The ‘Philomena Protocol’ > Saving Children in the Cayman Islands

 

Police using new approach to target child sex abuse in the Caymans

At a glance

• The RCIPS has launched a new process used by police services in the UK, known as the ‘Philomena Protocol’, to help protect children who are being exploited
• Former head of London’s Met Police team in finding missing persons and exploited children is leading the introduction of new protocol
• Police asking public to assist with protecting the islands’ vulnerable children

Police have adopted a new protocol in efforts to tackle child sex abuse and exploitation in Cayman.

The Royal Cayman Islands Police Service has begun using what is known as the ‘Philomena Protocol’, which helps to locate and return a child as soon as possible after they are reported missing, as well as to identify and protect potential victims.

The basis of the scheme is for vital information about the young person to be recorded and accessed by relevant agencies, including police and social services, so that it can be used to help locate them safely and quickly.

Detective Chief Inspector Lorraine Roberts says the RCIPS is taking a more proactive approach to protecting vulnerable children in Cayman. – Photo: File

RCIPS Protective Services Detective Chief Inspector Lorraine Roberts says groomers usually target vulnerable kids, noting, “You only have to look at the Epstein case at the moment” to see the types of young people who are being groomed and used.

“Cayman is no different to the rest of the world,” she said. “It’s the children … who are looking for love and attention, and suddenly they’ve got this admirer online giving them lots of compliments

“And the message from me, for parents, is to pass on to their children that nothing in life is free. People get given drugs, alcohol; why on Earth do they think that these adults are giving them drugs [or food]?”

She says the RCIPS is aiming to “get more in the prevention space” when it comes to protecting Cayman’s children.

“We know that some offenders are targeting some of our most vulnerable individuals, and now we’re doing much more to now be proactive in this space … in identifying the targeting,” she said, adding that police are making it a priority to be “perpetrator focused”.

The Philomena Protocol

The Philomena Protocol, named in the UK after Saint Philomena – the patron saint of babies, infants and youths – was introduced to the RCIPS shortly before Roberts joined the service last year, and she has been leading it since October.

It has been used by various police departments across the United Kingdom since it was launched in County Durham in northern England seven years ago. Roberts previously was the lead officer responsible for missing people and child exploitation in the Metropolitan Police Service in London.

She explained that, under the Philomena protocol, as soon as a child is reported missing, from school, a household or a children’s home, “we’re on the phone to CCTV to find out where they are … and we’re much more perpetrator focused”.

During her time in London, she said, using this protocol, the Met Police saw a reduction by half in child murders “because … we worked more with the causes; what were children being led into? Why were they going missing? Where was the harm and risk? And it was either for drugs or exploitation.”

As part of the RCIPS’s efforts to become more proactive in protecting the islands’ children, it is working closer with other agencies – like the Department of Children and Family Services, the 911 service, CCTV operators – on the newly adopted protocol.

The RCIPS also want members of the public to start communicating their suspicions to police when they think a child might be in danger from an individual. “Perpetrators are out there, and people who know them, they need to start telling the police who they are, and who they’ve got suspicions about. We need to hear about it,” Roberts said.

Breaking the cycle of sexual abuse of vulnerable victims and protecting them, is vital, says Chief Superintendent Richard Barrow, who heads up the RCIPS Public Protection Bureau.

A complicating factor in this is the interpretation of what is happening by the young victims themselves, he explained, noting that many of the youngsters targeted do not see themselves as victims.

“So we have got to change that mindset,” he said.

Dedicated efforts to deal with the issue of child exploitation and abuse in Cayman have been ongoing for some time, he noted, pointing to the establishment of the Child Safeguarding Board, which was set up in 2016.

That board was set up to help coordinate policies and procedures for preventing all forms of child abuse, and making sure information is shared across agencies.

Changing the language

Roberts has also been leading training within the RCIPS and with the various agencies on tackling “victim-blaming language”, as well as pinpointing exactly what is child exploitation and what can be done to prevent predators from targeting children who regularly go missing.

“They’re not runaways; they’re missing children,” she said. “When you call them runaways, that puts the onus on them. They are missing children because they think they are in a relationship.”

Those relationships are often with much older men, who offer them drugs, alcohol and gifts, and shower them with attention. “You can’t blame the child … they’re being coerced,” she said.

Kids who have little or no parental supervision, who can often be found out in public late at night, are typically among those who are targeted, she noted.

Other language that needs changing within the community would be calling the grown men these girls go with “abuser” instead of “boyfriend”, Roberts said.

She added that if the community mindset is changed from thinking the girls are just “with a boyfriend” versus being “sexually exploited by an adult male who is abusing them … that’s the shift we need.”

“It’s often the same offenders, and it’s just being wise to be proactive and targeting those,” Roberts said.

Cayman Island Abused Child Lied, Says Her Mother

Horrible child sex abuse case just got a lot worse

Cayman News

(CNS): The mother of a ten-year-old girl who claims the woman’s former boyfriend sexually abused her said she believes her daughter has lied about who the perpetrator of the abuse was. In a harrowing sexual assault case against a West Bay man, who is accused of abusing the little girl from when she was seven years old, the child’s mother gave evidence for the crown. However, she told the court that she believed the child had been molested, not by her ex-lover as the crown claims, but by other men in the family who had also abused her when she was a child.

The man on trial, who is accused of sexually assaulting the child for a year, has denied the allegations and claims that the young child made up the accusations against him because she wanted to live with her father. The mother appeared to agree with those sentiments when she took to the witness stand Wednesday.

Family from Hell

She claimed, for the first time since she gave her original statement to police, that her daughter had immediately recanted allegations made to a social worker against her ex-boyfriend. The mother also claimed that before the child was removed from her care and afterwards, during visits to her home after the investigation began, the girl had told her that it was other people in the extended family who had abused her.

She further claimed that before the child was taken away, they had discussed what she should do if she was molested.

The local woman told the court that her daughter had said that she was abused by her mother’s brother (the child’s uncle) and by a cousin who lived at the child’s grandmother’s house. The mother said that her eldest son, the little girl’s brother, had masturbated in front of the child on two occasions, as he has serious mental health problems and frequently does that in front of family members. The woman also revealed a history of sexual abuse in the family, saying that she had also been sexually abused when she was child by the same brother who she believes assaulted her youngest daughter.

The court heard that the mother has five other children besides the child making the allegations of abuse against her boyfriend and every one of them had been taken into care at some point because of the sexual abuse going on in the extended family.

But the woman claimed that she did not believe that her former boyfriend had ever abused her youngest daughter.

She said she believed the child had lied because she was manipulative and wanted to get her own way. She said the child’s father (her husband) had left and the daughter blamed her for it, and that she constantly cried and wanted to go live with him.

The mother said that the man accused of abusing the child was strict but he treated the little girl like his own daughter and had tried to protect her from the other men in the family who he believed were abusing her. She said that her former boyfriend had raised his concerns that he suspected the child was being molested when she visited her grandmother by the uncles and cousins. He was concerned, too, that she was being influenced by much older children and being allowed to watch films of a sexual nature.

The case continues.

Child Struggles to Testify Against Pedophile

Young child reveals sex abuse in video

Cayman News

(CNS): A little girl who told a social worker that she was being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend appeared in court Tuesday via video link to give evidence against her alleged abuser but struggled to talk about what she said was “the bad touching”. The child had revealed the accusations of assault when she was just eight years old after it had been happening for a year. At that time she was interviewed by police and revealed the disturbing allegations on video, which was played to the court.

Caution: graphic description follows in this paragraph

The girl, who is now aged ten, told police that a 58-year-old West Bay man (who was 56 at the time) who was living in the family home was abusing her. The abuse allegedly took place when her mother was sleeping or at work, and happened in the room where the family, including the child, all slept. She spoke of the man forcing his penis into her mouth and making her want to throw up, touching and licking her genitals and squashing her in what appeared to be allegations of attempted rape.

The court heard that the little girl was removed from the home after reporting the abuse in May 2014. Following a police investigation, the suspect was arrested a month later and then charged in February 2015. But the trial did not start until Tuesday, almost two years after the child reported the incident. No reason was given to the court for the lengthy delay from charge to trial.

In the video made in the immediate wake of the child’s reports and played to the court, the young girl spoke of the abuse in some detail. But two years later, clearly disturbed by seeing the footage again and being asked to recall the events and answer questions about them for the court, the child was upset, which made testing of her evidence extremely difficult. Given the rules surrounding the cross-examination of children in such cases, the court was adjourned to allow her to return Wednesday and the court to try the questions again.

The accused man, who cannot be named because of the risk of identifying the child, is currently remanded in custody. He has denied the allegations, which include two counts of gross indecency, two counts of indecent assault and one count of attempted rape. He has claimed that the child made up the allegations so that she could leave the home where she lived with him and her mother and live with her father.

Cayman Islands Child Sex Abuse: Investigating the Police Investigation

“It is totally unacceptable for there to be failings such as these in the investigation of a child sex abuse allegation. I expect the RCIPS to conduct a thorough and objective investigation … to determine what went wrong. Those found responsible for the failings must be dealt with quickly and appropriately.”

— Governor Helen Kilpatrick, Sept. 16, 2016

Governor Kilpatrick has spoken with clarity, authority and righteousness. It’s an auspicious beginning to an arduous process of truth-seeking.

Most of our readers are well aware of what has sparked the governor’s ire: The recent acquittal of two suspects accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl, more than four years after the initial complaint was made to police.

While nobody knows what will be uncovered by the internal investigations (one a police review specifically into the aforementioned case, and one a broader audit of all ongoing child abuse cases), it appears obvious that there were significant individual and systemic failings within the police service, which allowed for the case to “go cold.”

"Cold"? Glacial!

During trial, Grand Court Justice Timothy Owen skewered the police investigation as “grossly incompetent,” not only for the inordinate delays, but also for significant gaps in evidence presented in court. The investigating police officer lost notes about the accuser’s first account of the abuse, allegedly by an uncle and cousin. Then the police never attempted to collect witness statements from anyone living in the house when the abuse allegedly occurred.

While we support the launch of the broader audit into child abuse cases by new RCIPS Superintendent Peter Lansdown, any serious probe into these issues must also extend to the Department of Public Prosecutions and into the judicial system.

How many criminal cases — not just of child abuse — are derailed for reasons rooted in ineptitude, politics, policies, who’s related to whom, who’s friends with whom, or, most broadly, the flawed architecture of the system itself? Certainly, the problems go far beyond the RCIPS.

For example, it is deeply troubling whenever we see, apparently against all odds, a case involving allegations of abuse or violence (particularly against children, women or other “vulnerable” people) make it from the police, to public prosecutors and all the way in front of a judge — and perhaps even for a guilty verdict to be handed down … only to be accompanied by a sentence so lenient that its deterrent effect fades away before the defendant has sauntered out of the courtroom and back onto the street.

On the subject of the RCIPS internal investigations, it is less than ideal for police to be investigating “their own” (particularly when the officers being investigated have not been placed on administrative leave). However, those concerns are mitigated by Superintendent Lansdown’s position and reputation, and the fact that new Police Commissioner Derek Byrne’s tenure begins in November.

The best practice might be to invite independent experts from overseas to conduct the investigations, but our memories of Operation Tempura and its spin-off Operation Cealt are far too fresh for us to conclude that “outside investigators” are a panacea in these cases.

Ultimately, the investigation will be judged not by its procedural setup, but by its thoroughness, its timeliness, its objectivity and, above all, its unredacted conclusions.

Cayman Compass

Cayman Islands Police Failure Blamed for Child Sex Abuse Acquittals

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands (CNS) -- Two Cayman Islands men accused of consistently sexually abusing a child in the family home have been acquitted after the judge pointed to the “gross incompetence” of the police investigation that undermined the evidence and prejudiced the defendants so much that he had no choice but to find the men not guilty on all counts. 

The two male relatives, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were accused of abusing the little girl from when she was as young as six or seven years old until she was around 12, when she revealed the abuse to an adult at her after-school club.

See also: Sloppy Police Work Drops Child Sex Abuse Case in Caymen Islands

    George town, Grand Cayman Island

The case was heard without a jury by visiting UK judge, Justice Timothy Owen, who described it as a very “troubling case”. When he delivered his verdict via video link on Thursday, he made it clear that he did not think the child was lying.

Although he rejected the defendants’ claims that the child had made up the allegations of abuse to escape her violent mother, he said the problems in the massive delay between the victim making the complaint and the case coming to court made it difficult for him to be sure to the required standard of the men’s guilt.

Justice Owen was damning in his criticisms of the police investigation, which he described as incompetent. He made it clear it was the “inexplicable and inexcusable delays”, the failure to interview relevant potential witnesses and the loss of important notes by the police that undermined the case.

In the first unexplained delay, the police simply did nothing for some 18 months after the child gave video evidence. The judge said the “truly lamentable police response” after the child gave evidence meant that no witnesses in the house where the abuse took place were ever interviewed. As a result, there was no evidence to corroborate the child’s allegations, which were inconsistent and unspecified regarding times and places.

While the child lived in a small five-bed family home with 15 relatives, “cheek by jowl”, during the time period she claimed the abuse occurred, none of her other relatives there were ever questioned by the police.

4 Years to come to trial

The two defendants were not interviewed until more than 18 months after the allegations for a brief period, and there was another delay of approximately a year before they were charged. As a result of pressures on the court timetable, the case was heard some four years after the child was first interviewed.

The judge said he was left with no choice but to acquit due to those delays, as well as the missing notes, the lack of specific times and places regarding when the abuse occurred, inconsistencies in the young girl’s evidence at court compared with her earlier interviews, and the fact that it was difficult for the accused men to properly answer the vague charges.

He said that the defendants did not make an abuse of process application based on the delays in the case and the police mishandling, so no senior police witnesses ever appeared in court to explain the failures.

During the case the court had heard harrowing allegations about the abuse the child suffered, not only at the hands of her male relatives but also the violence inflicted by her mother, who beat her after she made the report. The court also heard how the child and her siblings witnessed their parents having sex as they had all shared a room and beds.

Despite the failures in the case, the child had been removed from the abusive home in the immediate wake of the allegations and was fostered by another relative.

This poor girl had to go through testifying for nothing, and now she gets to live on a small island with the two men who frequently raped her and the mother who beat her for reporting it.

Now the question is, has anything been done to address the spectacular incompetency of the police force? As with the Kansas City Police's spectacular incompetence, where is the oversight? Someone's head should roll, if not several heads.