Paedophilia in Britain: the victim's story
The smashing of an internet ring sheds new light on a dark secret. By Sophie Goodchild
Sunday, 24 June 2007
Peter Saunders was seven when it started, and he weighed just four stone. Even today, it is the memory of his abuser's body pressing down on his slight frame that makes him shudder most.
His abuser was a male relative, and he would get Peter to babysit and then pounce on him after returning home with his wife. As she slumbered upstairs, her husband would assault him in the living room.
So why didn't Peter tell someone, anyone?
Even four decades on, he finds it difficult to explain. "I was too frightened to tell anyone, and he said they would not believe me if I did," he said. "He abused me emotionally and psychologically, which I think, in the long term, has had a far worse effect on me."
Only when he reached the age of 13 did Peter find the courage to tell his abuser to stop. His respite was short-lived: as soon as that ordeal ended, another began: a paedophile priest at his school turned his unwelcome attentions on him.
Abuse like this leaves a terrible legacy. As an adult, Peter turned to drink to block out the horrific memories, and his first marriage foundered.
Finally, in his late 30s, he was able talk about his trauma for the first time. Too late, though, for anyone to be brought to justice. Despite therapy and his deep Christian faith, the 50-year-old economics lecturer still has to endure every day what he went through as a child.
He explained: "It makes people feel full of shame and a lot of children take the responsibility with them into adulthood. I know people who have committed suicide as a result. It puts a pickaxe through the whole notion of trust."
The men who abused Peter Saunders all appeared on the surface to be respectable, trusted members of society. How wrong appearances can be.
Take Timothy Cox, who last week was convicted for running a global internet ring which traded horrific images of child abuse. It was the first time police had broken into a peer-to-peer site, a secret area on the web run by a host that can be accessed only after a strict vetting process by his "lieutenants".
To his friends and family, Cox, was a hard-working man with a 26-year-old regular girlfriend who ran his family's micro-brewery business, Cox & Holbrook. Locals describe him as an "ordinary, everyday type of guy" and he lived with his parents David and Mavis in a handsome farmhouse in Buxhall, Suffolk.
Hardly like the gang of paedophiles from an Edinburgh housing estate who were convicted on Friday of the rape over several years of Dana Fowley, now 27 but nine when the abuse started. Her mother, who allowed the abuse to go on, was jailed for 12 years, and the guilty parties conformed to the stereotypical view of the dirty mac brigade.
But the internet offered Cox a similar opportunity, and to the hundreds of depraved individuals to whom he offered a "service" from his bedroom in his parents' home, the 28-year-old was known by his online identity. He had spotted what he might have called a gap in the market.
Cox was originally a member of a US-based chatroom called Kiddypics and Kiddyvids run by Royal Raymond Waller, 49, from Tennessee. He called himself "GOD". Waller was arrested, and the sites closed down, but Cox gave himself the name "SOG" (Son of God) out of a perverse respect for Waller, and he became kingpin of an internet chatroom called Kids the Light of Our Lives. There were at least 700 users worldwide, 200 of them living in Britain.
Cox's site was uncovered last August, when officers in Canada stumbled upon intelligence that linked the secret chatroom to the UK. Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) led the international operation.
Investigators posing as paedophiles were able to coax enough information out of Cox, and made their move a month later. They then took over the site. For the next 10 days British, Australian and Canadian officers masqueraded as Cox in an effort to identify further suspects and to obtain vital information about potential victims. They closed it down after 10 days.
When Cox's computer was examined, it was found to contain more than 75,000 indecent images including those sent by adults who filmed themselves sexually abusing their own children and posting the pictures on the web. One sickening video of a child being abused lasted an hour and a half.
Hundreds of users were traced via their internet details. The highest-risk offenders - those with children of their own - were located and arrested immediately. Thirty-one victims were taken into care - at least 15 of them in this country. Last week, Cox was convicted at Ipswich Crown Court. He is awaiting sentence and is likely to spend the rest of his life in jail. Gordon McIntosh, who helped to mastermind the site, is also due to be sentenced for his part in the website next week.
And the CEOP remains locked in a race against time to sift through thousands of images to identify and locate other victims or children at risk. This is painstaking work which involves looking for the tiniest of clues in the pictures that can identify where the images were taken.
The smashing of Kids the Light of Our Lives network is significant for several reasons. Not only is it the first success on such a scale against a peer-to-peer site, but it also highlights a growing trend in how paedophiles are using the internet. They are switching from pay-per-view sites in the belief a chatroom is much more difficult for the authorities to infiltrate.
This is partly a result of the success of Operation Ore, which began when names of more than 7,000 people linked to an American child abuse website were handed to British police. Detectives were able to track down and arrest 1,300 people in the UK through details from credit cards used to pay for downloading images from pay-per-view sites.
For members to gain access to a site like that run by Cox, they had to deliver up images to prove their worth to the group. There is huge kudos attached to sharing new images, and the more depraved, the greater the credibility of the person who supplies the image.
Jim Gamble, chief executive of CEOP, outlined the importance of the operation. "The world has changed for the predator: the internet has become more hostile, which means that people are not sharing as many images. Their confidence will come back but they need to realise we are waiting for them."
Child protection charities will be hoping so. Latest figures show that Childline received 11,429 calls from children who said they had been sexually abused. Of these, 83 were in relation to the internet, but that is simply the tip of an iceberg that is growing, with computer technology, webcams and video phones all featuring more frequently.
As well as making a potential audience virtually limitless, the internet means that the victims of child abuse can find their images circulating for years. They cannot escape current repercussions of past abuse. And blackmail is more prevalent on the web.
Debra Radford's job for the NSPCC is to identify the different needs of those victims abused at home and those abused over the web. She says that children can be "fooled" by the web because it gives them a false sense of security.
Ms Radford, children's services manager of the York and North Yorkshire NSPCC therapeutic service, said: "Abusers spend a long time working to find out where the victim lives. If you have never seen the person who abused you then you live with a constant sense they are going to turn up on your doorstep. And in some cases they have."
All this, of course, is wrapped up in how society and policymakers protect children from the changing face of paedophilia and its increasingly global nature.
On the legal front, there has been huge pressure on ministers to introduce a version of "Megan's Law" whose core principle is that parents have the right to know if a dangerous sexual predator moves into their community. It was introduced in the US in 1997 after the murder and rape of seven-year-old Megan Kanka, and was backed in this country by Sara Payne, whose daughter, Sarah, was killed by Roy Whiting.
Ministers accept experts' advice that such a move could drive sex offenders underground. Instead, John Reid, the Home Secretary, unveiled a watered-down version, allowing a mother with concerns about her partner or a carer with unsupervised access to her children to ask the police whether they have a record of sex offending. But this can lull people into a false sense of security, and isn't applicable to the type of paedophile Cox was. After all, he had no history of abuse.
Satellite tracking, lie detector tests and chemical castration are also proposed by ministers. But while the law is cracking down, there are also grey areas, particularly where the internet is concerned. Not for the likes of Cox and the peer-to-peer abuse groups, but for the pay-per-view user.
Professor Don Grubin, an expert on sexual behaviour at Newcastle University, said that men who are aroused by child sex abuse fall into distinct categories that should be treated differently by the criminal justice system. The first category is that of paedophiles who either directly and physically abuse children or who, like Cox, are involved in incitement to abuse. Then there are men who are sexually aroused by images posted on the internet but do not have a record of offending with children.
In his view, both categories are harmful to children but for different reasons. And those who do not have a record of sex offending who are caught viewing images on the web may be punished with fines and not necessarily jail.
Professor Grubin said: "Those who get sexually aroused do not see the leap between this and the fact they are contributing to abuse, like people who buy snow leopard rugs and are contributing to the extinction of the species."
Jim Gamble agrees. But he is also quick to point out that both types of offenders are guilty of serious crimes. "Don't get me wrong - of course I don't think enough paedophiles go to prison. But we have to make sure the right people go: that is those who represent an immediate risk to society and who children need to be protected from."
For victims such as Peter Saunders, who founded the National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC), the damage has already been done. The only solace they have is in shattering the silence that surrounded their abuse, even if it takes years.
He said: "Until the age of 38 I lived with the secret which made me feel dirty, depressed and worthless. The worst aspect is not having the words to tell anyone what is happening."
Further information: National Association for People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC), 0800 085 3330, or Childline on 0800 1111
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/paedophilia-in-britain-the-victims-story-454420.html
