Sex offenders roam free as SNP fail to act
DANGEROUS sex offenders are being allowed to roam free without vital treatment and supervision because of a ‘scandalous failure’ in the system.
Nationalist ministers were alerted to a loophole seven years ago by an official report into a notorious Scottish paedophile.
Disgraced youth football coach Neil Strachan was jailed in 2009 for violating a child and distributing images of the abuse.
A review of his crimes warned the public was being put at risk by a technicality allowing some sex offenders to avoid intensive monitoring by police and social workers. But The Scottish Mail on
‘Another family might have been devastated’
Sunday has now discovered that the Scottish Government chose to ignore the warning.
Campaigner Margaret-Ann Cummings, whose eight-year-old son Mark was murdered by a convicted sex offender in Glasgow in 2004, said yesterday: ‘This is a scandalous failure.
‘I am sick to the back teeth of being told that Scotland has the most robust monitoring regime in the world. Now everyone can see that is just not true.
‘The Scottish Government has a duty to protect the public from these most devious and dangerous criminals of all. It is horrible to think that yet another family might have been devastated simply because a Minister couldn’t be bothered to sign a piece of paper to make a minor change to the law.
‘They must do their job before somebody else needlessly loses their life.’
When sex offenders are released from prison, councils receive money from the Scottish Government – called Section 27 funding – to help pay for their monitoring and treatment by social workers.
But when the supervision period ends, so does the cash – even if the sex offender is still deemed to be a danger to the public.
As a result, monitoring is often reduced to just police checks on even high-risk offenders, leaving them without the additional treatment and support that could prevent them reoffending.
In 2009, serial sex offender Strachan – a disgraced youth football coach and referee from Edinburgh – was jailed for a minimum of 16 years for his part in the biggest paedophile ring in Scottish history, a sentence later reduced to nine years on appeal.
Seven other men were imprisoned, including Strachan’s boyfriend Colin Slaven, 24, and Scottish Government adviser Jamie Rennie, 38, the chief executive of the charity LGBT Youth Scotland.
Strachan, now 48, had photographed himself abusing a child and then shared the images with Rennie. Disturbingly, he was able to take part in the paedophile ring despite already being a registered sex offender. As a result, the authorities commissioned a Significant Case Review (SCR) to see if lessons could be learned.
But the report, completed in 2009, was kept under wraps and has only now been partly published, after a long freedom of information battle between The Scottish Mail on Sunday and Police Scotland.
We can reveal the review urged the Scottish Government to open discussions with force chiefs about how to correct the anomaly.
It states: ‘It is concerning that even when an offender is willing to participate with treatment, this facility is not readily available. If it is not made more widely available, then it cannot in reality be said that all reasonable steps have been taken... to reduce risk.’ The report called for the funding gap to be closed.
Last night, Scottish Conservative justice spokesman Douglas Ross said: ‘It is worrying this loophole has been allowed to exist for so long. Even if it only allows one dangerous sex offender to go unmonitored, it should be closed immediately.’
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘Protecting the public is our top priority. We gave due consideration to the observations contained in the 2009 SCR following the conviction of Neil Strachan.
‘However, it was not felt appropriate to consider new legislative powers as we have robust and sufficient mechanisms in place.’