Police say sex offenders can use social networking websites

Scotland Yard has announced that convicted sex offenders can use the social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace in the wake of MySpace removing 29,000 accounts from its servers in the USA after the company cross checked its members database with publicly available sex offender registers.

The Met has stated that it has no intention of sharing its sex offender databases with sites like Bebo so they can check if any UK based offenders appear on both databases. A spokeswoman said: “Just because you’re a convicted offender doesn’t mean you’re still offending. Why would we pursue them in this way? These are people who have served their time.”

The spokeswomen did, however, reiterate that the UK has some of the most rigorous laws that protect children, and that all police forces would continue to work with child protection agencies to ensure that the Internet is as safe as possible for young people to use. The position that the Met has taken was supported by the Home Office that stated that it had no plans to reveal the identity of any sex offenders to organisations other than those directly involved with policing.

Even though the police have no intention of sharing data about known sex offenders with websites like MySpace, officers regularly pose as children on these sites to trap offenders who may be using them as a first point of contact with a child they intend to groom.

Legislation is very different in the UK than the US. In the States, local authorities are compelled to publish details of known sex offenders. As this information is in the public domain, it can be used by any organisation including the social networking websites to check their databases for any matches. There are currently no plans to introduce similar legislation in the UK.

The police also state that many of the grooming incidents that they investigate are as a direct result of young people placing sensitive information about themselves on sites like MySpace. They repeated that most grooming takes place in chatrooms and not on social networking sites.

In a statement, MySpace said: “We are pleased that we have successfully identified and deleted these registered sex offenders and hope that other social networking sites follow our lead.”