The BBC reports that a paedophile who preyed on children as young as 12 has been jailed after admitting more than 40 sex offences. The man from West Sussex, was given an indeterminate sentence at Hove Crown Court. He sexually abused three young boys and shared inappropriate sexual messages with a 15-year-old girl he had met on an online gaming site.

It is disturbing nowadays how many offences against children are linked to the internet. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre is a police agency set up to combat the abuse of children. Interestingly although their helpful website is informative and describes the work that they do tracking abusers and working with other agencies, there is very little detail as to how precisely they catch men such as the one convicted in the above story. This is hardly surprising, given that such matters may be confidential to an individual case.  

See also the Internet Watch Foundation which enables people to report internet abuse. This is a very useful source of information on internet abuse.

The writer’s guess is that people who are convicted of grooming children over the internet seem to be caught in a number of ways. A child may disclose the abuse, which then leads to a raid on the abuser’s home, which in turn leads to the finding of indecent images on their computer. It is thought that the police do monitor internet chatrooms and the like, or possibly a disclosure is made by someone on the internet about a strange approach. The other possibility is that the police seem to hold a huge amount of intelligence on various people, not just in the form of criminal convictions or the barred lists held under the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Act 2006. This intelligence may give them a very good reason to investigate any approach made to a child by a suspected abuser.

Finally there is the sad fact that paedophiles are predatory by nature. They may well approach and abuse a number of children, thus increasing the risk of disclosure. It is to be hoped that children are more aware of the dangers that they may encounter on the internet and report the matter to the appropriate authorities.