other victims follow. That is part of the reason these investigations take a lot longer.
“People come forward for all sorts of different reasons. We have had some cases involving football recently because of the publicity around that,” she said.
“People say they have seen something on the news, and in other cases it may be a storyline on a programme like Coronation Street.”