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STEVE FINAN: Kirriemuir case proves police can make paedophile hunter tactics work

How to stop paedophiles is a major dilemma for police but a recent case at Forfar Sheriff Court shows officers are willing to try less conventional steps.

Paul Carabine outside Forfar Sheriff Court.
Paul Carabine of Kirriemuir was sentenced at Forfar Sheriff Court after he was caught trying to arrange the abuse of a six-year-old child in a Met Police sting. Image: DC Thomson.

Every day in the papers there’s another story about men sending explicit photos to underage girls, or accessing child pornography, or gangs grooming children.

Was it always like this and we didn’t know? Has there been an explosion in the number of paedophiles?

The wider issue and how to combat it is addressed less frequently. Maybe because too many people who count themselves “progressive thinkers” aren’t brave enough to even discuss the measures required.

Firstly, I don’t accept “mental health problem” excuses.

Paedophiles don’t mindlessly run after children in the streets. If they can control themselves some of the time, they can control themselves all of the time.

The writer Steve Finan next to a quote: "Many people, not just reactionaries, sympathise with the desire of paedophile hunter groups to be proactive."

They know they have a problem, so should seek help. But they lack the moral fibre to do so.

They have to be made to stop. But how?

No easy answers to how to stop paedophiles

Technological remedies exist but these carry a heavy social price.

Would you agree to a database of everyone’s DNA so physical crimes could be traced?

Would you allow every text, Whatsapp, Snapchat, etc., to be automatically copied to independent scrutineers?

What about implanting microchips into everyone so their movements are recorded? Or 24-hour CCTV surveillance in all homes?

finger hovering over a mobile phone screen showing WhatsApp and Snapchat icons.
Do social media companies need to grapple with how to preserve consumer privacy while protecting children from paedophiles. Image: Yui Mok/PA Wire.

Clearly, any of those measures would create a dystopian nightmare worse than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We couldn’t live like that.

But there has to be some course of action more effective than hand-wringing and saying “oh dear”.

Decades-long prison sentences, bring back the birch, chemical castration? None of that will happen either. The days of retributive responses to crime are gone.

So what measures are we left with?

Police and groups at odds over how to stop paedophiles

Paedophile hunter groups entice beasts out from under their slimy rocks.

But police don’t like amateur hunters. They say “stings” shown online can prejudice trials, and that the publicity hinders them tracing other paedophiles or sources of material linked to the original criminal.

People with a banner which reads 'Wolf pack hunters UK, against online grooming'
Members of the Wolf Pack Hunters group in Forfar.

There’s also the very real concern that innocent people will be wrongly targeted.

They suggest that once a suspect is identified, the hunter group should pass all evidence to police.

I can see the reasoning. Yet many people, not just reactionaries, sympathise with the desire of paedophile hunter groups to be proactive.

But what if the police themselves were the ones doing the hunting?

It turns out they do.

Kirrie case shows measures can be made to work

Just this week the case of a paedophile in Kirriemuir, who had been snared by a Met Police “decoy” operation, reached its conclusion in court.

Paedophile hunting as police policy feels to me like quite a step-change in the approach to law enforcement. It is actually quite difficult to frame a charge around “intending to commit a crime” within current law.

But say these sanctioned hunting expeditions were increased tenfold, or fiftyfold? Paedophiles could never be sure if their online activities were being examined, or even arranged, by the police

Is it ethically acceptable to entice people into crime? Or is a “pre-crime” policy justified if it catches potential paedophiles?

It’s an interesting discussion but the method has been proven, at Forfar Sheriff Court, to work.

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