It’s time Google & Co were forced to root out this evil

The posthumous exposure of Jimmy Savile as a monstrous paedophile has led to a transformation in official attitudes towards child abuse. This terrible crime is at last being treated with the seriousness it deserves and, as a result, many more victims have had the confidence to come forward.

As a former police detective turned television journalist and campaigner, I am proud of the role my team and I played in this welcome change.

It was our TV documentary about Savile in October 2012 that helped reveal, for the first time, the dark truth behind that grinning facade.

That is also why I am so desperately disappointed by news that the police are planning what I see as a major retreat in the war against abuse.

Simon Bailey, the Chief Constable of Norfolk, and Britain’s most senior officer for child protection, said this week that paedophiles who view indecent images of children should no longer be treated as criminals if they pose no risk of physical abuse to a child. Instead, he said, their offences should be dealt with through rehabilitation and counselling.

Mr Bailey’s justification for this new approach — which he calls pragmatic but which most of us would describe as absurdly lenient — is that the police are swamped by the number and range of abuse cases they face.

Certainly, the figures are staggering. The police receive 112 complaints a day, arrest 400 people a month and conduct more than 70,000 investigations a year.

Another 40,000 reports of abuse are expected from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which began hearing evidence this week.

According to Mr Bailey, the police simply do not have the resources to cope. So, he says, they must be realistic and focus on those individuals viewing the most serious images, those who have access to children, or who are co-ordinating abuse online.

As someone who has spent much of his career working in this field, I have enormous respect for Simon Bailey. And he is right about the scale of the problem. even the number of police investigations may be the tip of the iceberg.

A report by the NSPCC last year estimated that around half a million people could be involved in sharing indecent images of children, while the National Crime Agency stated in 2015 that up to 750,000 men in Britain were potential paedophiles.

There is no doubt the ubiquity of the internet and social media has fuelled the demand for, and availability of, child abuse material. Long gone are the days when paedophiles in Britain had to rely on clandestine material imported from overseas. Now, an online world of exploitative depravity is available at the click of a mouse, or a tap on a smartphone.

BUT

this ease of access for abusers should not be the cue to surrender in a fit of despair over limited resources. For the sake of the victims, we have to fight back harder than ever.

We cannot go back to the oppressive world of the eighties and early Nineties when the possession of child abuse material was a minor crime, equivalent to road traffic offences.

Sadly, that is where we are heading if Mr Bailey gets his way. he must not be allowed to, because his policy is based on a number of profound fallacies.

A key one is the assumption that the viewer of ‘ low level’ child abuse imagery is not really an abuser and therefore does not deserve a heavy punish- ment. The truth is every single person who accesses such images wilfully colludes in physical abuse — those who view such material are propping up this vile trade.

Just as wrong-headed is the belief that those who access the least serious material should be regarded as a low risk to children. Mr Bailey suggests that the police are now so adept they can say with ‘a degree of certainty’ that such an individual poses no risk. I strongly disagree.

how could the police possibly know without conducting a full investigation into the behaviour and possessions of the viewer? In my experience, nearly all physical abusers of children have also been users of every kind of child abuse material. The two impulses, for contact and for images, usually feed on each other.

Paedophiles are among the most devious, manipulative and calculating of criminals. Some of them will deliberately confess to stop a deeper police examination of their lives.

Mr Bailey says that, under the new regime, the police will conduct risk assessments to ascertain how dangerous an offender might be. But if they claim not to have the resources for proper criminal investigations, how thorough can such assessments be?

Indeed, the inability of the police to assess risks was highlighted by an appalling case in July 2012, in which the Toronto police alerted our National Child exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CeOP) that a trio of British paedophiles had accessed indecent imagery on a Canadian website. But the police failed to act on this, since the material was judged as low level.

Yet, it subsequently turned out, through a later investigation, that all three were serious abusers. One was Myles Bradbury, a distinguished doctor at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, who admitted 25 offences between 2009 and 2013, including sexual assault, voyeurism and the possession of more than 16,000 indecent images.

The other two, both deputy head teachers, were avid voyeurs and collectors of child abuse material. We cannot let such people off the hook. It’s time we tackled the root of the problem and forced the big online companies and social media websites to face up to their social responsibilities.

Pop up warnings or ‘splash pages’ as they are known — alerting users that access has been denied because the site may contain indecent images of children — are no long enough. These companies are raking in billions of pounds and appear to have no regard for some of the depraved content they are hosting.

It is time to spend some of those profits on protecting the vulnerable and bringing the guilty to justice. After all, it has never been easier for internet service providers to track people’s habits, relationships, spending and interests and target them with advertising accordingly. Indeed, why aren’t those same algorithms used to shut down offending sites?

At present, Twitter, for example, just closes down the accounts of users who try to access child abuse material. Why aren’t they reporting it to the police? Similarly, Google, Facebook or Snapchat could easily report any searches for indecent images or attempt to contact known paedophiles or file sharing of images.

WORKING

with the police, the internet service providers could also use their massive databases and advanced facial recognition programs to help identify online victims of abuse. This is not an invasion of privacy or a destruction of liberty. It is a civic responsibility.

ultimately, the fight against abuse is not about resources but political will. The money and the personnel could be found if the online giants played their part and if the state was truly determined to root out this evil.

After all, Wiltshire Police appear to have limitless sums for their increasingly discredited investigation into the alleged abuse perpetrated by the late prime minister Sir edward heath, for which no evidence has been produced in public.

It is time to concentrate on the real victims. And the best service we can render them is to treat ALL paedophiles as the criminals they are.