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6th August 2000

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Every parent's nightmare

The abduction and murder of Sarah Payne sent waves of shock and horror through the world. What can be done to protect children from the horrifying threat of paedophiles? Margarette Driscoll and Dipesh Gadher report

There was something special about Sarah Payne: something that touched a nerve. Maybe it was the way her brown eyes gazed so directly from her school photograph. The faint, shy smile was so real that you felt you could reach out and touch her face.

The disappearance of Sarah, eight, prompted the greatest response from the British public that their police have ever known. From the day she vanished only yards from her grandparents' home near Littlehampton, West Sussex, the telephone in the incident room was ringing off the hook.

As her mother and father made impassioned, desperate appeals for help, people called to report possible sightings, names, even the sound of a girl's screams in the night.

When Sarah's body was found, naked and face down in a field, the grief spread out like ripples far beyond her immediate family. Strangers came to pay their respects. Policemen mourned the "little princess". A blanket of 3,500 bouquets stretched along the roadside near where she was found, a shrine quietly eloquent of every parent's fears.

There was more to this outpouring of public sympathy than a horrified desire to help. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of women looked into Sarah's eyes and saw themselves.

It emerged that a "significant" number of the 35,000 calls to the police were not from witnesses, nor even from well-wishers. Instead, they were from women who had been abused or sexually assaulted as children, some of whom had perhaps never spoken about their ordeals before.

The dread evoked by Sarah's fate had awakened long-buried memories and nightmares. Although child- killers are mercifully rare, the uncomfortable fact is that paedophiles are not.

There are thought to be 250,000 convicted sex offenders in Britain - nearly all men - 110,000 of whom have committed crimes against children. This grotesque catalogue includes everything from possessing indecent photographs of children to serial rape and murder.

"Sex offenders are out there and we've all met them, whether we know it or not," said Susan Vivian-Byrne, a consultant clinical psychologist at the Caswell Clinic in Bridgend, South Wales, a medium-secure unit for offenders with mental illness. "What we must strive to do is develop a strategy that enables them to control their behaviour and keeps the community safe."

It is a tall order. An instinctive, violent revulsion towards paedophiles is shared by almost everyone. The day after Sarah's body was found last month, The Sun newspaper's headline was "Nail the bastard". The paper offered a œ50,000 reward for information that might lead to her killer. That night a mob surrounded a house in Crawley, West Sussex, belonging to the father of a man who had been arrested within hours of Sarah's disappearance and had later been released on bail. The younger man was not even there, yet the mob threw stones and hurled abuse at the house. The owner had to call the police for help.

Commentators joined in with their pens: paedophiles should be castrated, they railed, sent to penal colonies, hanged. The questions raised were many; the answers were confused by anger.

In 1997 the British government introduced the sex offenders' register, intended to allay public fears over paedophiles. It does not cover previous offences, so to date only some 12,000 people have been obliged to sign up. Criminals can be placed on the register for a range of sex crimes, from indecent assault to rape, buggery and having sex with a minor. The duration for which they must continue to register depends on the sentence they are given: anyone jailed for 30 months or more will be on the list for life.

The idea is that, once an offender has registered, the authorities can work out how much of a threat he poses and how they should monitor him. So far, so reassuring. Most people imagine that the police have a centrally held, up-to-date list that they can tap into so that, if a child goes missing in any part of the country, they can quickly track the movements of known paedophiles in the area.

It is not quite so simple. There is no specific register: an individual's criminal records are simply flagged. Worse, the system relies on co-operation from offenders. When they are released from jail or move home, they must report to the local police station and provide their details.

The national compliance rate in the UK is 97%, so far. But the missing 3% means 360 men have effectively gone to ground in England and Wales in the past three years alone. According to the Serial Sex Offenders Unit at the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), 200 of these offenders are "a cause for concern".

"They are mainly likely to be serial rapists or committed paedophiles who we know will look to reoffend again," said a source within NCIS.

It will get worse, predicts Ray Wyre, a sexual crime consultant. "In Los Angeles, when 3,400 offenders' names were checked when a child went missing, 90% of the addresses were inaccurate," he said last week. "That will happen in the UK in the future. The compliance rate will continue to drop."

Even when the whereabouts of known offenders is clear, monitoring is sporadic. And although the police can apply for an order preventing an offender from straying anywhere near public places, such as playgrounds, fewer than 30 such measures have been granted by the courts.

The Association of Chief Police Officers claims this is because it is difficult to prove an offender is likely to reoffend. But other agencies believe the police are reluctant to pursue orders because enforcing them involves manpower they cannot afford. Meanwhile, the paedophiles bide their time as an array of therapists and experts offers them counselling and other support in the hope that they will not reoffend.

Some psychologists believe paedophiles can be, if not cured, then at least taught to control their behaviour. "Some recognise the harm they do and want to do something about it," said Vivian-Byrne. "But there is a sub-group of sadistic offenders who take pleasure in what they do, and they are the most difficult to deal with."

One school of thought holds that such paedophilia is incurable, as inbuilt in the personality as being heterosexual or being gay. Self-delusion is central to such misfits. A paedophile is often someone who leads an outwardly normal life, who may even have a normal sexual relationship with an adult, but at some deep level feels inadequate, a failure. Such men look for hero-worship from a child and set out to "woo" them.

"They target children," said Vivian-Byrne. "The very experienced can spot a vulnerable child when that child is very young, and they are prepared to wait. Men who behave this way might also target adults with learning disabilities."

The sadistic, predatory paedophile - the sort who may have abducted Sarah - can be frighteningly calculating. "Some killings happen on impulse, but you can be looking at something much more structured," said Paul Britton, the forensic psychologist who has created offender profiles on numerous investigations. Determined, well prepared men will cruise an area for weeks, even months, waiting for their moment to pounce.

"Men become paedophiles for all sorts of reasons, but most eroticise the child," said Britton. "They persuade themselves that it's not their fault. It's 'love'."

Such men not only delude themselves but also mislead those trying to treat them. They will profess remorse, cry, swear they will never do it again. But sooner or later most strike again.

The British Home Office recently announced a review of the sex offenders' register and police organisations have identified loopholes that, if closed, could help to improve public safety. At present, for example, registered sex offenders do not have to notify the authorities if they travel somewhere for less than 14 days, or become resident overseas.

Police in some American states are obliged to tell certain local institutions and immediate neighbours when a convicted paedophile is released into a community. In other states, however, such moves are being challenged by civil rights campaigners. They argue that, once paedophiles have served their sentences, they should not be persecuted further. Public access to registers, they say, might encourage paedophiles to go underground.

In America, too, there is a growing interest in chemical castration, although its results are by no means reliable. In half a dozen states, convicted paedophiles are made to take a drug to reduce their testosterone level as a condition of their parole. This seems to work, but remains controversial. Dr Anthony Clare, the psychiatrist, says in his book On Men that to see testosterone as the sole cause of aggression is too simplistic; the case for chemical castration is not yet proven. (The Sunday Times London)

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