What 'child protection' means today

According to children's charity, Barnardo's, convicted child sex offenders should receive greater monitoring on release, including the use of mandatory polygraphs and satellite tracking to ensure that they are not engaging in predatory behaviour. However, the charity has rejected the notion of a 'Sarah's Law' where neighbourhoods were advised when a convicted paedophile moved into their area.

'Barnardo's is committed to protecting children from harm, but we feel that a Sarah's Law would offer a false comfort to parents and could put children in more, not less, danger,' said Martin Narey, chief executive of the charity, suggesting offenders would be driven away from supervision and into hiding. 'That said, the current arrangements for the safe supervision of dangerous offenders need to be strengthened and public confidence restored. Our report outlines how the use of polygraphs and satellite tracking could radically improve the effectiveness of supervision.' The implication is that we can trust the authorities but we can't trust the public not to turn into a lynch mob if told about an offender in their area.

Sex offenders are the easiest possible target for the extension of state controls and intrusion. Yet, the risk they pose is small. Most sex offenders - even those deemed 'high risk' - don't reoffend. According to a Home Office study in 2002, 'The proportion reconvicted of another sexual offence during [four- and six-year] follow-up periods was relatively low: less than 10 per cent, even amongst those who could be followed up for six years'. Although the figure is higher where the victim was a child not within the family unit (25 per cent), the study also found that nine out of 10 of all offenders deemed 'high risk' did not reoffend. These figures are substantially lower than for offences in general. For example, recent figures suggest that 57 per cent of adult offenders are convicted of another crime within two years.

If such monitoring is justified on the basis of such low reconviction rates, all serious offenders could be pursued in this manner - and, as we have seen with the Sex Offenders Register, definitions of what offenders should be covered can quickly expand to include groups that would never be considered much of a threat.

Isn't it more dangerous when a well-known charity, famous for providing homes for orphaned and vulnerable children, suffers such profound mission drift that it spends its time suggesting Big Brother measures to crack down on released offenders? It is indicative of what 'child protection' means today that Narey, the former head of the prison service and first chief executive of the National Offenders Management Service, is now the head of a leading children's charity.

Call to satellite track offenders, BBC News, 14 November 2006

Reconviction rates of serious sex offenders and assessments of their risk, Home Office, 2002

Two thirds of criminals sent back to jail within two years, The Times (London), 10 November 2006