Rantzen: Forget the past, focus on today’s child abuse

‘Survivors deserve justice, but if you have to make choices, I would rather we protected today’s children’

ESTHER RANTZEN, the founder of Childline, has urged police to concentrate on protecting today’s victims of child abuse rather than “wasting time” on multi-million pound investigations into people who are dead.

The former television presenter, now one of the country’s most respected campaigners on child abuse, said paedophiles abusing children today might avoid detection if police were using their limited resources to delve into the distant past. Ms Rantzen was speaking after it emerged that Wiltshire Police is to spend more than £100,000 recruiting four civilian investigators to trawl through the late Sir Edward Heath’s private papers for evidence that he was a paedophile.

They will be employed for between one and two years to go through the uncatalogued archive of 4,500 boxes being stored by Oxford University’s Bodleian Library at a warehouse near Swindon.

Last month Mike Veale, Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police, said the force’s resources were “under in- creased pressure and demand”, and previously said budget cuts meant his officers could not attend every crime scene.

The investigation into Heath, who died in 2005, began last year, following a retired officer’s claim that abuse allegations against the former Con- servative prime minister were covered up in the Nineties. At least seven people have made allegations of abuse against Heath, including one claim that he abused a boy on his yacht before throwing him overboard.

Ms Rantzen, a trustee of the National Association of People Abused in Childhood (Napac), said: “I hope and assume that if the police are conducting such an elaborate exercise they will have more than one allegation that provides hard evidence, otherwise I hope they wouldn’t waste their time.

“But you do have to ask the question whether there are current child abusers who are not being investigated because so much time is being spent on child abusers who are now dead.

“Survivors deserve justice, no matter how long ago the abuse occurred, but if you have to make choices I would much rather we are protecting today’s children.”

Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former chancellor, said: “This obsession with alleged child sex abuse in the distant past has got completely out of hand.

“I knew Ted Heath well, and have no reason to believe that there is anything in this at all. I would have thought that the police, who complain of being overstretched, have better things to do with their scarce resources than this.”

Gabrielle Shaw, the chief executive of Napac, supported the investigation. She said: “It is a very serious matter if an ex-prime minister is being accused of abusing children and it should be investigated, particularly if there might have been a cover-up or collusion. It is also possible there may be evidence connected to people who are still alive. For survivors and victims this is not something that dies with the abuser.”