Soroptimists from Southampton, Chichester and Winchester joined members of Gosport and Fareham to hear a thought-provoking talk by Det Insp John Geden, a member of the Child Abuse Investigation Team of Hampshire police with wide-ranging knowledge and experience in the field.
He made it clear that a lot more needed to be done to tackle the horrors of travelling sex offenders, commonly called sex tourists, who travelled to countries such as Ukraine and Cambodia where a child could be bought for ten dollars a night.
“We need more boots on the ground and some changes in UK law,” he said.
Why did offenders travel abroad? The law was not very robust in other parts of the world so criminals knew there was less risk of getting caught, and in addition there was no age of consent in Ukraine for example and “in Spain it’s age 13.”
In many countries the only child protection available was provided by charities and offenders often ran charities such as orphanages as a cover for their activities. Corruption was rife, abject poverty meant families often sold their children into sexual slavery and a culture of deference to Westerners was common.
DI Geden said he had been seconded to the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), the agency that works across the UK to tackle child sex abuse and had helped to bring back the pop star Gary Glitter.
He had been fortunate enough to gain a grant from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust enabling him to travel abroad to carry out research on the subject.
He explained that sex crime often escalated, offenders would start by, perhaps, fantasising then downloading photographs from the internet before progressing to an actual assault.
He said it was important to try to convict travelling sex offenders as they could return to the UK and assault children in their locality.
“But in this country it’s easier to get a court order to prevent a football hooligan travelling abroad than it is to prevent someone intent on committing child sex offences.”
He said he had been co-author of a report published this month that criticised the fact that the system was flawed, especially where orders banning overseas travel were concerned.
Changes were needed in the law to rectify this and CEOP was working towards this end. In Australia, for example, sex offenders were prevented from having passports.
“And the US are much more proactive than we are in this country,” he said. There, an agency had been set up to trace American travelling sex offenders and they had brought 85 perpetrators to justice.
As a result of his work rescuing a group of children from abuse in Cambodia he had become involved in the Cambodian Children’s Fund (CCF).
“My wife and I sponsor a child and in 2012 we visited the organisation in Phnom Penh as part of a family holiday in Asia.
“The highlight of our week was watching our two daughters singing a One Direction song along with the Khmer children. It just shows that children are the same the world over.”
Thanking him for his talk, Christine Wilkes gave him a cheque for £50 for the CCF.