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West Yorkshire Police officer sacked in secret for child sex abuse
photo possession
By David Jagger
Digital Reporter
Telegraph & Argus
West Yorkshire Police's headquarters
A NEW investigation has revealed the identity of a West Yorkshire Police officer who was sacked in secret by the force for gross misconduct.
Alexander Maloney, who was a serving police constable at the time, was dismissed on June 4, 2018, in a private hearing.
The details weren’t published for another six months, after he had been sentenced for the offences he was dismissed over.
West Yorkshire Police said the hearing was held privately due to ongoing criminal proceedings and that private hearings are “rare and carefully considered”.
The public was kept in the dark over his dismissal due to a loophole in transparency regulations, and an investigation by the New Statesman in collaboration with Newsquest has revealed that 212 dismissals have been hidden from the public since January 2018, one in four police dismissals in that time.
This is despite regulations introduced in 2017 stating that barred officers should be placed on a public list by the College of Policing, except in instances that would cause serious harm. The regulations say that “where a person recorded in the police barred list is a police officer or former police officer… the College must publish the entry relating to that person”.
Alexander Maloney was dragged before the disciplinary board accused of breaching the Standards of Professional Behaviour. It related to Maloney being arrested in July 2017 for the offence of possession and distribution of indecent images of children.
Police found a number of electronic devices at his home which he owned and when they were seized and examined it was found they contained 53 images of child abuse, two extreme adult pornography films, and 93 images of indicative/borderline child abuse.
A number of the seized electronic devices also contained encryption products and software applications to veil and conceal his online activity.
The hearing concluded that: “In behaving in such a way, you have acted in breach of the Standards of Professional Behaviour relating to discreditable conduct.
“These matters are individually and collectively alleged to amount to gross misconduct, namely a breach of the Standards of Professional Behaviour that, if proved, is so serious that your dismissal would be justified.”
The New Statesman said that according to Leeds Crown Court, he was sentenced in November 2018. And that the force did not publish details of this case due to ongoing proceedings but did not make the matter public after they had concluded either.
Other offences officers were dismissed for include domestic abuse, sexual harassment, racism, colluding with suspects, engaging in sexual relationships with vulnerable people, excessive use of force against suspects and members of the public, breaching Covid-19 restrictions, drink driving and more.
Some of these officers were dismissed in “private” meetings away from the press and public, or were granted anonymity. Others were sacked in supposedly public meetings, or had notices placed online, of which there is no current record.
A breathtaking betrayal of trust – how ‘atrocious’ sex abuse of three
children by a father, mother, uncles and aunt was revealed in Irish court
A harrowing 10-week trial laid bare the suffering inflicted by five family members
on three children
August 06 2021 09:32 PM
IT WAS a 10-week Central Criminal Court trial against seven – later reduced to five – members of the same family accused of the “atrocious” sexual abuse and neglect of small children.
The three men and two women, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the children, were accused of sexually abusing the three older siblings between 2014 and 2016.
Ranging in age from 27 to 56, they are the mother and father, aunt and uncles of the children and they live in various locations in Munster, Ireland.
The five family members were found guilty by a jury yesterday of all but one of the 78 counts against them. Final verdicts came in after 19 hours and 54 minutes of deliberations.
Thanking the jury for their service, Judge Paul McDermott said words were inadequate to express his gratitude for the “contribution, application and dedication” they had shown throughout the trial.
“This was an extremely difficult case to deal with and get to grips with, both by the nature of the allegations and the complexity of it and by the nature of the principles to be absorbed and applied by you,” the judge said. “I want to thank you for that. It is a huge and onerous task.”
He remanded all five in custody ahead of sentencing at a later date.
The parents were also accused of neglect of five of their children, while the father was accused of mistreating three of them by giving them medication. The trial heard he told a social worker he did this to help them “settle” at night.
The children were aged between one and nine at the time of the offending.
Extensive reporting restrictions were put in place to protect the welfare and identities of the children, who were taken into care in 2016.
The cases against two other women – the children’s uncle’s 32-year-old partner and their 57-year-old grandmother – were withdrawn during the trial after the children they were accused of abusing told the trial they could no longer remember them doing anything or may have been mistaken.
Before an enlarged jury panel of 15, the trial took place in Croke Park to allow for social distancing.
The case started with an indictment of 91 charges against seven people. In the end, the jury deliberated on 78 counts against five defendants, with each count being treated as its own individual case. It was a mammoth task.
Jury members had to sift through the evidence of more than 30 witnesses, including the children, social and family support workers, foster parents, teachers, medical professionals and gardaí.
They listened to transcripts of hours of garda interviews with most of the accused persons.
The judge’s charge at the end of the case, in which the entire case was outlined, took nearly four days.
There is much more to this horrible story at The Independent.
Munster, Ireland
Paedophile allowed to keep working at children's home
after sex abuse conviction
A report published by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse said youngsters in the care of south London authority, Lambeth Council were subjected "hard to comprehend" levels of cruelty
By Jonathan Humphries, Graeme Murray
16:55, 6 Aug 2021
A paedophile was allowed to continue working at a children's home following a conviction for abusing a boy. It was one of hundreds of failings identified in an investigation by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
A report published by the IICSA said youngsters in the care of Lambeth Council were subjected "hard to comprehend" levels of cruelty and abuse and were "pawns in a toxic power game" between politicians.
The south London council has since paid out more than £71 million in compensation to abuse victims.
The report found there was a “culture of cover‐up” within the authority, with staff and councillors failing to respond to extremely serious allegations of misconduct, including criminal behaviour, towards children.
Convicted paedophile Michael John Carroll ( Image: Daily Mirror)
One “particularly shocking example” was Michael John Carroll, who ran the Angell Road children’s home in Brixton.
Born into care himself at a mother and baby home in Blundellsands, he was admitted to St Edmund's Orphanage in Wirral, where he took a job in the mid-1960s.
In 1966, when he was 18, he was convicted at Wirral Magistrates Court of indecent assault against a boy in his care at St Edmund's.
The paedophile, who later married, moved to London and in March 1978 took up a job at Lambeth's Highland Road Children's Home, before becoming the "officer in charge" of Angell Road in 1981.
The inquiry found Carroll did not disclose his conviction when applying for the job and a check by Lambeth Council with the Department of Health did not bring it to light.
But in 1985/6, Carroll and his wife made efforts to foster a child in the care of Croydon Council, who conducted background checks. Officers at Croydon discovered the 1966 conviction, and refused the application, while also telling Carroll they would give him a month to inform his employers at Lambeth Council before disclosing it themselves.
According to the IICSA report, David Pope, then Lambeth Council's assistant director personal services (social work), and Gerallt Wynford-Jones, senior personnel officer, conducted disciplinary proceedings after Carroll finally admitted he had a conviction for indecent assault.
The IICSA heard Carroll falsely claimed the incident took place when he was 17, and involved him "larking about" with another boy by grabbing each other's privates.
However Merseyside Police sent Lambeth Council a letter contradicting Carroll's version of events, stating that he had entered the room of a boy, pulled his pyjamas down and touched his penis.
Despite the contradictions, Lambeth recorded that the accounts of Carroll and the police "differed only slightly" and the IICSA found the disciplinary panel "downplayed the significance" of the incident.
Carroll was given a final written warning for failing to disclose the conviction and allowed to continue his career until 1991.
The Liverpool Echo reports that the IICSA stated: "Given the potential risk to children in care, there should have been a more rigorous investigation into Carroll by Mr Thomas.
"Having employed a man with a conviction for the sexual assault of a child to run a children’s home, Mr Pope should have considered the risk that he posed to children. Mr Pope told us 'at the time we felt, on balance, that he was not a risk to children'.
"The disciplinary panel lacked any foundation for that conclusion."
Carroll continued to work at Angell Road for another five years until he was sacked for fraud.
Investigations later found he had implemented a type of therapy termed "direct work", which supposedly involved children expressing feelings of grief or trauma through play.
But reports emerged of bizarre and inappropriate scenarios, including one social worker describing "adults crawling around in nappies" and an occasion where Carroll shared a photo of a child in their underwear.
In 1999, the full extent of Carroll's abuse emerged when he pleaded guilty to 34 sex assaults on boys at children's homes in Wirral and London between 1966 and 1986.
He was jailed for 10 years.
The Echo said Professor Alexis Jay, chairman of the IICSA said: "Over several decades children in residential and foster care suffered levels of cruelty and sexual abuse that are hard to comprehend.
"These children became pawns in a toxic power game within Lambeth Council and between the Council and central government.
"For many years bullying, intimidation, racism, nepotism and sexism thrived within the council, and all against a backdrop of corruption and financial mismanagement.
"There was a vicious and regressive culture, for which a succession of leading elected members were mainly responsible, aided and abetted in some instances by self-serving senior officials.
“This all contributed to allowing children in their care to suffer the most horrendous sexual abuse, with just one senior council employee disciplined for their part in it.
“We hope this report and our recommendations will ensure abuse on this scale never happens again.
Lambeth, London
Chinese cyber agency detains 59 over illegal camera voyeurism
9 Aug, 2021 14:26
The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced on Monday that dozens of people have been arrested and 25,000 illegally hacked webcams seized as part of a crackdown on illegal voyeurism in the Asian nation.
In a statement, the cybersecurity watchdog announced the detention of 59 suspects who had allegedly used camera-cracking software to illegally control webcams, eavesdropping on individuals and engaging in illicit activity.
The CAC, together with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Ministry of Public Security, and State Administration of Market Regulation, initiated the crackdown on more than 4,000 online accounts and 132 groups, finding 22,000 illegal or harmful posts.
In order to prevent further violations, the CAC, alongside the relevant ministries, ordered digital agencies to improve their inspection and screening processes to identify and fix vulnerabilities that could lead to secure networks being compromised.
Digital platforms, including Alibaba’s UC Browser, Baidu, and Tencent, were among the Chinese providers ordered to ensure their services are “cleaned up” following the discovery of thousands of pieces of voyeuristic content on their sites, according to the CAC. Tech companies have been given a one-month deadline to “complete comprehensive rectification.”
Similarly, e-commerce sites, such as Alibaba’s Taobao, JD.com and Xianyu, took 1,600 cameras offline that had been illegally sold or offered to perpetrators potentially engaging in malicious activity, according to the CAC’s statement.
The CAC’s announcement of the crackdown on illegal voyeurism was paired with a warning from Chinese officials that further illicit behavior will be met with a “strong response” from authorities acting to protect “citizens’ personal privacy.”
Anti-LGBT Russian MP gets warning from Human Rights Council after
call for gays to be ‘sterilized’ & kept in ‘shelters’ like cats
9 Aug, 2021 10:53
A notorious Russian MP, known for making inflammatory remarks, has dubbed gay people the “lowest stage of development of the animal world” and called for the country’s homosexual population to be “sterilized” like stray cats.
Answering a journalist’s question on his TikTok account, Vitaly Milonov also proposed opening shelters for gay people, where they would be housed and fed. The video now appears to have been removed.
“We have to be humane,” Milonov said. “How do we fight stray cats? We sterilize them. And gays should be sterilized, too.”
Generally speaking, gays don't procreate. If gays numbers were a result of procreation, gays would have disappeared from the human race thousands of years ago.
“Of course, you cannot compare cute cats to gays,” he continued, before dubbing homosexuals the “lowest stage of development of the animal world.”
In response to the inflammatory comments, the head of Russia’s Human Rights Council, Valery Fadeev, called on the MP to mind his language and stop calling for people to break the law.
“It seems to me that, just as in Soviet times, the party committee should deal with him. It is not right if an MP has not read the Russian Constitution,” Fadeev said. “You can have a negative opinion towards gays and the LGBT community, but a politician should watch his language and should not publicly call for breaking laws.”
The latest comments aren’t the first time Milonov has made comments about gay people. The outspoken MP is notorious in the West for his homophobic views, and was the most vocal proponent of Russia’s 2013 so-called ‘gay propaganda law,’ which seeks to prohibit minors from exposure to LGBTQ material. In the time since, he has proposed numerous outlandish laws, including a ban on men walking topless along the street. He also suggested that fathers who fail to pay alimony should not be listed as male on their official documents because “a real man will never abandon his kids.”
I like that!
Ashford, UK paedophile jailed after paying women in the Philippines
to abuse girls
By Alex Jee
Published: 11:35, 09 August 2021
A paedophile who paid women in the Philippines to make videos of child abuse that he directed has been jailed.
An investigation by the Paedophile Online Investigation Team (POIT) revealed that Terry, 55, frequently paid for videos lasting between two and three minutes, sent via a live messaging app.
After being tipped off in February 2018, police raided Terry's home in Maidstone Road and seized his computer. A forensic examination of the machine found a staggering 7,000 indecent images of children on the hard drive.
Terry was charged in March 2020 and appeared before Canterbury Crown Court on Friday, August 6, where he admitted 15 counts of encouraging or assisting the commission of a child sex offence and four counts of possessing indecent images of children.
He was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment and will be the subject of a Sexual Harm Prevention Order for life.
Investigating officer DC Lee Sparks said: "This case is a disturbing example which highlights how easily children can be harmed online by strangers.
"Terry has been the cause of the most horrific abuse of young girls and despite not being physically present at the time of the assaults, he is responsible for them.
"It is saddening that we may never be able to safeguard these young victims and the case serves as a reminder that we must do everything in our power to protect the vulnerable, wherever they may be.
"This was a lengthy and complex investigation and it took considerable time to fully ascertain the extent of Terry’s offending.
"The judge recognised the severity of Terry’s crimes, issuing him a lengthy custodial sentence."
Charges stayed against accused child sex offender after 8 years
of police, Crown delays
Manitoba judge says Crown and police should have known
their actions and inactions could compromise case
Caroline Barghout
CBC News ·
Posted: Aug 11, 2021 5:00 AM CT
A man accused of raping a 14-year-old girl a decade ago won't face trial because of years of delays by police and the Crown, a Manitoba judge has ruled.
Thompson RCMP charged Frank Graham with sexual assault in 2011. He was released on bail and appeared in court twice, but then skipped his next hearing and moved to Edmonton.
Police and Crown attorneys knew where he was from 2012 to 2014, but they didn't arrest him until 2019, a recent Manitoba court decision says.
Graham later applied to have his charges stayed on the basis that his right to a trial within a reasonable time was breached.
Manitoba provincial court Judge Stacy Cawley granted that request in an Aug. 5 written decision that highlighted some of the problems in the case.
Cawley said that while Graham was responsible for part of the 10-year delay, which started when he skipped out on court and moved to Edmonton, more than eight years of delay was due to the actions and inaction of the Crown and the police.
"A delay of over eight years is not reasonable," Cawley wrote in her decision. "The Crown and the police should have known they were required to make timely decisions and the failure to act would risk the prosecution."
Lack of 'reasonable diligence'
The Crown had argued that since Graham skipped out on a court hearing and moved to Edmonton, he was to blame for the delays.
Cawley rejected that argument.
"The severity of this charge is precisely why the Crown and the RCMP should have acted with reasonable diligence to arrest Graham when they had the chance," Cawley wrote.
Defence lawyer Rohit Gupta says not only was there a significant delay in arresting Frank Graham, but it took the Crown over a year to provide full disclosure of documents. (Jacques Marcoux/CBC)
"The Crown can't rely on 'Hey, the accused screwed up in the beginning, so we don't really have to move this matter forward,' and I think this case says that," said Rohit Gupta, Graham's lawyer, in an interview.
The state not only failed to honour the rights of the accused in this case, he said, but it also failed the victim, a 14-year-old Indigenous girl.
"Had this complaint been in a locality such as Winnipeg, would the police have taken it more seriously?" he asked.
Gupta wondered if the case would have been taken more seriously by police and the Crown if the complainant hadn't been an Indigenous youth involved in the criminal justice system.
"It's a failure of the northern Manitoba system in general," he said.
For the chronology of events and more please go to CBC
Indonesia halts ‘two-finger’ virginity tests on female military recruits
11 Aug, 2021 12:20
The Indonesian military’s chief of staff has confirmed that the country’s armed forces will no longer conduct virginity tests on female recruits after criticism that the practice is cruel, degrading and has no scientific validity.
“There’s no more of that,” Army Chief of Staff Andika Perkasa declared, discussing the so-called ‘two-finger’ virginity tests which had examined “whether the hymen was ruptured or partially ruptured” before female cadets could be admitted.
Addressing concerns raised by Human Rights Watch (HRW), which investigated the process in 2014 and 2015, Perkasa made it clear that the selection process going forward will be equal for male and female cadets. HRW had pressured the Indonesian military to end the examinations, calling them “discriminatory and degrading.”
Previously, the Indonesian military had defended the tests by claiming that they were necessary to determine the morality of potential recruits despite the World Health Organization claiming they have “no scientific validity.”
Separately, the Indonesian Navy said that virginity tests do not take place but pregnancy tests on female applicants do occur. The navy’s spokesperson, Julius Widjojono, defended its practice by stating that “both men and women undergo the same examinations.”
Men are examined for pregnancy?
Indonesian Air Force spokesperson, Indan Gilang, claimed this branch of the military does not conduct any examination called “virginity tests,” but admitted female reproduction tests are done to check for cysts or potential medical complications.
The announcement from Perkasa was met with praise from human rights groups. Andy Yentriyani, the head of the National Commission on Violence Against Women, said “there was never any need for the tests” and HRW’s Indonesia researcher Andreas Harsono declared that it was “the right thing to do,” as the practice had been “degrading, discriminatory and traumatic.”
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