2 comments on the 'paedos in the classroom' fuss
TIME TO TEAR UP THE SEX OFFENDERS REGISTER?
The fears stoked by the register are a bigger problem than most of the
people on it.
By Rob Lyons
Spiked, UK: 13 January 2006
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAF1C.htm
British government ministers are under pressure following revelations
that a man listed on the Sex Offenders Register had been given the
all-clear to work as a schoolteacher.
Paul Reeve, a physical education teacher, applied for a post at a
school in Norwich, England. He had previously received a police
caution for accessing child pornography. The fact that he only
received a caution suggests his offence was not a serious one;
otherwise he would have been prosecuted and punished in court.
However, a caution is an admission of guilt and he was placed on the
Sex Offenders Register.
When he applied for the teaching job, he had to request clearance to
work from the Department for Education and Skills. Reeve's case was
one in which the decision over whether to place him on 'List 99', the
list of those banned from teaching, was at the discretion of a
minister. In this case, the decision was taken by Kim Howells,
minister for higher education at the time. After reading through
Reeve's file and being assured that he did not represent a threat to
children, Howells decided Reeve should not be placed on the list.
Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, has stated that there are about
10 such cases of sex offenders working in schools. This has caused
uproar, with accusations that children are being placed at risk. But
questions should be asked, not so much about Kelly resigning, but
about the wisdom of having a Sex Offenders Register at all.
The Sex Offenders Act 1997 (since re-enacted as the Sexual Offences
Act 2003) introduced the register and demanded that anyone convicted
of a range of sexual offences notify the police whenever their address
or other personal circumstances change. The length of time someone
remains on the register is dependent on the offence committed, ranging
from five years to life.
Thus, someone can remain on the register long after any punishment for
their crime has been served. In cases like Reeve's, they can be placed
on the register even if no punishment was deemed necessary. Moreover,
while the register is usually justified on the basis of monitoring
high-risk child sex abusers, the register is so sweeping that
essentially any sex-related offence is covered.
For example, there are a number of cases involving teachers, male and
female, having a sexual relationship with a pupil.
* David Wootton, a 36-year-old teacher from Kent, was convicted in
April 2005 of engaging in sexual activity while in a position of
trust. He had sex with two pupils, aged 15 and 16. On top of being
jailed for two-and-a-half years, he was also placed on the Sex
Offenders Register for life.
* In June 2005, Nicola Prentice, a 25-year-old teacher from Yorkshire
was convicted of having a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old boy.
She was given a 12-month suspended sentence, and placed on the
register for 10 years.
* In August, Hannah Grice, a 32-year-old married teacher from
Staffordshire was convicted after having sex with a boy when he was 14
and 15. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison and also placed on
the register for 10 years.
In most of these cases, the parties involved regarded themselves as
being in a relationship. There is no suggestion of forced sex. While
it is quite clear that these people have failed in their
responsibilities and probably should not be allowed to teach again, it
is far from clear why they should have to be monitored by the police
for years to come.
Even more bizarre is the case of a bus driver called Ayrton Senna.
Originally called John Campbell, he had changed his name to that of
the late motor-racing champion. In September 2005, the 37-year-old was
convicted of making obscene gestures to two teenage girls on the back
seat of the bus in front of the one he was driving. He was placed on
probation and put on the register.
A final example is the case of the Stoke-on-Trent councillor, with the
slightly unfortunate name Lee Wanger, convicted in January 2005 of
logging-on to a child pornography website. However, he apparently
didn't do anything while he was there as no images where found on his
computer. Nonetheless, he was fined £250 and placed on the register
for five years.
While there is certainly an argument that certain people who are
assessed as representing an ongoing threat after their release should
be monitored, the cases above all involve people who will have
criminal records for the next few years as a result of their actions.
What purpose is served by placing them on a register, too?
This law is directed not at the offence but at the offender. What the
register succeeds in doing is giving official approval to the notion
that sexual offenders are a peculiar breed of criminal who are far
more likely to strike again - even though there is plenty of evidence
to the contrary.
This is bad news for us all. Previously, the assumption was that
people would reform given an opportunity to do so. Once they had
served their punishment, they would be regarded as having 'paid their
debt to society' and could move on. Even their criminal record could
be expunged after a few years if they did not commit further offences,
allowing them to take part fully in society again on the same basis as
someone who had never committed a crime.
The new approach is akin to the notion of original sin. Rather than
assume that people are basically good but in particular circumstances
let themselves down, now we are led to believe that for thousands of
people there is a constant struggle to prevent their real, malevolent
desires from expressing themselves - a situation that in reality
applies, at most, to a handful of disturbed individuals.
In fact, the very existence of such a register tends to stoke fears
even further. Firstly, it implies that there are thousands of
dangerous sexual predators out there. Secondly, the fact that the
register can only be accessed by limited numbers of people suggests
the government is putting the rest of us at risk by refusing to
disclose where 'the perverts' live. No wonder there are constant calls
for laws that would allow public disclosure of their names.
In this whole affair, the one thing that is truly perverse is that the
element of the system that does allow cases to be examined on their
own merits (the decision to put someone on List 99) is derided.
Instead, a register that lumps together a wide variety of individuals,
most of whom do not pose an ongoing threat, is regarded as
authoritative. In the midst of the hysteria about child abuse we have
descended into a situation where simply being on the list means people
are regarded as tainted.
Rather than obsessing over what Kelly and Howells did or did not do,
we should question the existence of the Sex Offenders Register. Having
said that, it is hard to have any sympathy for ministers who have been
all too happy to reinforce the paedophile panic.
==================================
KELLY SHOULD BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO FACE DOWN MASS HYSTERIA
By Tom Utley
Telegraph.co.uk, UK: 13 January 2006
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/01/13/do1301.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/01/13/ixopinion.html
[ http://tinyurl.com/7345w ]
At the school where Ruth Kelly and I went - she many years after I had
left - there was a master who used to invite favoured boys up to his
flat in the evening for extra tuition. He had trained his dog (or so
we believed, because it happened so often) to jump on to our knees
when we sat on his sofa.
He would then remove the dog from our laps - an operation that always
seemed to involve rather more fumbling than was strictly necessary. We
all thought this a tremendous joke - but, then, teenagers have always
been much less screwed up than adults about sex.
Some of the very best teachers I had during my childhood were that way
inclined, interested at least as much in our developing bodies as in
our developing minds. It is probably fair to say that this was a part
of the reason why a few of them became teachers in the first place.
They liked to be surrounded by adolescent boys, and the teaching
profession would have been very much poorer without them. Nobody who
taught me, as far as I am aware, ever tried to seduce a boy in his
charge, or pushed his luck any further than that pathetic pantomime
with the dog.
But all this was nearly 40 years ago, long before the current outbreak
of mass hysteria over paedophilia. So perhaps I am being very
old-fashioned when I say that I cannot begin to understand all the
fuss now being made about the fact that Paul Reeve was allowed by Miss
Kelly's Education Department to work as a PE teacher at the Hewett
School in Norwich.
When I first saw the headlines proclaiming that Miss Kelly was
fighting for her political survival over the case, I assumed that
Reeve must have done something unspeakably vile to a pupil at the
school. But not a bit of it.
Unless there is something that we are not being told about him (and
more evidence may yet emerge), Reeve has never laid an inappropriate
finger on a child - and I have yet to see any convincing evidence that
he is likely to. Indeed, he has never been convicted of a sexual
offence of any sort.
It is true that his name appears on the sexual offenders register, but
it was not put there by any court. He is on the register only because
he agreed in 2003 to accept a caution from Norfolk Police, who
suspected him of having deliberately looked at pornographic pictures
of children on the internet.
They did not prosecute him, because they felt that they did not have
enough evidence to prove the charge against him beyond reasonable
doubt.
Reeve apparently denied the accusation (although, strictly speaking,
he could be said to have admitted his guilt by accepting the caution),
maintaining that he had stumbled on the pictures by accident, when he
was trying to look at adult porn. At this, you and I will roll our
cynical eyes and mutter: "A likely story!"
All I will say is that it is perfectly possible to access some very
surprising material on the net by mistake, as anyone will testify who
has tried, in all innocence, to use an internet search engine to book
a bedroom at the Paris Hilton. I can well understand, too, why anybody
accused of such a filthy offence as looking at child pornography
should prefer, guilty or not, to accept a police caution, rather than
go through the trauma and embarrassment of having the case against him
aired in a public court.
But, as I say, I am a cynic. I strongly suspect that Reeve was guilty
of looking at child pornography - either because he was curious to
know, in an intellectually detached way, how disgusting it really was,
or (perhaps) because he wanted to turn himself on. But, even if I am
right, I don't see why it should necessarily follow that he is a
danger to children, or that he should never be allowed to work in a
school for as long as he lives.
I see a world of difference between looking at dirty pictures and
doing something dirty. (Before anybody writes in, let me make it clear
that I do not believe that looking at kiddie-porn is a victimless
crime. If nobody logged on to this repulsive muck, there would be no
market for it, and no child would be abused in its making.)
In my schooldays, of course, the internet didn't exist. But I have a
fair suspicion that, if it had, one or two of my harmless teachers
would have used it to take a guilty glance at pictures of bare boys.
Instead, they had to content themselves with admiring the naked youths
on the Grecian urns in the British Museum, or lingering a little too
long in front of Degas's Young Spartans Exercising at the National
Gallery. If the police had been as hysterical about paedophilia then
as they are now, they would probably have slapped them on the sex
offenders register for that, too.
I have the deepest contempt for the way in which Miss Kelly has
handled the Reeve affair. In the Commons yesterday, the Tory education
spokesman, David Willetts, demanded to know why everybody on the sex
offenders register should not be automatically banned for life from
working in a school. The obvious answer to that, which Miss Kelly
should have given, is: "Because that would be extremely unjust."
Instead, she pandered to the tabloids' obsession with paedophilia by
agreeing with Mr Willetts, and promising to make sex offenders' lives
even more hellish than they are now. Worse, she played that nauseating
hypocritical trick of saying that she accepted full responsibility for
allowing Reeve to work in a school (thereby seeking credit for being a
thoroughly decent woman, who sticks up for her underlings), while
hinting strongly that the decision had nothing to do with her.
How I would have admired Miss Kelly if she had told the House: "I
myself took the decision to allow Mr Reeve to go on working in schools
because I judged, on all the evidence available to me, that he posed
no risk to children. We live in a country in which we believe it is
wrong for the Government to destroy a man's career, on the untested
say-so of the police. Long may we continue to do so."
No doubt a speech like that would have been political suicide. But it
would have made me prouder than ever to have gone to the same school
as Miss Kelly.
date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 19:49:14 +0000
author: Cub Reporter
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