Inquisition 21
 |
 |
|
|
| Log In
|
|
|
|
|
| Search Articles
|
|
|
|
|
| Comments
|
|
|
You don't have to,
but if you log in,
you can add comments.
|
| Page Referral
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Our children have become terrified sex objects
|
|
|
Our children have become terrified sex objects
Our children have become terrified sex objects of the child exploitation industry
By Kevin Kirk
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the simplicity of their minds they are more ready to fall victim to the big lie than the little lie, since they themselves often tell lies in small matters, but ……. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
When I first read Guardian correspondent Mark Gould’s assertion, on 23rd November 2005, that: “The generally accepted estimate is that the paedophile internet market is worth $20bn (£11.6bn) a year.” I was amazed, probably just like you, by his assertion as to the sheer size of the market. But I suspect for different reasons. I know that when journalists preface their figures with “The generally accepted estimate is that ..” then you know they are going to pluck a number out of thin air, double it and multiply it by their year of birth. But this number was astonishing. It is more than both Hollywood AND the Adult Pornography Industry churn out in a year, plus there’s room to pay off the national debt of Chad.
I take it he does realize that in order to service an industry of this size you’d need to be able to rent the stuff at Blockbuster and buy it in Woolworths. Based on the number of pedophiles out there, as estimated by the law enforcement agencies, then this works out that they were each forking out around 46,000 pounds a year on their hobby. And if we assume that its all coming via the internet then they would have needed racks of computers all working round the clock downloading it and they’d never have time to watch it.
And you’d have thought their wives would have noticed wouldn’t you?
But then I got to thinking about it and I could start to see his point. There IS an international industry out there, although whether it has actually grown to this size yet is unclear but it must be getting there, and it is centered around child abuse. There is a huge machine with a plethora of people beavering industriously away feeding the market.
And we’re paying them.
Me and you; taxpayers and charity donators.
In other words the demand side. The people whose very survival depends on new images being brought to the internet on a regular basis. That are desperate to try and increase the one or two new cases that come to light each month (Source Max Taylor – Copine Project) from across the whole of the world.
I’m talking about the politicians who can strut around looking grave faced, saying they are going to stamp out the scourge of child porn whilst knowing full well they couldn’t do a damned thing about it in reality because its being made in a jungle hut on the other side of the world. Then there is the press with their gullibility and the propensity for spreading fear throughout the population in order to sell more copies.
Then there are the police and their shiny new high tech crimes unit and the countless ‘abusive images’ sections based in Police Stations around the country. And Customs and the Post Office; every organization with a uniform and a badge seems to have a child abuse section in it somewhere. And not forgetting the academics, from third rate universities, with whizzy titles with words like Child Exploitation Research or Cyberspace or Kiddie Porn Studies (ex Polys) in them, who are always good for a quote and a lucrative interview. And the civil servants who sit on countless committees pontificating and issuing nonsensical statements or instructions.
And the self proclaimed ‘child abuse experts’. Who are nothing of the sort. But are, judging by the number of them that have been busted lately, just looking for a way to get at the latest child porn. And do gooders, in floral prints, who are trying to implant 19th century morals into 21st century teenagers. And social workers who are so busy looking at the minutiae they miss the obvious. And the nurses who hand out contraceptives to 12 year olds in the toilets of a Mc Donalds. And get handed awards for doing it. And teenage pregnancy coordinators who get paid by the abortion.
And the charities. How can we forget the charities? Over 80 of them at the last count, and all trying to stop child porn. There are so many just looking at internet porn they’ve even got their own association . And their staff outnumber the number of kids that have ever appeared in child pornography, and are ever likely to, by at least ten to one. With international boondoggles where they can make stern resolutions about stamping out the very market they are living off. These are people who are trying to convince gullible idiots that there is a 20 billion dollar market out there waiting to be exploited by abusing kids and putting their pictures on the internet; to try and entice them to do it. It frightens me to think about how many children have been abused just to serve this false market.
There never was a huge market so if it’s growing as fast as they say it is, then it can only be by them stoking it, by talking the prospects in the market up so well. Anyway the sort of people who really do trade in this stuff have long gone to encrypted peer to peer networks and, no matter how sophisticated the police are, they are not going to find them except with blind fishing trips like Ore where they might get lucky. Remember the 2 real paedophiles out of 7272 in Ore? Those are the odds I reckon. But do 7270 innocent people have to be crushed in order to find 2 guilty ones?
Adults have human rights too you know.
Am I the only one to find this all a bit surreal? A whole vast, international kleptocracy has grown up before our very eyes. The problem is that there is no real market to underpin it. There never was much of a market for child porn, certainly not enough to sustain an industry of this size. And the Amsterdam police raids pretty much put paid to the market in any organized sense.
So where does it stem from? I reckon there is a clue in that half of these charities have the words Child Exploitation in either their titles or their memorandum and articles. It is just too beautifully apt because that’s exactly what they are doing. Exploiting children and the guilt of the mothers who, because of exorbitant tax rates, have to work; by frightening them with tales of child molesters on every corner. And all you need to do is drop a fiver in this tin, or get your school to organize a fund raising event, and we’ll save you.
How? By busting internet surfers who have come across some contentious images they downloaded free of charge from a newsgroup? How’s that going to help?
And, let us not forget; by having a policeman monitoring teen chat rooms.
I was open mouthed with incredulity when I read that it ‘reassured’ the youngsters to know that the police were listening in on their private conversations. No it does not; show me a teenager that wants the police monitoring their private chat? These poor kids are under almost constant surveillance almost 24 hours a day as it is: give them some freedom, leave them alone, the human rights act applies to them too you know. Of all the repressive schemes I’ve ever seen, this has to take the biscuit. No wonder kids are faking their ages and going on to adult chat rooms. And they are, despite the fact that the child exploitation industry is saying they are all innocent little angels that wouldn’t know how to even spell sex before they’re eighteen. Actually, on reflection, with our education system they probably can’t.
And I had to go and lie down after I heard Sir Paul Beresford, in full po-faced flow, banging on about the wonderful scheme the police were running, under the aegis of Detective Chief Inspector Sarti of the paedophile unit at Scotland Yard. The scheme works like this: the police entice children into chat rooms where they are coerced by a policeman called ‘Alice’ to divulge their personal details online. Then there is a knock on the front door and, in his words; “the door opens, and the biggest, ugliest, tallest, largest (sic) Metropolitan policeman who can be found enters the room declaring that he is Alice. It brings the message home to the children.”
I’m sure it does, I should imagine it convinces them that the police aren’t to be trusted as they go round impersonating little girls in order to wheedle personal information out of them.
Anyway I’m not sure how, exactly, this is supposed to make the kids trust in anything adults do, never mind policemen. I’m sorry but the majority of kids in this country either distrust the police or hold them in contempt. They never see a friendly bobby on the beat anymore but only see them when there is trouble; if the police spent less time looking at porn and more time getting out into community then they might be trusted more. And yet, incredibly, the police think their presence and their terrifying tactics are reassuring youngsters. How incredibly stupid can they get or how gullible are we to believe them? I know Paul Beresford is too wide eyed over his friend’s toys to criticize them but surely there is an intelligent Senior Police Officer or politician somewhere that can see that this sort of thing is not helping. Remember the old axiom if you can’t do anything sensible then do nothing.
Besides it’s making the police look like idiots.
The internet can be a place to learn. Somewhere where you can be anonymous. Be what you want to be. It is, arguably, the greatest gift that man could have bestowed upon himself since the wheel. The capacities are infinite. Especially now that online translators are appearing. Now you can talk to someone across the other side of the globe about anything you want. We can discuss politics with an Islamic militant to try and understand what drives them, we can experience through words what it’s like somewhere, with someone who is there on the ground giving you the facts as he sees it.
As Churchill said: “Jaw, jaw is better then war, war.” Let’s learn to understand what motivates people to undertake hazardous journeys across continents to come here to live. Maybe we can even sponsor our own family in a third world country to create a better life for himself and his family without putting his life in danger or at the mercy of traffickers. The amount of money we spend individually on gym fees alone would keep a poor Cambodian farmer from selling his daughter. A few hundred people with targeted monthly donations would pretty much shut down the far eastern child prostitution rings. If we can find them, individually we can help, one to one. What stupendous opportunities there are to do good.
But the child exploitation industry (CEI) is making it a place of terror. For example at the Wilton Park conference entitled ‘combating child abuse on the internet’: an international response which ran over Monday 22 – Wednesday 24 March 2004, run by the National Crime Squad stated in its policy document: “ The Internet industry can do more to create an environment of distrust.”
They are joking right?
They’d be hard pushed to create a more of a climate of fear than the CEI (child exploitation industry). Take for example sinister sounding projects like Manchester police’s ‘e-spy’ that monitors internet traffic supposedly sniffing out dodgy pictures. So, if your daughter sends a picture of her new baby lying on the hearthrug to you, then you can expect a 5am knock on the door.
The e-spy project is particularly interesting because it highlights the priorities of the UK’s largest child protection charity, the NSPCC. Except it isn’t, not any more. Child protection seems to be taking second place to PR and Spin, with the so called ‘advocacy research’ taking the place of real Scientific Research. As Professor Frank Furedi (a sociologist at the University of Kent, author of Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Anxious Age, and Paranoid Parenting: Why Ignoring the Experts May Be Best for Your Child) in his article “A danger to the nation's children” (Inquisition 21 passim) puts it: “If you want to get a story circulating in the media, all you have to do is get some numbers, call it research and put out a press release.” He goes on to say: “Advocacy organizations don't have to discover the truth - they already know it and their research is designed to affirm what they already know. 'Let's get some numbers to prove the cause' seems to be the motif of such research. In contemporary times, advocacy research provides one of the principal instruments for gaining publicity for a cause. And publicity is what advocacy is all about. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is one of the most successful advocacy organizations in the UK. In recent decades the NSPCC has become a lobby group devoted to publicizing its peculiar brand of anti-parent propaganda and promoting itself.”
Strong stuff, but it does present disquieting thoughts about a major charity which seems to have lost its way. The truth of the matter is that the NSPCC no longer seems to care about child protection and is more interested in its new role as a sort of fashionable PR organization. Indeed it prides itself more on its 'PR Week Award 2003' than it does about actually stopping child abuse. A press release published in December 2003 boasts that its 'hard-hitting' cartoon TV and poster campaign gained an award for being 'the best charity ad in the world'.
What has this got to do with protecting children?
Indeed what exactly has its ‘Full Stop’ campaign to do with child abuse. As they boast on their website the money from the campaign will be used primarily for political lobbying. To try and get more draconian laws drawn up to ‘protect children’ while at the same time it is running down its hands on protections such as shelters. So far they have raised £129 million under full stop and are aiming for £250 million, which is over and above their normal fund raising activities. Is all of this money going to be used to buy expensive dinners and exotic junkets for MPs and journalists, not forgetting high limit credit cards for its directors?
Can some of it be used to, say, support shelters for battered women and children?
Apparently not.
Even though it has cheekily asked the government to stump up a further £25 million to help it to ‘closely monitor’ medium level sex offenders (i.e. porn downloaders) it can’t be expected to use its scarce(!) resources to actually create safe environments for children; for example it recently pulled out of backing the battered women’s refuge in Stockport, which was forced to close, where physically abused children and their mothers sought refuge from violent spouses. And has replaced it with …… a telephone helpline.
The closure was announced at the same time that the NSPCC and Manchester police (Stockport is a suburb of Manchester) launched a sparkly new initiative to tackle child abuse on the internet.
Child protection officers from the NSPCC are joining Greater Manchester Police internet investigators in an effort to hunt paedophiles and trace internet child abuse victims under the new "E-spy" project. NSPCC director Wes Cuell said he hoped the initiative would bring child abusers to justice and save exploited children from further victimization. He said: "The internet has made it much easier for paedophiles to organize and exchange images that fuel the horrific market in child abuse. Behind the images are real children who have suffered… It is important to get convictions." Does the NSPCC really have a stock of standard emotive statements they can use, because they all sound remarkably similar?
Notice the last sentence in his quote? Convictions ARE important. Because more convictions = more fear of paedophiles = more money to the CHILD EXPLOITATION INDUSTRY to protect us from them.
Two full time social workers from the NSPCC's Special Investigations Branch will join the seven full time officers in Greater Manchester Police's Abusive Images Unit in April. A valuable, and no doubt totally justified, use of scarce resources in an area that is suffering from massive gun, gang and drugs problems and with a force that is finding difficulty in recruiting more officers to patrol the streets and protect its citizens.
When e-spy was announced, with a huge fanfare, by Assistant Chief Constable Dave Whatton of Manchester Police, he said: "Project E-spy aims to show that victims and their abusers can be traced, given the resources [hint, hint]. GMP have linked up with NSPCC, which works across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, to ensure images are tracked and intelligence shared no matter where the abuse originates.”
Professor Max Taylor of Cork University, arguably the leading researcher of child pornography in the world, in a paper entitled 'The nature and dimensions of child pornography on the internet' that he presented to an international conference on combating child pornography on the internet in Vienna made the following points: “Much of the core of the sexually explicit child pornography currently available on the internet is 30 or 40 years old, and even older;” and “Of the internet material to which his project had access, an estimated 85 to 90 percent was older than 10 to 15 years, with a large amount of that dating from the 1960s and 70s.”
So why exactly are Greater Manchester Police and the NSPCC expending so much of our treasure investigating the ‘victims’ many of which have probably died of old age anyway?
The Northern Ireland Police have also got in on the act. PSNI Chief Inspector Willie MacAuley, who is in charge of the Child Care unit in Northern Ireland, said: “[M]ost of the child pornography available locally had been downloaded from the internet.” Brilliant! You can see why he has done so well in the force.
He then went on to launch his service’s use of Childbase. Now Childbase is a very interesting piece of software because it is the NCS, under the guise of UK Policing PLC (which was announced by Jim Gamble to the All Parliamentary Internet Group [A PIG]) that has created it in order to sell it to the rest of the world. It was to provide basic feedstock for the program, which was written in Canada, that WDC (police woman’s name removed here) got apprehended and strip searched by Canadian Customs after she’d tried to smuggle in substantial amounts of child pornography to the country. There was reason to believe she had CDs stuffed in her knickers apparently. Oops!
In short Childbase is the finest collection of Child Pornography the world has ever seen. All beautifully catalogued and indexed. A real paedophiles’ dream. I hope their security is good because, if the CEI is to be believed, every hacker in the world will be itching to back door into that. They could charge a fortune for access.
Are the ‘gains’, and I use that word advisedly, really worth risking it getting out and onto the web? Aren’t they risking releasing a huge flood of material, much of which has never been seen before or not for a very long time at least, onto the web in one huge wave? This strategy should be more carefully thought through before, as is envisaged, it gets rolled out globally; so all the various law enforcement agencies and other CEI hangers on can pay to get access to it. All it needs is one rogue officer or a skilful hacker and it’s out there.
Mind you if this were released out there no child would ever need to be abused ever again there’d be far too much out there to ever need any new stuff. Millions of images, videos the lot, all in one big swoosh. It’d be everywhere. We’d all have it on our computers.
The most disturbing aspect of them flogging it round willy nilly – you do realize that what they are doing is distributing Child Abuse Images around the world, for a profit, and it is legal. Even applauded. The mind boggles - is that even the Police are cashing in on the paedophile panic; you can’t have fair and honest Policing where a profit motive is involved. Look at speed cameras.
What Childbase is supposed to be used for is to track down victims but there is a slight snag as acknowledged by DCI MacAuley and that is most of the images he was finding date back to the 60s and 70s. I can see that as being a problem as it means that they are essentially wasting their time, and our money.
The most chilling aspect is DCI MacAuley’s claim that “With the help of additional software, detectives are also able to see what a child might look like several years after a picture is taken, helping to identify adults who were abused as children.” The rational behind this piece of lunacy is because it is widely believed, in pseudo psychology and social work circles, that anyone who was abused as a child will grow up to be an abuser.
So if they can match you to the photo taken way back when then they can put you on the ‘grey’ list that stops you ever getting a job working with vulnerable adults or children in future. And you’ll never know why. You can’t demand it under Data Protection or Freedom of Information because, officially, it doesn’t exist. It only surfaced briefly during David Blunkett’s contretemps with the Humberside Police Chief Constable, David Westwood, over Ian Huntley, the Soham killer, then it was gone. If you’re on it, you don’t come off it. Ever. Just like NCS’s Violent Sex Offender’s Register a.k.a the list of people who have had their credit cards stolen and used to buy porn.
Inevitably the NSPCC got in on the act. Martin Crummley from the NSPCC in Belfast said that one of the on-going problems faced by social services and the police was being able to identify abused children in order to help them. "What people need to realize is that behind every picture is a victim - a child whose life has been shattered by the abuse they are suffering at the hands of adults."
And what people also need to realize is that the NSPCC is doing next to nothing to protect children any more; there is more to preventing child abuse than spouting dog eared clichés, a list of which they found stuffed in their pigeon holes on their first day at work there. Do something useful like setting up clubs and playgrounds, or even holidays for the disadvantaged kids, or music or dance studios, with all that money not waste it on rubbish like this. For all the money that’s been poured into this project in Northern Ireland have they saved 1 child there because of it? Professor Furedi again: “ It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the direct services that the NSPCC provides for children have become a mere adjunct for this publicity-hungry machine. Somehow, the NSPCC zealots have lost touch with the world of real children.”
The NSPCC has seriously lost its way and needs to re-evaluate its priorities and if it can’t then it should be shut down. And the Charities Commission shook take a hard look at its charter to see if the word ‘spin’ is in its stated aims.
And it isn’t the only organization that has lost its way. At the Wilton Park conference the NCS wanted to see legal newsgroups like software groups being taken down by ISPs, although they give no reasons why except for the vague catch all of ‘protecting children’.
This is an outrageous breach of civil liberties and I for one cannot for the life of me see why depriving say our nation’s software writers from conversing with their peers will protect children. I have yet to see any image on any of these groups, let alone an image of a child. Can somebody please tell the people at NCS that what the public want is a police force that is out there and visible, catching criminals and preventing crime, preferably the latter, not mouthing nonsense and trying to close down lawful activities. They swore their allegiance to the Queen not Tony Blair and their job is to serve Her subjects, not the latest craze or fad that the wonks in Millbank Tower dream up.
And that means policing our streets not our bedrooms.
And there is a sinister side to this; the newsgroups are where interesting snippets tend to pop up and one of the few places on the web where the poster cannot normally be traced back. So things like names and the details about dodgy deals and backhanders find their way out of government offices and into the public domain via civil servants or journalists smothering under ‘D’ [censorship] notices. Not for money but because they believe the truth should be out there. That’s dangerous stuff for the government, so if they can close them down then much less of the information they don’t want us knowing about will escape. This is straying seriously into human rights territory here.
Political censorship! Tut. Tut!
If we add in the antics of the Internet Watch Foundation then the whole sorry ‘crusade’ against child porn is laid bare for exactly what it really is…political censorship. After Jack Straw’s son was fingered by the News of the World for selling a bit of blow this government has been desperate to censor the internet. Because it was via the internet that we knew the miscreant was indeed Straw’s son and heir and pere was at that point trying to push through a law making parents responsible for the actions of their kids. The government ‘d noticed’ the newspapers but the gaff was blown on the internet. And it was about that time that someone came up with the bright idea of censoring the web using child porn as the cover.
Hence the pressure put on the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to stop access to certain newsgroups and poor old Demon Internet being pilloried for allow unrestricted access. The industry responded by setting up the Internet Watch Foundation which was supposed to alert ISPs to contentious websites but it was soon infiltrated and taken over by people nominated by the Home Office (with whom it boasts excellent links and who now part fund it). These people include the NSPCC, Childline and an assortment of touchy feely lefties who will ban anything that the Home Office tells them to. Their database forms the list that BT’s Cleanfeed stops us from viewing (which Margaret Moran, the MP for Luton I believe, wants to be adopted by all ISPs by law). They will also censor any sites that criticize their sponsors (which include Microsoft, AOL plus a host of others) in return for their largesse.
They no longer even pretend that it’s al about child porn (or racism) but instead ban anything that is ‘possibly illegal’. In other words whatever the hell they like. This is a breathtaking breach of civil liberties and the human rights act which the government neatly sidesteps by saying it’s a private organization and so falls outside the remit of the HRA. So far they have banned over 15,000 websites of which less than 1200 contain contentious images, the rest are banned because they contain information harmful to the IWF’s patrons. It is high time some responsible journalist started looking at this incredibly shady organization, the sites it is banning (and why) and how the directors are selected; as well as it sources of funding.
The ironic thing is that the EU parliament has just passed a resolution calling for a complete ban on any form of internet censorship. Which, of course, is one resolution Blair’s government will ignore.
One further very disturbing aspect of the CEI’s relentless search for people to penalize is that children themselves are being hunted, and convicted, as paedophiles. Greater Manchester Police’s Detective Inspector Terry Jones said about a pro-active paedophile hunt named Operation Appal, in March 2001, which targeted chat rooms; 'Disturbingly several of the suspects were found to be under 17 years of age, including a boy of 13“
Teenagers wanting to talk to other teenagers about sex and trying to attract a mate? How awful, put them on the sex offenders register straight away.
And the Chat Wise, Street Wise – children and Internet chat services paper by the Internet Crime Forum IRC sub-group (you mean there’s more?) stated; “It should be noted that children can be at risk from other children and adolescents as well as from adults.” A Home Office research paper published in December 1998 indicates that adolescent sex offenders probably account for up to a third of all sex crime. US statistics indicate that nearly half of all online solicitation cases involve juvenile perpetrators.
And what about the case of the 13 year old boy who was accused of paedophila, the judge in the case said: "I accept that you did not go on the Internet looking for this material; your initial reason was to look for innocuous teenage chatrooms. What you found, you found by accident. What you then did was pursued it; you pursued it out of an interest in girls of your own age. While undoubtedly committing a crime, the interest was a healthy one, not an unhealthy one." The boy was subjected to an 18-month supervision order and placed on the sex offenders register.
Why?
This is madness. He was doing what all teenaged boys do and that is find out as much as he can about the opposite sex. The judge said it was a healthy interest, but he still had to place him on the sex offenders register. A dangerous sexual predator? Are they insane?
This CHILD has just had his life screwed up for doing what was natural, for anyone at that age, and that is exercising his curiosity. Damn, we should be applauding him for broadening his mind, not criminalizing the poor lad! These people need to seriously sit down and read the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child. That, may I remind you, we signed up for and is fully binding on us. I’ve a good mind to write to Kofi Annan and ask him to convene the Committee that judges breaches of the convention and ask them to investigate this.
Rachel O'Connell, Director of research at the Cyberspace Research Unit at the University of Central Lancashire said: “It was clear from Operation Ore.... that some teens were engaged in downloading child-abuse images. There was also evidence to suggest that they were engaged in grooming activities.”
These are the signs of a very sick society. The CEI is deliberately criminalizing children in order to ‘protect’ children. Am I the only one not able to tease any sort of sense or logic out of that? Except of course unless you look at it through the prism of the CEI then you’ll see it’s about protection. Their protection. So what if children have their lives destroyed, the expense accounts of the CEI’s directors are far more important than mere kids.
Did you know that over 20% of all the people on the sex offender’s register are actually children? It came out in the SOA debate. And research shows that 25 to 40 per cent. of all alleged sexual abuse involves young perpetrators. Of 6,400 people cautioned for, or found guilty of, a sexual offence, 23 per cent. were aged between 10 and 21. It has been estimated that in 1994 more than 10,000 children were sexually abused by another child or young person. This shows we have a serious problem, not with the kids but with the fruitcakes in the CEI. No wonder we are locking up more of our kids than any other country in Europe, we have twice as many kids in clink than our nearest country (Germany) with 2,600 kids in detention as opposed to their 1,200. And as Lord Carlisle’s recent report shows they are being treated abominably with at least one teen a year dying from the brutal treatment by staff. Plus, of course, sexual abuse is rife.
We, as parents, have a prime duty towards our sons and that is to drill into them that no means no! No ifs or buts, if she says no or is not in a position to say yes then you back off whatever it was you were doing. And to our daughters it should be to say if you are not comfortable with what he’s doing then say no and if you must do it then don’t forget to take precautions. If those rules are obeyed then just about anything goes. Or it should. If the lass is happy with her paramour’s hand up her skirt then it is isn’t ‘inappropriate behaviour’ - its normal adolescent learning. So why on earth are kids being put on the sex offender’s register for it? And why are adolescents being convicted of grooming in chatrooms? Isn’t it every person’s right to try and find a mate? Didn’t I read about that in the Human Rights Act somewhere?
Come to think of it why are Ore victims being labeled as ‘violent sex offenders’? That’s a hell of an emotive title for someone who has done nothing more violent than clicked a mouse. It makes a mockery of the Sex Offenders Register putting people like this on it - the real perverts can hide in the crowd.
Brilliant move!
Yes if they had downloaded pictures of kids with no clothes on they were breaking the law. But they weren’t sex offenders.
Think about it, they didn’t have any contact whatsoever, they might not have even been turned on by the image, possibly disgusted. Remember on the newsgroups you generally don’t know what you are getting until you’ve got it. And they sure as hell didn’t abuse anyone; the transference that the CEI tries to place on them that they encourage the abusers doesn’t ring true, particularly in light of the research that proved that there is no link between sex offences and looking at images, rather that the converse was true.
A large number of the victims of Ore had deleted the images they were eventually convicted of, the images had to be retrieved using very sophisticated software from the unallocated space on the hard drive. They didn’t delete them because they were afraid of being found out: they deleted them because they didn’t like them.
Were they sex offenders?
What about the poor man who saved the images onto a floppy disc ready to show the police, but they got to him before he got to them. Can’t remember how long he got in jail. Child abuser?
No. He didn’t incite the market, the majority of the stuff out there is posted on the newsgroups, it is donkey’s years old, and it will be there whether he downloads it or not. Remember also that most of this stuff is completely legal in the less anally retentive parts of the world; and free. So how on earth can he be a sex offender? Criminal possibly, sex offender no. And let’s not forget that they had to tighten the rules on the sex offenders register because people, usually the dangerous ones, keep absconding and they were understaffed so they couldn’t chase them up.
Didn’t it cross anybody’s tiny mind that this may just be because they’ve stuffed it full of people who clicked on the wrong web link or who had tried to get the bra off his girlfriend. These aren’t sex offenders so leave them off and concentrate on the real bad guys who the public want you to keep close tabs on.
Intimating that there is such a vast army of sex offenders out there by inflating the figures like this is scaring the hell out of people for no reason, or is that the intention so the CEI can tap ever deeper into the money tree?
And the result is that kids aren’t allowed out of doors unsupervised.
Gone are the days of exploring or running round getting hot and dirty, there are predators about - except there aren’t. The number of real child sex abusers in the UK is mercifully low, so low the Home Office doesn’t even list them in their crime statistics. It’s not as low as it could be but we have our repressive nature to thank for that. In raw numbers, it hasn’t changed in years (its actually 6 a year, the same as it was 50 years ago – so it has actually decreased as a percentage of the population), possibly millennia.
But we are still being bombarded with tales of devious paedophile rings with unlimited intelligence and superhuman powers, that can rush up and grope a child without either it, or its mother, knowing about it, and that have access to technology way beyond anything found on this planet.
And we, Davids, are pitted against this mighty Goliath. Standing shoulder to shoulder, armed only with emotive rhetoric, we face the avalanche. At least we would if we could have more money. As ex Attorney General John Ashcroft says the porn downloaders outgun the forces of law and order. It’d be funny if it wasn’t so dumb. When was the last time you ever heard of someone who had downloaded a bit of smut getting violent? One policewoman was guilless enough to say that the porn down-loaders she’d arrested were the nicest people she’d ever met. They removed her from the arrest team tout suite, they can’t afford that sort of unorthodoxy - these people are dangerous predators and let us not forget that fact.
This was the self same John Ashcroft that decreed that the Lady of Justice Statue, a female representing justice with one nude breast, had to be hidden behind curtains at a cost of $8,000. This was to stop anybody taking pictures of it and to ‘protect children’. Had it not occurred to him that the majority of them had already seen one.
Close up!
And didn’t it also occur to him that it now represents hidden justice? Not the open justice we should all expect as of right? I often ponder what an alien would think if he dropped down on us now? Come to think of it what do the rest of the world think to us? These idiots are making us into a laughing stock, because it doesn’t stop there.
The most depressing aspect of the whole debate on Sexual Offences Act was where the MPs seriously contemplated whether to make kissing illegal between teenagers. It showed two things, one they obviously think they have the right to scrutinize the minutiae of teenaged courtship like this – which they don’t - and two they didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. They’ve forgotten everything about what it was like to be a teenager. Teenagers, particularly girls, want to use the internet to communicate; to chat with their friends, to send pictures of crazy stuff like Tracey’s boyfriend snogging with that slag Andrea and talk to other teens about angst and problems with growing up and sex; above all sex.
And they don’t want policeman or ‘concerned bodies’ hanging around to advise them that they are straying off onto topics that, in the words of the IWF, are ‘inappropriate for their age’. Says who? Repressing people like this, even in the course of ‘saving’ them, causes a lot more harm than good.
In his essay, Child Pornography in Cyberspace, Albert Benschop said “Girls experience emotionally complex situations on the internet, but don't tell their parents about it. They think they know what safe and unsafe internet behavior is and that they have sufficient 'common sense'. But the parental involvement is usually limited to 'don'ts' such as: 'don't talk to strange men' and 'don't give them any personal information'. A small minority of these girls sticks to these rules, a large majority doesn't. Most girls say they can easily get round these parental rules. They know how to chat secretly, read their parents' email and keep up a cyber-love-affair.”
And if they know how to get around parental rules then they are just as likely to get around anything that the CEI can devise. So the question is how to segregate them from the small number of ‘predators’. Or as the police so succinctly put it “to stop adults in Birmingham, Alabama from talking to children in Birmingham, England.” Or was it the other way round? It scarcely matters as they were hardly ever likely to meet.
If we want to keep adults and kids separated on the internet and stop children accessing porn then the answer is simple. Create two internets. One for the family and one for adults. The adult one wouldn’t have access to sites where kids congregate and the family won’t have access to the adult stuff. The key is in the browser. If kids’ sites all have a special header on, then they can’t be seen on an adult version of the browser. If the site doesn’t have a header then only those with the adult’s version of the browser can see it. There should be a third category that would encompass research material, libraries etc that can be accessed by all. It wouldn’t need a huge rewrite of code in any of the browsers. Or indeed the websites. It could be accomplished in a single line of code. You’ll be surprised how cooperative the webmasters will be.
In order to stop adults cross surfing onto the kid sites then only allow one type of browser to be installed on the machine at a time. And that type could be tagged by the ISP as either adult or family, so multiple computers can’t be used to access both types of sites off the same internet link. I realize that a hacker could probably over ride the controls, certainly in early versions, but if evidence of this is found on the computer of a suspected abuser then it could be regarded as an aggravating factor in any subsequent trial. The family browser could also have a deep cache and history file, which is only deleted as the cache space becomes too big when the earliest is deleted first. And the history should be easy to retrieve. Then concerned parents can see exactly where little Johnny or Janey, or indeed dad, has been looking at.
If that is really what we want; from a libertarian view it is a retrograde step, but its going to take time to dismantle this apartheid that the CEI has thrown up.
Kids would be segregated from adults. There would be no chance of kids accidentally downloading adult material and they could chat safely in their own, Police free, chatrooms. Whereas adults could explore the huge wide world out there without fear.
Sounds a bit too easy doesn’t it? I’m sure there would probably be problems and it would take a while to add features like email header changes so family registered browsers couldn’t download any emails without a child safe tag on. This would shield them from pornography emails.
There are two major snags as I see it. The first is that of human rights: kids are entitled to impart or receive information just the same as adults. So is it infringing their human rights for them to want to see porn and us stopping them? Isn’t it educational? I’m not being judgmental either way here. I’m just asking the question. Remember it has been proven that late (or no) access to porn helps to create sexual deviants. It’s a sobering thought isn’t it? Now how will you answer the question?
The second is that it would put about half the CEI out of business. Outfits like the eponymous Childnet would go bust. Segregating adults and kids. That’s their job. Actually I like Childnet, totally pointless, but in a fluffy sort of way and judging by the personal profiles they put on their site, the only qualification you need to be able to join this happy band is to know how to party.
They have delightful websites all full of primary colours and they even have a couple of case studies for your reassurance. Of how nasty incidents were prevented, although modesty forbids them from claiming any direct credit for preventing them, because obviously they didn’t. These same testimonies keep popping up on other websites in the CEI too, they are a bit thin on the ground so they have to make do sharing.
Mind you the police are helping in their sting operations by giving the poor sucker at the other end the come on pretending (s)he’s a 14 year old schoolgirl. The sucker knows for a fact that it isn’t a teen judging by the expressions they use in their online speech. Teens use their own patois and 45 year old policemen do not speak teen. A lot of women play at Lolitas online, it’s a fantasy, perfectly harmless and half the poor idiots think they’re talking to one of these women. (S)he pushes him to arrange a rendezvous and when he turns up, bang, they’ve got him for soliciting, grooming, whatever. And if he doesn’t turn up? Then they’ll raid his house anyway.
For example a conversation on an adult chat site (where people go to arrange casual sexual encounters) cost a man called Mark Henning 3 years of his life and his life savings. He was a star athlete and musician with a glittering future then he had a fatal conversation with ‘Erica’. He actually started out to meet ‘her’ but in the end he decided not to, he was surrounded by police cars when he turned round to drive home. The ‘girl’ was actually a cop. You can read his full story elsewhere on this site.
This conversation, according to other people caught in these sting operations, is typical. Is this the way to achieve justice and can we really be expected to believe that this is really how 14 year old girls behave with men they’ve never met before on the web? And do they really go into meeting rooms, which are only there to arrange one off sexual encounters between strangers? If so they can hardly be described as innocent can they?
The fact that this particular encounter took place in the US doesn’t mean that the same sort of thing isn’t happening in the UK. It just took a very brave man to allow his case to be publicized in order to help stop this charade that makes a mockery of justice. And he just happens to be American.
Mind you it does raise some fairly serious questions. If our young women are really like this at the age of 14, and 90,000 a year of them are not getting pregnant off of toilet seats, then we have a problem. And the solutions the CEI is coming up with aren’t working.
To my mind, the root cause is that the CEI has considers itself in loco parentis over our kids. Parents don’t seem to figure in the equation anywhere, except as potential abusers. Why on earth the CEI should think that they have more of a right to say how our kids are brought up than we do heaven only knows. They should keep the hell away, unless there’s obviously something demonstrably wrong, and let us get on with it. And it would help if the state didn’t keep up this constant barrage of ever increasing sexually repressive measures on us.
For example why is the 1876 Customs Consolidation Act, that bans the importation of anything ‘indecent’, thus giving customs carte blanche to go through your private mail, not forgetting examining the contents of journalist’ laptops, still in existence? Stopping child porn coming in is tolerable, but anything indecent? The definition of which is that it could offend the average man. And if they seize it you can contest it in a magistrate’s court where it is judged to be indecent or not. By a magistrate - the average man? It’s little wonder we have problems regarding sexual relations in this country if the state can decide what we cannot watch because it might offend a magistrate, who probably finds ‘Celebrity Come Dancing’ risqué.
Its not surprising that we find it difficult to talk to our kids about sexual matters with the state repressing all forms of ‘sexual deviancy’, i.e. indeed looking at anything they don’t like, and poking its nose into our bedrooms like this. I thought the Human Rights Act was there to stop this sort of state interference in our private lives happening. And the CEI makes it worse by scrutinizing us all with gimlet eyes to see if they can spot any moral unorthodoxy. Inappropriate comments, staring too long at a cute little poppet who is giggling and picking daisies, that sort of thing. At which point they’ll pounce and take our kids away. We are in a most terrible state over our sexual mores and that is feeding down to the younger generation. If we became more relaxed about it, like most of the rest of the world, then they’d relax and open up more. So you can discuss things, like sex and life. That’s the cause of our problems here, the CEI has taken over our children and won’t let us talk to them without suspecting us of grooming. Our own kids!
Add to that the fact that I, for one, do not like the way kids are being sexualized just to keep the CEI in business. Amy Adler, a professor at New York University Law School, suspects said: "The legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse," she wrote in the Columbia Law Review, "threatens to enslave us all by constructing a world in which we are enthralled — anguished, enticed, bombarded — by the spectacle of the sexual child." Before all this kerfuffle started, we had a normal view about kids, they were kids, dirty, scruffy, unsure, rebellious everything you could think of. But not sex objects. But now that’s all everybody seems to be referring to them as, they’re not kids any more they are the targets of paedophiles. They hear on the radio and TV every day that huge numbers of nasty people are after them into order to subject them to horrifying abuse and suffering. Every person on the street is a potential attacker and you can’t trust anyone.
Whereas the real answer is you shouldn’t trust everyone.
They’re even told by the CEI in countless ‘award winning’ adverts to be scared of their own parents.
What a truly horrifying thing to frighten them with.
If there is one thing that makes my blood boil about this whole stupid shambles it’s the way they turned my kids, and yours, into terrified sex objects; distrustful of all adults, even us. Not so long ago everyone in the community looked out for a child in trouble. Now if you see a child screaming, and obviously lost, you turn away and block your ears or else you are likely to be called a child abuser. I can’t stress how sick this society has become. We, you, me even the CEI should take a long hard look at ourselves before we plunge any further into this pit of calamity.
It doesn’t need a rocket scientist to know why our kids feel alienated and hence difficult to communicate with. They’re told we don’t care about them and just regard them either as a bloody nuisance or as someone to attack if they let their guard down. No wonder we have major problems with youths; both boys and girls. Think of it from their viewpoint; we won’t talk to them, we just regard them as pieces of sexual meat and other than that we don’t give a damn as long as they don’t hang around in shopping malls wearing hoodies. That’s a powerful message that’s being sent out there. And it’s totally wrong. The exact polar opposite of what the message should really be.
The child exploitation industry (CEI) has a hell of a lot to answer for.
I’d even rather that they did talk to an adult online rather than living in this repressive never, never land where they are made to believe that their little fetish, whatever it is and we’ve all got one, is abhorrent. The thing is that the CEI believes that ‘the thought is father to the crime’ and so once they get the idea in their heads then they want to rush off and do it, whereas the reality is that they don’t want to do it, just fantasize over it.
For example a huge number of women have a fantasy about being forced to have sex. They don’t want it to happen in real life but as a fantasy it can be very arousing. It’s not abhorrent. We, as a species, are lucky we have supremely pleasurable sexual organs (as far as I know no other animal has an organ quite like the clitoris whose only function is to provide pleasure) and an imagination to go with it.
What gifts!
We have tamed fertility and erectile dysfunction so we should be having fun, not being all repressed and miserable. Human sexual fantasy is almost infinite so how can someone judge what is obscene or not? It is the most subjective definition in the legal lexicon, one man’s meat and all that, and has no place in a digital world where we need laws of crystal objectivity.
Everyone needs to find their own way and if that involves a teenager talking to an adult then I say fine. Teenaged girls are not that stupid on the whole, that they’d run off with someone like that at least without telling someone. And if they did then it shows there is a major problem at home. And if intercourse did take place then the adult should be prosecuted for statutory rape. It worked before we had the grooming offence in the SOA.
The internet hasn’t made this worse. It’s made it better. If your daughter did want to talk to an older person, and a lot do, then would you rather it be some guy in Alaska or the guy down the street? Who is more likely to have the opportunity to seduce her? We need to cut our kids some slack and show them we trust them. Yes they are probably going to make stupid decisions and it’s our job to try and prevent them from hurting themselves by educating and talking to them and then being there to pick up the pieces when they ignore our advice. Which they will and they’ll do their damnedest to circumvent any silly strictures the CEI throws up.
As far as the anonymous abuser pretending to be someone he isn’t, in order to get under the guard of vulnerable teenagers, is concerned he is going to go away anyway once web cams become omnipresent. The teen can see who is trying to contact her and switch off if she doesn’t like them or they won’t switch their camera on. And so, of course, can the poor sucker. So goodbye to Childnet and all the other chaperones out there. They’ll be out of business.
Actually nothing of the kind will happen because new vistas are opening up. Outlawing Violent Porn, for instance, will create vast new savannahs for the CEI to graze on. Not only can they save kids but they can also track down middle-aged women who had their bottoms spanked during sex play with their husbands. Who had unfortunately filmed it and had posted a still from it to the web when it was legal to do so. Or merely just kept a copy in their video cabinet.
Spanking, apparently, is ok if both the spanker and the spankee are laughing like wild eyed maniacs; at least according to guidelines issued by the increasingly Cratchett-like cringers in the British Board of Film Censors (Jack Straw must really have put the fear of God into them). But if one of you frowns it’ll get you both 3 years.
And the police can play in this game too, because under the proposed bill consent has been assumed to not have been given. So when they find the wife, using their super new databases and morphing software, they do her for possession of a violent porn video and him for assault; maybe even rape if there was evidence of penetrative sex. Remember the proposals said that the assumption is that consent was not given, even if it was.
Maybe they could do her for perjury too when she says she gave consent. If the law says you didn’t then you didn’t.
This law is going to be a dilly.
A couple of years ago I would have laughed at the suggestion but now, after seeing how Ore has been run, I’m not so sure. And I’m not the only one as Neil Gerrard MP for Walthamstow said; “It might be argued that the police and courts will not apply for orders on trivial grounds—although I can think of one or two ex-chief constables whom I would not have trusted not to do so—but we should not afford them that opportunity.” Quite right, well said. Except of course they will, whatever the police want the police get from this government.
The NCS have had a great success, as far as they can see, with Ore. With pats on the back and promotions all round, never mind those junkets. But like the successful salesman who landed the company’s first million pound order his boss is soon going to be pestering him for the next one. And in order to keep their shiny new buildings all stuffed with policemen and social workers who you won’t be able to tell apart - at least according to Jim Gamble. Wait a minute, wasn’t that how Orwell’s Animal Farm ended? – then they’re going to have to bring in another, preferably bigger one.
They had a list from a Minsk based AVS called Regpay, containing 350,000 names and email addresses, but they bottled this one because the evidence was even flakier than Landslide. They plucked a desultory couple of dozen or so but their heart wasn’t in it, even though they had harvested over 12,000 UK names, mainly because Duncan Campbell’s article had spooked them into realizing that they just couldn’t falsify and twist the evidence in future and expect the courts to swallow it. And of the ones they did raid, they found very little evidence of child porn - one poor chap was raided 5 times because the police were angry that they’d found nothing whatsoever and were convinced he was hiding something. He wasn’t, as he was an innocent man, but that concept didn’t enter their heads; if he was on the list then he was guilty and devious, in short the sort of devious paedophile we’d been warned about.
The NCS theorem is: innocent = guilty + devious. Truly innocent = 0.
Anyway child porn was really getting too thin on the ground, pour le grande bust, and the punters had got the message; they were avoiding it. They tried pushing the envelope of what they could get away with in terms of indecent images – one Ore victim had 200 Mike Tyson photos added to his total to get the sentence up – but even so it isn’t helping much in terms of big numbers.
But with violent porn there is a whole new world out there. Room for numerous abusive images units and internet centers.
And little old ladies being mugged in the street for their pensions being given a crime number over the phone, by a civilian, because the police are busy elsewhere.
This is going to be so much fun, much better than looking at child porn all day, some of which is disgusting, but this stuff, physical violence and shackling people up and that, is right up the average policeman’s street. This he could watch all day on those special wide screen TVs that the high tech unit had made for them and not bat an eyelid; except to pop out for more beer and dips. It is going to do wonders for police recruitment and attendance would be excellent.
And it looks fertile to the rest of the CEI too; who, let’s face it, is getting a little worried about the dearth of new child porn images out there.
Which is why Childnet put its two pennyworth in to the consultation document. Their submission was an interesting document and mainly for public consumption as to what a brilliant job they’re doing. It wasn’t just Childnet doing a publicity puff in the hopes of shuffling sideways; just about everyone else who responded kept their submissions private, but not the CEI - it splashed its responses all over the place.
I picked Childnet in particular for two reasons: the first is that the subject has got nothing whatsoever to do with their remit, they made a vague stab at linking so called violent porn with kids but it just didn’t fly, and secondly it was so incredibly draconian.
I’m surprised they didn’t call for hanging, drawing and quartering and they even added a few new offences that they’d thought up to add to the stew.
I’d seen the fluffy websites; now the steel fist.
When MPs, in particular MP Martin Salter – the same one who put links to all the nasty violent porn sites on his parliamentary homepage so we can all see them, the first time the house of commons servers have ever been used as a porn gateway - talked about banning it, they banged on about how it will send a signal to the world.
Yes it did and that signal was that we are a country of repressive nutcases, who are prepared to put up with burgeoning levels of violent sexual assaults and a runaway police force purely so our MPs can look stern on TV.
No-one else in the world, aside from the US of course, is thinking of banning it, so it’ll still be all over the internet. There is absolutely no way that it is going to be stopped because it’s perfectly legal in the majority of the world. And there never will be any international consensus. The only effect it will have, if any, is for websites to start splashing “Banned in Britain” on their front page in order to increase sales. The Dutch Minister of Justice has already said they had no plans to ban it on the basis of individual privacy.
Privacy?
What a novel concept!
So there are going to be millions of images that the CEI can gaze at and obsessively catalogue, something they accuse paedophiles of doing, all day and their future is assured. What bliss! Especially when the legislation is being written in order to maximize the number of convictions rather than seeking justice.
It will, indeed, herald a new dawn in the lives of the CEI people.
I often muse about how be nice it would be if, instead of squandering all this money on the CEI, we used it to say buy anti retrovirals for every child in the world who is suffering from AIDS. Now that I would say really would be making children’s welfare a priority.
In the end it comes down to the question of which is more important; the child exploitation industry or a child’s life. I know which I’d go for. But I’m not in charge, they are.
The question is how did the CEI in the UK grow so big and so fast?
It started with certain senior policemen aching for a bright shining new high tech centre, like they’d seen on American cop shows, where they could look at porn all day, on big plasma screens, instead of being out in the rain chasing villains. And then, if things went to plan, possibly even the formation of a giant new law enforcement agency modeled along the lines of the FBI.
A supranational agency that encompassed Customs, from whom they could inherit awesome powers and who are always good for carrying heavy stuff, a bunch of seconded and horribly ambitious, firearms trained, policemen from other divisions and some bean counters for totting up the loot.
You see this new agency has a mission. And that mission is to make money.
From the start the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) had a mandate from the government to make itself financially independent. It was even laid out in the bill that brought SOCA into being. It was assuming frightening powers of confiscation, under the proceeds of crime act and that was going to pay their way.
They made the SOCA laws of acquisition so loose that if you had once shared a taxi with a bloke who knows the milkman of Slab Murphy, they’d be in your house sizing up your wife’s engagement ring with an eyeglass before you’d paid off the driver. They don’t even have to catch villains, not in a ‘find enough evidence to send them to jail’ sort of way, they can just march in and swipe your car keys off the sideboard because you’d been seen jaywalking last week.
No villains to catch, huge financial bonuses out of the profits, ‘seminars’ to go to in exotic locations, no pesky trials, and some shiny new toys. This was worth going for.
These senior policemen had enormous ambition because they wanted to run it and become the first millionaire policemen the world had ever seen. Well legal ones anyway.
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
The problem was they first needed a decent crime to prosecute, preferably one that would result in a good number of high profile busts, with the attendant publicity, but, most importantly, without a lot of work. They must have thought of a good drugs bust, but the dolts at Customs and Excise always screw those up, possibly because they too have a fixation about porn. So that was out. Anyway it wasn’t really high tech or whizzy enough for what they had in mind.
It was Interpol that provided the key by faxing them of a list of names of suspected child porn purchasers in the UK.
Suddenly the way was clear.
You have to bear in mind that to NCS, Interpol was like Interflora; they always used them when they’d run out of other ideas.
“Thousands of Paedophiles! This could be the way to further our ambitions.” I think Gary Oldfield should play this part in the film.
They sent WPC Sharon Girling back to the USA with the ex traffic cops from CELT in order for them to put their ‘forensics expertise’ to use getting evidence. What they did there would have made a real forensic scientist’s toes curl. They blundered and crashed around with their size nines and managed to taint the data before it even left the States. For a start they created their own user on the Landslide data with an address of ‘999 Letsbe Avenue’ and a password of ‘yournicked’ and a new website called ‘Spitfire Heaven’ in order to ‘simulate’ the Landslide system. Right in the middle of all the live data.
It’s like throwing a minesweeper into a village pond and pretending it’s not there. Messing around with live data, inserting and deleting entries inevitably taint a database.
Sheesh!
They later pretended that Thomas Reedy had set them up. With those names, I ask you?
And Dr Sam Type of CELT rewrote the sign-up script used by Landslide (she called her version sams_signup.cgi) then presented it to the court as the original. Heaven knows what other damage they caused to the evidence trail by their incompetent blundering.
Which is probably why, when a request was made later by a defense expert to view the scripts, it was refused point blank by Jim Gamble, who tendered no reason for denying the request, but in reality he couldn’t afford for the truth to get out.
So with this tainted data, a photocopy of a screen grab from a camcorder from part of a webpage with an image of a banner on it that didn’t exist, a couple of dubious and contradictory statements and a WPC who was way out of her depth but daren’t say it and they were set.
They had no evidence of child porn though.
But what they did have was a huge great list of names and addresses. This is detective work at its finest in this ‘surveillance footage or no can do’ police state we live in.
All they had to do was hook a printer up to Girling’s laptop, which probably took them all day, and hey presto!
Then get together some lads in riot gear, tell them that by painstaking forensics work you had got a list of names and addresses of violent and extremely dangerous child abusers and “Oh yes and go in armed. You never know, these are desperate men. Yeah and keep your visors down ‘cause you might be on TV.”
And let nature do the rest.
A lot of hopes and ambitions were depending on it so it had to get results.
They busted 52 people and got 44 ‘convictions’, usually cautions because there were no images found, in the first wave (which was actually going to be the only wave – they weren’t planning big busts at that time) but couldn’t get any serious money out of the government who basically told them to use their existing resources (e.g ‘get stuffed’).
So they decided to stage a huge bluff.
They announced that there were over 7,000 dangerous and violent (no pronoun spared) paedophiles living in the UK of which through ‘painstaking blah blah’ they managed to get the names and addresses of. And to prove it they sent the list to the Sunday Times which was an incredibly irresponsible thing to do. What if the ST had been stupid enough to publish it and what if these were real paedophiles? Would we have wanted them to be tipped the wink so they went underground?
Or did NCS know already that they were harmless?
It makes you think doesn’t it?
Irresponsible it may have been; but it did the trick.
Hillary Benn called a hasty press conference and announced that the government had stuffed 25 million quid into Jim Gamble’s helmet in order to pay to round up these ‘violent predators’.
Operation Ore was born.
Our children have become terrified sex objects
Our children have become terrified sex objects
 |
|
|
