By Jon Land
24dash.com
January 7, 2008
http://www.24dash.com/news/Communities/2008-01-07-Pillars-of-the-community-grooming-children-on-the-internet
Some people thought to be pillars of the community are being arrested as predatory paedophiles, police tell a TV programme to be shown tonight.
Detective Chief Inspector Nick Stevens, head of the paedophile unit and the hi-tech crime unit within the Metropolitan Police, tells Tonight that internet grooming is on the increase.
Mr Stevens, whose officers have been posing as children in chatrooms over the last 18 months and have arrested 50 predators, says those doing internet grooming are mainly middle-class men who appear to be upstanding members of the community.
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| 'Pillars of the community' grooming children on the internet |
He says: "There's certainly an increase in online grooming. It's difficult to put actual numbers on it, but certainly the more that we go on the internet the more perpetrators, the more paedophiles we actually arrest and it certainly is extremely alarming the amount of paedophiles that we're actually engaging with and there has been an increase, certainly.
"Over the past 18 months the Met's paedophile unit have arrested over 50 online groomers and these people, normally are middle class persons who have no previous convictions.
"Quite often they will be married or in a long term relationship, quite often have children.
"In the past year, we've arrested two magistrates, company directors, police officers and other persons who are heavily involved in children's activities, such as running scouts, the guides, cubs and sporting groups.
"So people who you would think are pillars of the community, but unfortunately when you scratch the surface are in fact predatory paedophiles."
In a warning to parents he adds: "There is a risk that your child will go online, into a social networking site and they will be communicating with someone who they don't know and that person is an online groomer.
"That person is a paedophile who will send, who will distribute child abuse imagery or adult pornography, will attempt to groom your child and eventually try and meet your child for sexual reasons."
The ITV1 programme tracked down and confronted a former priest allegedly trying to groom a schoolgirl from Wales.
In a confrontation in a German internet cafe, 36-year-old Martin admits to sending 12-year-old Becky photos of naked young girls, asking her to send him a bra she has worn and having child pornography on his computer at home.
Email records of their chatroom conversations show he claims to speak regularly to girls of 10 to 14 years.
What Martin did not know is that Becky is really a researcher from the UK online child protection company CRISP, which has developed new anti-grooming software to help parents protect their children from predators on the internet.
Martin, who lives in Rottweil, Germany, tells Tonight special reporter Mark Williams-Thomas that his chatroom encounters with Becky are just "a fantasy" and denies he would have met Becky in person.
He tells former detective and criminologist Williams-Thomas: "I don't have money, and if I had, I wouldn't take the risk. Because I know that is very dangerous and I could get in lots of trouble with the law."
In one email conversation in October, he says they would have to pretend to be father and daughter if they were to meet.
CRISP, whose researchers pose as youngsters online to try to capture both good and bad data to strengthen the software, passed all the conversation and images to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre (CEOP), the government law enforcement agency devoted to online child protection and then on to German police.
German police have searched his home and seized his computer. He was questioned and the police are investigating.
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