Female paedophilia vastly underreported - up to 64,000 female paedophiles in the UK

[SomeGuy]

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/04/uk-female-child-sex-offenders

'Child sex abuse by women is significantly more widespread than previously realised, with experts estimating that there could be up to 64,000 female offenders in Britain.

Researchers from the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF), a child protection charity that deals with British female sex offenders, said its studies confirmed that a "fair proportion" of child abusers were women. Donald Findlater, director of research and development, said results indicated that up to 20% of a conservative estimate of 320,000 suspected UK paedophiles were women.

Findlater said: "There was some suggestion it was only blokes that sexually abused children. Over time those arguments have fallen aside and people have had to wake up to the fact that actually, sadly, there is a fair proportion of women abusing as well."

Steve Lowe, director of Phoenix Forensic Consultants, which treats and assesses child sex abusers, said the true number of female paedophiles has remained hidden for too long.

"As a society, we find women sex offenders difficult to acknowledge. But those of us who work with paedophiles have seen evidence that women are capable of terrible crimes against children ? just as bad as men." He said some female abusers remained hidden because they appeared before the family courts, where their cases were not publicised because of reporting restrictions.'

To put this in to context, recall policies like that of British Airways, which considers all men to be paedophiles, and bans children from sitting next to male strangers.

Yeah there are a lot of people who would like to discredit Operation Ore for various reasons Someguy.

Yes, the people who were falsely named and killed themselves, the people who lost their jobs and families. Can't imagine why.

The police didn't go after everybody, they targeted certain people on the list - higher priority went to people with access to children. They did find people who had accessed child pornography - Chris Langham and Pete Townsend were the two most high profile. Of course child porn users will lie and say they didn't do it, it doens't mean we have to believe them.

Of course child porn users will lie - but they will also use stolen credit card details.

And Pete Townshend did not access child pornography, there was not a shred of evidence for that.
"The police searched his house and confiscated 14 computers and other materials, and after a four-month forensic investigation confirmed that they had found no evidence of child abuse images"

" After obtaining copies of the Landslide hard drives and tracing Townshend's actions, investigative journalist Duncan Campbell wrote in PC Pro Magazine, "Under pressure of the media filming of the raid, Townshend appears to have confessed to something he didn't do." Campbell states that their entire evidence against Townshend was that he accessed a single site among the Landslide offerings which was not connected with child pornography"

As I explained, Landslide secured a number of sites, the vast majority of which were legal. But the police treated everyone who'd viewed even normal adult sites as paedophiles.

Landslide was categorically NOT a child porn system. What it was a pornography payment service. At the time it operated, people believed that if they didn't moderate content on thier servers they were not liable for it (the postal carrier defence - Royal Mail is not liable for people sending child porn through the mail). Hence although the Landslide owners knew there were two or three child porn sites on the system, they didn't remove them, because their legal advisers told them it would make them liable for everything if they started moderating sites.

This turned out to be very bad advice and Landslide's owner was sentenced to 1800 years in prison.

There were child porn users on that list.

Indeed.

There wasn't one woman. That's a fact.

I can't find any confirmation of that. Besides, child abuse is not limited to looking at websites.

2 things shout out at me:

1. Pete Townshend had 14 computers.

1. Landslide sentenced to 1800 years. Que? Does that sort of sentence exist in English law? What is landslide?

My mum and Sister are trying to convince my brother to work in early education. he is fantastic with children. His grounds for refusing to consider it? 'people will think I'm a paedophile'
I can see why he says that though. People do look askance at men who choose to work with children. I do think that women are just as capable of doing hideous things to kids. Even women who don't actively abuse children can turn a blind eye to abuse as well (look at baby P's mum among others)
At the same time, the paedophile hysteria is ridiculous. It's hard to know where to find the balance between protecting children and becoming a completely paranoid society.

oh your brother needs to get with it
HALf of our primary classes are led by men.

The ore folk I have come into contact with all had prev cons for downloading

and agree with d that we tend to see" sex offenders are people lurching after preschoolers"

its often a LOT older girls/boys
not that that makes it less bad just puts a diffo slant on it,

doesn't surprise me.

when i was 6, living in germany, a woman tried to kidnap me with a white van.

the way she went about it was practiced and efficient, it was sheer luck she failed.

i seriously doubt she was a childless woman looking for a child to love or any other less sinister possibility.

my mother had fits when i told her years later as she was sure if it had been reported the woman might have been caught and other children saved, i was too terrified at the time to tell my parents though as i'd been wandering somewhere i shouldn't have been in the first place and thought i'd get in trouble

Pete Townshend had 14 computers.

He probably had some sort of music studio at home. That's all done on computers these days.

Landslide sentenced to 1800 years. Que? Does that sort of sentence exist in English law? What is landslide?

Landslide is/was the name of a service set up to secure pornographic websites. Basically if you setup a porn site, the business of taking payment is very complicated due to credit card company rules and high fraud rates. So porn sites will usually use a third party service to handle payment - in essence, Landslide was akin to Paypal.

It was setup in the US. The owner was sentenced to 1335 years in US prison (sorry not 1800), reduced to 180 years on appeal.

In the US, where most of the subscribers were located, 144 people were investigated out of 35,000 subscribers, and 100 people were arrested, because the FBI actually went to the trouble of checking whether the subscribers had actually accessed a child porn site or not (not a difficult thing to determine, given that all the data was in the database) - and the vast majority had not.

In the UK, OTOH, the police went around screaming 'PAEDO' and treated every single person who had used the site (7272 in total in the UK) as paedophiles, searching 4283 homes and arresting 3744 people.

AnnVan, I can understand your brother's view point. I'd quite like to work in a nursery as I like children and the work hours would fit in well with my kids. But I'm also put off by the thought that it would only take one false accusation for my whole world to come crashing down. I'd be facing not only the loss of my job but the possibility of Social Services investigating my own family. I'm not sure it's worth the risk to be honest.

yeah snorbs I get that. It just seems so sad to me. There should be EQUALITY of the sexes, and that includes men being able to do jobs that are traditionally seen as being 'women's job's'

That's great dittany, but you are talking about the US where they prosecuted a few dozen people out of 30,000. The UK operation was completely different - they went after everyone on the list.

Here is the actual legal case against Reedy:

openjurist.org/304/f3d/358/united-states-v-reedy

It states that there were two systems: 'AVS', which offered a subscription to all 'AVS' sites, all of which, according to the US government contained only adult pornography; the second was 'KeyZ', which secured individual sites, about 30-40% of which contained illegal child porn material.

The database sent to the British police contained all Landslide subscribers, the AVS members as well as the KeyZ users. To investigate this database would not be rocket science for anyone with an understanding of databases, they should have done a query to find users that had accessed the specific KeyZ-secured websites that contained child pornography.

They didn't do this, and went after everyone who had ever used the system, the majority of whom were accessoin legal content, and including victims of credit card fraud - something that was absolutely rife considering that Landslide's merchant account had actually closed down shortly before the US government raided them due to the high chargeback rate.

The only propaganda is coming from people who believe the UK police have behaved reasonably in their conduct of this investigation. Their modus operandi - treating all suspected users of this pornography gateway as paedophiles - is clearly illegal. They should have had probable cause before investigating - and that would have come from the database records showing specific users paying to access specific illegal websites.

Btw, this particular claim

In fact, Landslide Productions had caught the eye of postal investigators in April 1999, after several people who came across the site complained that it was trafficking in child pornography. The next month, investigators found their smoking gun: a banner on Reedy's personal home page labeled "Child Porn." "It was that blatant," says U.S. Postal Inspector Bob Adams. "You clicked on the banner, and it routed you to Landslide Productions. For $29.95 a month you could purchase another site, and that was pure child porn."

is total bollocks. Many of the UK cases rested on the claim that the Landslide website included the text "Click Here Child Porn".

This was proved to be false. The text was actually a third-party banner ad, as you can see here.

This was presented in court as evidence that anyone who had used Landslide had 'clicked here for child porn', when in fact it was a third-party rotating banner at the bottom of the page, and wasn't controlled by Landslide any more than say the Google ads you see on the bottom of Mumsnet. This one banner ad was used as 'evidence' to convict numerous people of paedophilia. See for instance here: www.pcpro.co.uk/gallery/features/74690/operation-ore-exposed

It's obvious from the position of the scrollbar that the ad, labelled "Adult Classifieds", was at the bottom of the page belowthe actual content, and moreover that particular ad during the course of the entire investigation by the US investigators, that ad only appeared once.

Unfortunately it appears that a dodgy banner ad that you've no control over, haven't clicked on and didn't see (because it wasn't there when you used the site) is enough to convict British citizens of paedophilia.

Here's more from The Times: www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article539974.ece

It makes it clear that the police based cases on the following:

1. The Landslide website contained the text "Click here" "Child Porn" [this was not true]
2. The accused subscribed to a Landslide website
3. Ergo the accused accessed child porn.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of the internet or the way banner ads work could see that it was disgraceful that this image could be submitted in court as a piece of evidence.

Should anyone have missed it... BBC Radio 4: Female Sexual Abuse - Breaking the Silence
"Penny Marshall investigates the dark secret of women who sexually abuse children.

Female sexual abuse of children goes against everything we want to believe about women. The thought of mothers overstepping the boundaries of love to abuse their children is so threatening and shameful that it has become one of the most under-reported of crimes. However, recent research suggests that they are responsible for up to 20 per cent of all abuse. Because there was often denial that women could behave in such a way, it has remained under-researched and many incorrect assumptions and beliefs still surround the subject, even among professionals.

Penny hears shattering stories from the abused and talks to those working with offenders to try to understand their behaviour and motivations."

LeninGhoul - I don't know if those statistics exist, perhaps organisations like the NSPCC have an idea of what the figures are. Abuse of children can fall into various categories, such as Neglect, Emotional Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Physical Abuse. An abuser may carry out one or more of those different types of abuse.

This article from Bristol says that research done by the NSPCC shows there were 20,758 child victims of sexual abuse across the UK in the period April 2007 to March 2008.
It does not however say how many people were charged/convicted of doing the abusing.