NCA says it cannot arrest every child abuse suspect
The National Crime Agency (NCA) says it cant arrest everyone suspected of viewing images of child abuse online and that a coordinated response is required to tackle the issue, after it was criticised of having no action plan to deal with the problem.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) says it cant arrest everyone suspected of viewing images of child abuse online and that a coordinated response is required to tackle the issue, after it was criticised of having no action plan to deal with the problem.
The NCA said on Tuesday (September 23) that there are at least 50,000 people across the country viewing child abuse images online.
A spokesperson said: This is a very a broad subject. It has been recognised for quite a few years that there is evidence to suggest that people are committing these offences.
There is a percentage of people who, for whatever reason, have this kind of interest. I dont think there is a suggestion that that is going to change in the near future.
Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper described the issue as immensely serious and, while praising the NCA for safeguarding 400 children and arresting 660 suspected paedophiles, said more needs to be done.
Why are the Home Office and police not demanding action against tens of thousands of identified suspects of online child abuse?
Tens of thousands of other identified suspects must not be ignored. It feels as though once again the authorities are treating child abuse as too difficult to solve, and the Home Office are just not keeping up with this new and immensely serious growing online crime. Yet vulnerable children are at risk.
This problem should not be too big for the police to handle. After all, they manage to investigate and arrest over 230,000 for theft and handling stolen goods. Surely they should be able to investigate 25,000 potential child sex abusers.
She added that prosecutions for child sex offences have fallen by nine per cent, despite more cases being reported to the police.
Ms Coopers criticism of the NCA and the Government follows the revelation that the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which was merged into the NCA in October 2013, failed to pass on information to the police about a paedophile doctor more than a year before his arrest in December 2013.
Myles Bradbury, of Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, admitted offences against boys he was treating for cancer.
The NCA said information CEOP received at the time in relation to Bradbury was classified by experienced officers as Level 1 or lower on the COPINE scale, a system used to categorise the severity of child sexual abuse images. As a result it was not passed on to the police.
However, as soon as the matter came to light following the creation of the NCA, its deputy director general, Phil Gormley, ordered an independent review of CEOPs handling in 2012, concluding that it was clear that all steps that should have been completed at the time did not take place.
Shadow Home Affairs Minister Diana Johnson described the errors as deeply troubling and criticised both organisations.
She said: This shows how child abuse investigations have dropped under both the downgraded CEOP and the NCA over the last four years.
It has been reported that the NCA has details on over 10,000 people who have been downloading abusive images of children yet it has only investigated and arrested around 700 of them.
This extremely troubling case of Myles Bradbury is likely to be the tip of the iceberg. Child sexual abuse is not being given the priority it needs either by the police or the Home Office. Theresa May needs to ensure that much faster action is taken on intelligence of abuse, and child protection is paramount.
However, the Home Office said the NCA has unique and unprecedented capabilities to coordinate law enforcement efforts against the issue.
It added that additional work is underway to support these efforts.
A spokesperson said: We are building a single, secure database of all illegal images seized by the police and NCA which will enable better sharing of intelligence, and have set up a UK-US taskforce to work with industry to develop technical solutions to tackle the problem.
We will continue to draw on the brightest and best mi