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Premier League player arrested on suspicion of child sex offences
after home raided by police
20 Jul, 2021 07:40
A Premier League footballer has been arrested on suspicion of child sex offences, according to reports in the UK. The player is said to have been suspended by his club.
The unnamed 31-year-old was arrested on Friday by Greater Manchester Police and has been bailed while investigations continue.
According to reports in the Daily Mail, the player’s home was raided earlier this month in search of evidence.
“Several items were seized by cops. He was questioned in relation to very serious offences,” the newspaper quoted a source as saying of the player, who is said to be married.
According to the Mirror, the footballer in question is a regular international and has attracted multimillion-pound transfer fees during his career.
"Allegations of this nature will cause a considerable amount of alarm among everyone within the club, the fans, and the wider public," the Mirror quoted an 'insider' as saying.
'Dangerous' teen paedophile who abused nine nursery children
sentenced to over 14 years in Exeter court
By Abigail O'Leary Reporter
18:02, 23 JUL 2021
The Mirror
A "dangerous" teenage paedophile who abused nine nursery children over a three-week period has been sentenced to 14 and a half years.
A trial at Exeter Crown Court heard sick McCarthy, now 18, raped one child and molested eight others.
Judge David Evans - who said the defendant committed "blazingly obvious incidents of sexual assault" - sentenced him to a total of 14.5 years youth detention. Victims' family members clapped as the judge jailed him.
He will serve seven years behind bars and will be strictly monitored on release and faces a further three year period on licence.
What happens to the other 4.5 years?
The judge told the teenager this afternoon: "You are a dangerous offender and pose a significant risk to members of the public of causing serious harm by the commission of further specified sexual offences. You could barely contain your sexual urges in that nursery.
"Between June 26th and July 29th you sexually assaulted eight other children in your care aged two and four on 13 separate and blazingly obvious incidents of sexual assault."
He continued: "You are immature. I take into account your childhood experiences, childhood abuse and significant neglect. There are not clear mental health issues but you have a psychiatric illness.
"You had obtained a job in a nursery and you had received safeguarding and training in the need to protect the young and vulnerable children whose care was entrusted to you."
Males should never be hired in daycares. They should never be present in daycares. If they are, remove your children at once, please!
It was heard that the offences came to light when a girl came home from nursery and told her parents that an adult called Jayden had sexually abused her.
One parent told the court: "It was a big shock and we didn't really know what to do." The parents immediately called the nursery to ask who Jayden was and report what had happened.
"I asked if they had someone called Jayden working there as I hadn't heard of him before then and I asked if Jayden had got my daughter changed because she had said he had changed her in the toilets."
The parents visited the nursery that evening looking for answers and were told McCarthy had been suspended while the claims were investigated. Police launched a major investigation.
McCarthy admitted changing the girl out of wet clothes in the toilet but denied any sexual offence. The incident was not captured on CCTV.
A member of staff said she noticed he had taken longer than usual to change the child. She went to see what was happening and McCarthy said he was having trouble getting her dressed.
McCarthy, from Brixham, was charged with 16 offences, which he denied.
Police searched through more than 250 hours of other footage from the weeks leading up to the offence to see if there were any other incidents of sexual behaviour. They found 13 incidents which caused concern.
The jury was played clips of CCTV which showed McCarthy sexually assaulting children. He would often sexually assault children while playing with them on the ground or while applying sun cream to their bodies, the prosecution said.
Prosecutor Jason Beal said: "Over the course of several weeks in 2019 Jayden McCarthy sexually assaulted nine children.
"These assaults were of varying degrees of seriousness, ranging from touching children over and under clothing in their private areas to an incident of rape."
German cops identify over 1,600 suspects in sting op on online chat groups
where child porn & zoophilia materials were distributed
24 Jul, 2021 14:46
© Getty Images / sakkmesterke
Police in Germany have identified more than 1,600 potential child sex-abuse suspects who participated in online chat groups on which child pornography and zoophilia material was shared. Many of the suspects are reportedly minors.
While most of the suspects came from across the country, digital forensic experts had picked out people from the US, Austria, Switzerland and France on suspicion of possessing or sharing images of child sex abuse in the chat groups.
According to a press statement from Bavarian police, the suspects were being evaluated as part of “two large-scale trials” being prepared by police and prosecutors. If convicted, all suspects, including the minors, would be looking at a prison term of "not less than a year.”
Police officers in the Bavarian town of Amberg had been on to the online chats after coming across an advertisement earlier in March. The chats contained graphic videos and images of sex acts with children, adolescents and animals.
Hinting at the scale of the five-month investigation, Amberg police said that they had "several hundred thousand" pages of information on the suspects – enough to fit in “21 large moving boxes.”
“The distribution of child and adolescent pornography has increased markedly in recent years and is an area of focus for us in many investigations,” Peter Krämer, deputy head of criminal police investigations in Amberg, said.
“As well as people with pedophile tendencies, it is often children and adolescents who share material like this in group chats without thinking, and who therefore regularly open themselves up to criminal prosecution," he added.
The investigators also warned that even membership in such group chats would be enough grounds for prosecution in Germany – since it pointed to the possibility of an individual either having access to, or possessing copies of, the photos and videos on their devices.
"That is why our appeal is particularly aimed at parents to sensitize their children to this issue," Krämer said.
The statement noted that the early use of smartphones by young children had opened up the possibility of them being exposed to such illegal content.
Earlier in the year, German authorities arrested four people after a raid on a dark-web club that had some 400,000 users.
UK police abandoned investigations into over 1,000 crimes daily in 2020
with one in seven probes dumped within 24 hours - reports
24 Jul, 2021 12:55
Police forces across the UK reportedly wrote off over 1,000 crimes a day last year. Investigations into serious crimes like threats to murder, rapes, assaults and arson were apparently closed within 24 hours during the pandemic.
Despite lower crime levels in the country during the Covid lockdowns, some forces doubled the number of crime investigations they "screened out". One in seven crimes reported last year were allegedly abandoned within a day of police opening investigations into them.
The shocking figures, revealed in freedom of information requests by the Daily Mail, showed that police probes into some 432,634 crimes were ditched within a day – or about 1,185 crimes per day last year. The paper noted that the true figure was likely at least twice that amount since less than half of the UK's police forces shared their data.
According to information provided by 17 police forces across the country, 15% of cases were closed on average without an officer meeting the victim. The worst offenders were the Police Service of Northern Ireland which screened out 38% of cases while the UK's largest force, Scotland Yard, dumped 31% of new cases inside a day.
Although crimes judged as 'lower harm' or with poor evidence are typically more likely to be dropped, the reported figures show that during the pandemic there was a spike in the numbers of serious offences going uninvestigated.
About 42,073 reported violent incidents were ditched last year – a 6% jump from 2019 and there was a 4% rise in arson cases being abandoned, with the police shelving 6,753 reports in 2020 compared to 6,483 the year before.
Meanwhile, in a revelation that is expected to add to public outcry over police handling of women's safety, forces reported that 71 rapes and OVER 420 other sexual offences were screened out within a day last year even though there was a 7% overall drop in sex offences in England and Wales.
In its 'End-to-End Rape Review' report last month, the UK government had ordered the police to reverse the downward trend in the volume of rape cases being referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) since 2016.
Among other recommendations, it called for the police to "ensure decision-making is based on evidence, rather than subjective judgements of victim credibility" and mandated a "change of practice and longer-term cultural change in the police and CPS".
Good luck with that in Northern Ireland.
The government report also stated that the data collected by the police needed to be "more consistent". The Bedfordshire police force had admitted to the Daily Mail that its data collection was "unreliable". The force had reportedly dropped as many as 6% of rapes and 13% of sex offences last year.
"It is still the case that too many victims do not have confidence in the response they will receive if they report to the police and so do not come forward," a new government policy paper on tackling violence against women notes.
Other crimes written off by police forces include 6,350 robberies, 1,137 muggings, 423 drugs possession cases and 171 weapons possession cases. In addition, some 29,730 residential burglaries were screened out with some forces in England and Wales failing to investigate over half of such cases.
In April, a HM Inspectorate of Constabulary report had warned that some forces had "increased the number of crimes they decided not to investigate because they were unlikely to be solved" and were offering a "reduced service in some areas of police work" as a result of Covid precautions.
"If the public knew this was happening on this scale, they would be shocked and outraged. Anyone who reports a crime deserves a proper response from the police," Vera Baird, Victims' Commissioner for England and Wales, told the paper.
But a National Police Chiefs' Council spokesman responded, "In some cases, there may not be enough intelligence or data for police to act on. This does not mean that a crime is closed indefinitely or that intelligence or information is ignored."
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More than 250 convicted of child sexual abuse in UK and Ireland
while in Scout movement
For decades, the Scout movement has been promoted as offering the chance to experience adventures
and gain life skills. Photograph: John Birdsall/Alamy
Haroon Siddique Legal affairs correspondent
Sun 25 Jul 2021 14.57 BST
The Guardian
More than 250 people in the UK and Ireland have been convicted of child sexual abuse offences committed while they were Scout leaders or in other positions of responsibility within the Scout movement since the 1950s, according to analysis that raises questions about the organisation’s safeguarding procedures.
For decades, the Scout movement has been promoted as offering the chance to experience adventures and gain life skills but a review of offenders shows that for scores of children it has led to abuse at the hands of someone entrusted with their welfare.
The 255 cases include convictions for rape, indecent assault, voyeurism and the possession, creation and distribution of indecent/pornographic images.
The cases date back to the 1950s but also include contemporary examples such as Oliver Cooper from Bognor Regis, who was jailed for six years in October last year for three counts of sexual assault, against two six-year-old girls, taking indecent photographs of a child and 13 counts of voyeurism. The offences took place just over two years previously.
Also last year, Graham Avison from Audenshaw, Greater Manchester, was jailed for five years and seven months in November after pleading guilty to four counts of indecent assault between 1991 and 1995 against a boy whom he began grooming by giving him small gifts such as chocolate bars.
Abbie Hickson, associate in the abuse team at Bolt Burdon Kemp (BBK) solicitors, which compiled the interactive map of scouting abuse, said: “The Scout Association must do much more to protect the safety of its scouts from sexual predators going forward. At present there is an ongoing culture where there is potential for abuse to be inadvertently facilitated and not actively prevented.
“Much of their safeguarding policy relies on the integrity of the Scout leaders themselves, and is dependent on the individual choosing to adhere to it. It is important to remember that scoutmasters who perpetrate sexual abuse against scouts are by their very nature highly manipulative, secretive, devious and opportunistic individuals.
“There has to be a culture of transparency and trust and steps must be taken throughout all levels of the organisation so that sexual abuse within the scouts is actively prevented. When complaints are made, these must be investigated thoroughly and lesson learned, so that future abuse is prevented. Only then will the scouts of today and the future be protected from these sexual predators.”
BBK says the actual number of perpetrators and victims is likely to be even higher than detailed on its interactive map, which was based on public records, newspaper articles and independently verified documents, given that it only includes convictions. It does not include cases where victims did not report abuse or where prosecutors did not bring charges because of the difficulties of proving abuse where several years had passed or because the alleged abuser had died.
One example not included is that of Lucy Pincott, 27, details of whose case have been made public for the first time. She says she was sexually assaulted multiple times by a young leader when she was 13 years old.
The Crown Prosecution Service did not bring charges against her alleged abuser but Pincott, represented by BBK, agreed to a £160,000 settlement with the Scout Association (the main UK scouting body) last year after an independent review was highly critical of its investigation into her complaint, although it did not admit liability.
Pincott said: “I want scouting to continue. It can be a great thing for many young people. However, they must be kept safe from those who would prey upon them.
“Many people will never recover from the damage of paedophiles and other sex offenders, especially when they are not believed and predators remain protected.”
Unfortunately, the article doesn't tell us how many victims of CSA there were in the Scouts. But in America, we know that at least 60,000 children suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Scout leaders. And that's a conservative estimate.
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