An Academic Said She Was Bullied At The Ministry Of Justice After Revealing It Was Running A Programme That Made Sex Offenders More Likely To Reoffend

[EweSurname]

Kathryn Hopkins’ study of the controversial Sex Offender Treatment Programme, believed to be attended by rapist John Worboys among others, found it made prisoners more likely to offend again.

www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/kathryn-hopkins-moj-sotp-john-worboys

Why are so many men so disgusting, and how as a society should we deal with them? I get really down thinking about all this tbh.

I think we've totally failed on a society wide level to appreciate how our cultural attitudes and teaching about sex, and the experiences that are common (watching porn, hooking up, prostitution, whatever) drive people's behaviour and sense of what is ok and what isn't.

Women are in some ways less prone to certain sorts of deviation as a result, but there are plenty that they pick up as well, so you have a whole set of people who see sex in a certain way and have never really had to consider serious self-restraint. These kinds of boundaries, and practice at self-restraint, should be the first level of prevention around people indulging anti-social behaviour, but they don't really exist.

I thank you Kathryn Hopkins. May your torch be ever on to shine light in dark corners.

(V glad ignored the man inserting himself into this space unasked)

There is a very weird follow-up to this story that seems to be still hanging in the air.

The timeline is tricky to work out but it seems to be:

2007: Hopkins worked for the MoJ

September 2016: Hopkins moved to HMRC.

July 29, 2018:
Hopkins hired a car under HMRC corporate policy and, when the car was stopped by the Police later that day due to it being driven erratically, a 15-year-old male who did not hold a driving licence, was not insured to drive the car, and was under the influence of cannabis, was driving the car. Hopkins was in the rear of the car at the time.

August 15, 2018:
Hopkins is arrested by Merseyside Police on suspicion of paying a schoolboy aged 13-15 for sexual services and three other offences relating to the July 29th incident.

August 16th 2018
Hopkins informs HMRC about the arrest, mentioning only the serious sexual offence she is suspected to have committed, and is suspended on full pay, pending disciplinary proceedings.

(It is not clear whether or not she has ever been charged with any offence arising from her arrest. She remains suspended for at least two years with monthly reviews, pending further action by the police.)

Sept 3, 2018:
Merseyside Police write to HMRC identifying the four alleged offences for which Hopkins was arrested but not charged.

(Only one of these is detailed by the Liverpool Echo, Sept 4th 2020, the other three can only be guessed.)

June 2019:
While suspended by HMRC, Hopkins takes the MOJ to an Employment Tribunal alleging discrimination due to her criticism of the disastrous Sex Offender Treatment Programme (SOTP).

She loses the case due to it being "out of time" but it publicises the problems within the MOJ that she had been concerned about.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5d289244ed915d2feaf5f7ff/Ms_K_Hopkins_V_Secretary_of_State_for_Justice-_jdgt__reasons.pdf

June 2020:
While suspended by the HMRC, Hopkins takes the HMRC to court, alleging data protection breaches and numerous other illegal acts after she informed her employer in 2018 about her arrest by Merseyside Police.

She loses the case apart from one relatively trivial point.

"The claim stems from the Claimant's arrest by Merseyside Police on 15 August 2018. In accordance with her contract of employment, she disclosed her arrest to her employer. The Claimant was suspended on full pay by HMRC pending disciplinary proceedings. More than two years after she was arrested, the position remains that the Claimant has not been charged with any offences (but nor has she been notified that the police investigation is closed). No disciplinary charges have been laid by HMRC, but the Claimant remains suspended. The primary focus of Dr Hopkins' claim against HMRC is her concern regarding the processing of her personal data, including criminal offence data, and the way in which the ongoing disciplinary proceedings have been handled, albeit her claim raises numerous causes of action."

The judgement in Hopkins v HMRC details the July 29, 2018 incident but glosses over the August 15th 2018 arrest, mentioning only a "serious sexual offence"

www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2020/2355.html

August/Sept (?) 2020:
The High Court Judgement is published.

Sept 4, 2020:
The Liverpool Echo picks up the story, adding details about the nature of the "serious sexual offence" which it says were revealed in "new court documents".

Except the details are not in the Judgement. Were they included in other documents made public by the court?

"Woman accused of paying schoolboy for sex was senior government analyst
Dr Kathryn Hopkins was also allegedly stopped in the back of a car driven by a 15-year-old boy under the influence of cannabis

The article ends:

It is not clear why Dr Hopkins, who is from the London area, was in Merseyside at the time of her arrest.

A spokesman for Merseyside Police said: "We can confirm a woman was arrested in 2018 following allegations of sexual contact with a teenage boy.

"A 48-year-old woman from London (now 50) was arrested on August 15, 2018, on suspicion of paying for the sexual services of a boy aged 13-15.

"She was released under investigation and enquiries into the matter are ongoing."

Archived (original page gives a 404 Not Found error):
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200907021133/www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/woman-accused-paying-schoolboy-sex-18881414" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">web.archive.org/web/20200907021133/www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/woman-accused-paying-schoolboy-sex-18881414

That was over a year ago and I have not been able to find any reference since then to Hopkins being charged with anything following her arrest in August 2018, or anything about the outcome of the protracted police investigation, or the HMRC Disciplinary Proceedings.

=========

Hopkins published several research studies while she was with the MoJ and did a brilliant job exposing failures within the MoJ and Prison System's Sex Offender Treatment Programme.

It was shocking to discover that when she took the MoJ to an Employment Tribunal she had been suspended for a year after being arrested on suspicion that she had solicited sex from a 13-15 year old boy - along with the other extraordinary circumstances in which she was found on 29 July 2018. Then that after two years these alleged offences were, apparently, still being investigated by the Police, with no charges being brought or the case being closed.

The whole thing is mind-boggling!

Goodness Bosky. If this is not a great example of why to RTFT before coming to an opinion, I don’t know what is.

What the actual fuck went on / is going on? This sounds super dodgy……

Also - shouldn’t Buzzfeed have done some background research as Bosky did, on the person they were giving a sympathetic write-up? I guess the two cases are separate but it definitely puts the MOJ case in a very different light.

Eh?

I don't think we can criticise the journalists for complete failure to do due diligence in 2019.

None of the info about 2018 was in the public domain at the time. None of it would have come to light in 2020, a year later, if Hopkins had not taken the HMRC to court - in a case that was directly related to her necessary disclosure in August 2018 to HMRC of her arrest that month.

"Streisand Effect" writ large!

Hopkins only took her case against the HMRC in 2020 because she objected to information about her 2018 arrest being shared within HMRC. Result: it ends up in the public record of a High Court case and in the Liverpool Echo!

By 2020, no charges had been brought, there had been no prosecution and there does not appear to have been anything in the public record before the judgement in her High Court case against HMRC.

However, neither does there seem to be anything in the reporting in 2019 about the fact that she had been suspended from work for a year at that point, pending Disciplinary Proceedings.

Perhaps she did not mention it?

In most reports in the Press in 2019 there was not even any mention that she was working for HMRC at the time that she took her Employment Tribunal case against the MoJ.

Apart from getting the the timeline straight from July 2018 onwards the most tricky thing was finding out when she started work with HMRC. Luckily, I found a final paragraph, almost as a footnote, at the bottom of one of the press reports about the HMRC case that mentioned when she started with the MoJ and when she started with HMRC.

I have found information about someone of the same name who seems to be currently employed in the Merseyside area but it might not be this Kathryn Hopkins so I have not included that detail.

The complete lack of any press coverage for over a year since the Liverpool Echo article in Sept 2020 seems really odd, given that she had such a high profile in 2019 and 2020. There are loads of legal write-ups of the 2020 judgement because of the focus on data protection as an HR issue.

Oh! And I don't see how this "puts the MOJ in a different light" *Forgotthebins".

That case was heard on the evidence of the validity of her research into the efficacy of the SOTP. Her concerns were vindicated, belatedly, when the MOJ finally stopped the SOTP.

The issue with the MOJ is whether anything has changed for the better. If the replacement programme should be as flawed as the SOTP and accurate evaluations discounted in a similar way that Hopkins' research was dismissed then we are no better off.

There are some horror stories arising from her case against the MOJ, of sex offenders confirming that involvement with the SOTP resulted in them learning about and becoming obsessed about new levels of depravity.

Personal revelations about a whistleblower don’t diminish the importance of the appalling information she revealed. That the Ministry of Justice persisted with a programme that they knew made the worst sex predators more likely to reoffend.

And even more appalling: Their subsequent programme of treating sex offenders with anti-androgens has resulted in almost half transitioning - with all the implications for the female estate and the vulnerable women incarcerated within it

Thanks for that post @thinkingaboutLangCleg.

I can remember listening to a podcast about a year ago maybe longer discussing this. There was a sex offender who said that the group discussions of their urges and experiences was actually very damaging to him. He was trying to get better but it was making him fixate on his sexual urges and was helping offenders find ways around getting caught/convicted.

@FlibbertyGiblets

I thank you Kathryn Hopkins. May your torch be ever on to shine light in dark corners.

Thank you for saying that so brilliantly.

@thinkingaboutLangCleg

Personal revelations about a whistleblower don’t diminish the importance of the appalling information she revealed. That the Ministry of Justice persisted with a programme that they knew made the worst sex predators more likely to reoffend.

And even more appalling: Their subsequent programme of treating sex offenders with anti-androgens has resulted in almost half transitioning - with all the implications for the female estate and the vulnerable women incarcerated within it

I agree. We can't completely ignore who provides evidence. If someone produces a piece of research and we know that person to be a plagiarist/lazy and lacking in rigour/not very bright/monomaniac on one subject etc etc, yes, then in that case we might review it more thoroughly even than normal. But even then it could turn out to be valid. The fact that a conclusion is inconvenient is no reason to rubbish the research, obviously.

I'm about these new revelations. But also bothered that it's not yet come to court. I know there are long, long delays in the courts sytem at the moment, and that was the case even before the pandemic. But this sounds quite serious. Why hasn't it been fast tracked? Is the CPS bothered about the quality of the evidence? I'm not a great one for conspiracy theories but how very convenient for a whistleblower to have her reputation destroyed in this way. Hmm.

Yes, one can't help but wonder.

Although, despite my contempt for the ministry of justice over their handling of all sorts of things, I really can't help thinking that would be a bridge too far.

I'm not a great one for conspiracy theories but how very convenient for a whistleblower to have her reputation destroyed in this way. Hmm.

All the news stories about this have been removed. Apart from the Liverpool Echo, this was reported in some of the tabloids, but now you get this:
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/woman-who-worked-top-government-22631556
www.dailystar.co.uk/news/woman-accused-paying-schoolboy-sex-22631671

I think these now deleted news articles are the only places in which a connection is made between the Kathryn Hopkins who was a whistleblower and the Kathryn Hopkins who was arrested for a sex offence. Can we be sure this is the same person?

Can we be sure this is the same person?

I found a copy of the judgement. The URL is so dodgy looking I almost don't want to post it! it doesn't seem to have done anything to my computer though, so maybe it's just a legal archive or something?

Based on the judgement we can be sure it's the same person, but this is all so very odd I don't think we can be sure of anything else. Except that she did a great thing with the whistleblowing.

1f2ca7mxjow42e65q49871m1-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Hopkins-v-HMRC-Judgment.pdf

The URL is so dodgy looking

I didn't like the look of your link, but I eventually found the judgment here:
www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/QB/2020/2355.html

It didn't come up on a web search, but I found it via this summary of the case:
www.corderycompliance.com/hopkins-v-hrmc-lawful-processing-of-data/

It's almost as if I hadn't already posted the links to the Employment Tribunal and High Court judgements on gov.uk and bailii.org in my original post

I will also repeat that, IMHO, there is no reason why knowledge of this background should detract from the work that Hopkins did at the MoJ, her persistence in trying to get the the Prison Service to recognise that the SOTP was doing more harm than good and her achievement in bringing it to public attention via her Employment Tribunal against the MoJ.

I stumbled across the Liverpool Echo article (the original, not the archived version) last year and was staggered. Like PP I thought it could not be true and that Hopkins must have been "fitted up" to discredit her. So I went looking for the court documents referred to in the article.

That is when the peculiar timeline struck me.

Although information about Hopkins's arrest became public knowledge in 2020 and her case against the MoJ was in 2019 (Aha! they seek to discredit her after she has embarrassed them in court!) her arrest was in 2018, two years after she had left the MoJ and a year before she took the MoJ to an Employment Tribunal.

So the "fitted up to discredit her after she embarrassed them" theory is not supported by the timeline.

Unless I have missed something, there is also nothing in the 2020 Judgement to suggest that Hopkins disputes that on 29 July 2018:

"(she) hired a car under HMRC corporate policy and, when the car was stopped by the Police later that day due to it being driven erratically, a 15-year-old male who did not hold a driving licence, was not insured to drive the car, and was under the influence of cannabis, was driving the car. Hopkins was in the rear of the car at the time."

When Merseyside Police arrest her on August 15, 2018, it is on suspicion of paying a schoolboy aged 13-15 for sexual services and three other offences relating to the July 29th incident.

But by Sept 2020, two years later and after taking both the MoJ and HMRC to court in high profile cases, the police were still "investigating" and she had not been charged with anything.

Rather than being "fitted up", was she being protected? Or is it normal for a case involving "suspicion" of sexual abuse of a drugged child in a Government vehicle to take over two years to be investigated?

If Hopkins had been male and the child had been female, would some PP be so keen to hand-wave away these allegations, with "I thank you Keith/Kevin/whatever Hopkins. May your torch be ever on to shine light in dark corners."

Really?

The allegation is that Hopkins is a "John" and, since we do not talk of "child prostitution" on FWR, that she sexually abused a drugged child.

This does not take away from what she did to expose the failings of SOTA and the culture within the MoJ and Prison Service and those achievements were rightly celebrated at the time. She had some bottle to take that case against the MoJ with these allegations hanging over her.

(By contrast, her case against HMRC was completely irrational.)

What I want to know is: what happened next?

Did the Police close the case without bringing any charges?

Is she still waiting to know if charges will be brought?

Has she been charged and is awaiting trial?

If it went to trial, what was the outcome?

I suppose we might never know, unless the Liverpool Echo decides to do some digging.

Bosky That's all bizarre. Email the reporter at the Liverpool Echo. It looks like he's still there. I expect he knows a lot more. (And let us know the outcome )

@kesstrel

Absolutely horrifying treatment of that poor woman. I really, really hope she wins her case.

The thing is, though, this is not a completely new finding. I read about a similar thing happened in a study in California, although I don't think that was on sex offenders. In that case the programme appeared to be making no difference overall. It was only when they separated out the prisoners with high psychopathy scores that they realised that it was decreasing the offending of the non-psychopaths, but making the psychopaths worse (which was why the effect averaged out at zero). They concluded that it was because it helped the psychopaths improve their skills at deception.

The point is, you cannot "reform" a psychopath by appealing to their consciences. But there has been a huge resistance to the whole concept of psychopathy even existing for many years, unfortunately coming primarily from the left. We really need to investigate the degree to which the category of prolific sex offenders are made up of psychopaths, and begin to think about the implications of that.

Yes, I remember that.

And it's important to dig into this stuff. The people who can potentially benefit shouldn't lose out because it makes other people worse, so there needs to be examination into findings like this to see if it's possible to figure out who will benefit.

It's almost as if I hadn't already posted the links to the Employment Tribunal and High Court judgements on gov.uk and bailii.org in my original post

Sorry, Bosky, I don't know why I missed that link to the HMRC judgment in your post (and then wasted time searching for it). I clicked on your other links and must have just scrolled past that one.