That same story in the Guardian also disclosed the activities of
Warwick Spinks, a British paedophile then serving a sentence of five years for abducting and raping two homeless boys from the streets of London. He had sold one of them into a brothel in Amsterdam.
Spinks is a paedophile of grandiose ambition who ran an agency in Britain which sold boys to like-minded punters, and
then he moved to Amsterdam where, as the Guardian disclosed, he worked in brothels and joined a group of British men who produced videos in which five boys were alleged to have been raped and murdered for the pleasure of viewers.As he approached the end of his five-year sentence, Spinks was transferred from prison to a probation hostel in south London where, last September, he was asked to fill in a form so that the police could enter his details on the new register of sex offenders. Spinks, however, refused to fill in the form. He simply walked away from the hostel and sent his probation officer a postcard with an invitation to come and see him in Amsterdam. The result: another abuser has escaped.
The sexual abuse of children is a special crime, not simply because of the damage it does to victims, nor even because of the anger and fear it provokes in communities, but more particularly because it is so easy – easy to commit, easy to get away with.
It is physically easier for a rapist to overpower a child than an adult. In February of this year, police reported that a paedophile had boarded a train outside Brighton one evening and abducted not one, but three young boys, aged between eight and eleven. Police said that the man forced the three boys to get off in the village of Glynde, where he marched them into the public toilets and indecently assaulted all three of them before threatening to kill them, raping one of them and putting them all back on the train.
Equally, it is easier to confuse a child than an adult. A woman who spent four years from the age of seven being raped regularly by her stepfather, told the Guardian she had never thought to complain: “I thought it was normal, I thought everyone was going home from school and being hurt by their dad.” Children have emerged from abuse to report variously that there was no point in telling because no one would believe them and they would be put into care; or, commonly, that the abusive parent would be sent to prison, thus destroying the family and bringing hardship and misery to the other parent.
Children are conned by their abusers in a way that no adult would be. Bruce McLean, for example, who is serving nine years for indecent assaults in Cheshire, was using Manchester United tickets to entrap boys. A man who is now awaiting trial for producing a small **** of child pornography videos in the north of England bought adolescent girls with Kentucky Fried Chicken and toffees, according to one who has spoken to the Guardian.
The ease of the crime is reflected in its scale. No one knows the exact numbers, but to construct a picture is to watch an arithmetical explosion. Start with a hard fact. At the last count, there were 2,100 child sex abusers behind the bars of British jails. Now think of all those who have previously been convicted but who have been released back into the community. You have to multiply by 50: according to the Home Office Research Department, there are 108,000 convicted paedophiles in the community.
Now, think of all the child victims who are conned and confused and never report their abuse in the first place; and all those cases which are reported but which fall short of the demands of the courts; and all those cases of **** and indecent assault which are convicted but which are not statistically recorded as crimes against children. At the most conservative estimate, the NSPCC and specialist police agree with studies here and in the US, that the official figures for convictions record no more than 10 per cent of the paedophile population. Which means that today in Britain, there are probably 1.1 million paedophiles at large. Other studies suggest that the figure is very much higher.
This vast scale appears to be confirmed by “prevalence studies” which take samples of the population and establish how many were childhood victims of sexual abuse. In the UK, the US, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, studies consistently find that around 20 per cent of women and around 8 per cent of men suffered sexual abuse as children. In the current population of UK children, that would cover 1.5 million girls and 520,000 boys, a figure that is consistent with the projection of 1.1 million offenders.
Child sex abuse is not only easy to commit, it is also easy to get away with. It is the least reported crime on the planet. Numerous victims say that they were silenced by their own emotions – the same emotions which gag the adult victims of ****, but which are magnified in a child’s mind. Some children simply cannot report it: social workers in East Sussex four years ago found paedophiles deliberately targeting children who were too disabled to give evidence. Others had picked children who were terminally ill and who died before the system could catch up with them.
Those children who do report what has happened to them are uniquely likely to find their stories rejected. Often, like the adult victims of indecent assault, they will have nothing but their own word as evidence. And the word of a child is viewed with suspicion from one end of the criminal justice system to the other. It is for that reason that the tribunal of inquiry into abuse in children’s homes in North Wales is only now attempting to get to the truth of hundreds of complaints which were first made by children up to 20 years ago – to council officials, doctors, social workers and parents who, almost without exception, believed not a word of it.
North Wales is only the beginning. It is now clear that during the last 30 years, children’s homes in Britain suffered an epidemic of **** and violent assault. It was an epidemic that went unnoticed. There are now thousands of men and women, in North Wales, South Wales, Manchester, Liverpool, Sunderland, Northumbria, Edinburgh – in 17 different police areas – who have come forward to make detailed, credible allegations about their childhoods of abuse in care. And yet, at the time, just about all of them were overlooked by just about every agency that was supposed to protect them – the police, social workers, the Social Services Inspectorate, health visitors, doctors.
The passage of time, itself, often allows abusers to escape. In Cardiff, Paul Conibeer, who is now aged 28, is trying to persuade the police to prosecute three men for buggering him and passing him around their friends when he was a 13-year-old in care. The three men have since been convicted of paedophile offences and have become involved in the abuse of children in Portugal and Amsterdam, where they shared their pleasures with Warwick Spinks. Police in Cardiff, however, say Conibeer’s story is too old to be proved.
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