Top police officer: many viewing child abuse images should be treated on NHS

12-5-2014 United Kingdom:

Norfolk chief constable Simon Bailey believes thousands on police database ‘pose no threat’ and don’t belong in prison

Thousands who view child abuse images online should be treated as patients by the NHS rather than sent to prison because they pose no threat to children, says one of Britain’s leading police officers.

In an interview with the Guardian, Simon Bailey, chief constable of Norfolk police and the Association of Chief Police Officers’ (Acpo) lead on child protection and abuse investigations, said that while police had a database of 50,000 people who regularly viewed indecent images of children, research suggested not all were an immediate threat.

“What academic research would say is between 16% and 50% of those people who have viewed indecent images of children are then likely to be ‘contact abusers’ [of children]. That can be as high as 25,000 or as low as 8,000. [This group] poses a threat,” he said. However, the remaining group of child sex offenders – who are committing a crime by viewing the material online – are “non-contact abusers” who Bailey says do not “need to come into the criminal justice system in terms of being put forward before a court”.

He added: “We have to think about an alternative solution. [We] need to engage with service providers from mental health and the health service to work with us to say these people need help.”

The new approach provoked a debate among child protection experts and health professionals over whether the police were in effect decriminalising child sex offences at a time when online abuse appears to be increasing.

David Cameron will call next week for further controls over child abuse images. There are thought to be more than 100m of them in circulation on the web, up from 7,000 in 1990.

Admitting the new strategy appeared “a very unpalatable response from a senior police officer,” Bailey said the decision to give priority to active paedophiles rather than browsers of images that include the rape and torture of children was “based on realism ... it is based upon the fact there will be a significant number of those people who will simply not go on to contact abuse.”

This week a doctor, Myles Bradbury, was jailed for 22 years for “grotesque” abuse of 18 vulnerable children in his care. Police in Canada had told their British counterparts he was buying indecent images of children on the internet, but UK investigators failed to act for 14 months, classifying him as low risk. ..Continued.. by Randeep Ramesh, social affairs editor