Paedophiles, housing and IIOC

Families petition for paedophile to be re-homed

 

JEP Online Monday 15 July 2013

 

"RESIDENTS in a family housing estate say they are furious that a suspected paedophile is living among young children and they are calling for Housing to move him immediately.

 

Eighty people have signed a petition requesting that the Housing department move the man, who has been charged with downloading indecent images of children but is currently out on conditional bail.
One resident in the estate claims that Housing knew that the man was a known sex offender."

One hopes that this is an isolated incident (the placement of the suspected paedophile into a housing estate with young families living in it, not the petition to have him removed). From the printed article, it states that his particular house was "between a family with three young girls and a family with two young girls" - with two of his windows overlooking the estate playground".

However, being that this is the second story in a little over a year, regarding child sex offenders living in close proximity to young children, maybe this isn't an isolated incident after all?

It would be interesting to know what the Housing policy is regarding housing registered sex offenders and paedophiles. Reading the print edition, and seeing that the Housing department is a partner agency of JMAPPA, one would hope that these incidents would never happen, but obviously they do.

Where then do they house convicted paedophiles and sex offenders? What "criteria" do they look into when deciding this? Jersey is a small Island with a large population, so this is always going to be a challenge, but surely there must be far more appropriate places to house paedophiles than in estates with young families in. No good for either the residents already living there, or any relatives of the offenders who may be living with him/her.

Good luck to the residents, and hope they are successful with their petition and something is done.

Which brings me onto the sole comment under the article (before the JEP decided to close comments, why?). This comment stating the fact of "where to house as Jersey is so small", and "downloading doesn't mean he is a risk to children as he hasn't physically touched a child".

Firstly I wonder if the commentator realises what indecent images actually are? Why would someone go online and download (make) images of child abuse if they were not sexually interested in children? These images are not the "toddler and tiara" type posing of children - a lot of them involve the actual sexual abuse and rape of children. Stating the blindingly obvious, the more that view these disgusting images, the more demand there is to "produce" them - and the more the demand to "produce" them, the more rapes and child abuse there will be to do this. How on earth can anyone say that someone who is sexually attracted to children is not necessarily  a risk to children?

Last year in June, CEOP released an executive summary, detailed here

 

A Picture of Abuse

 

In this report, it specifically states -

"There is a clear correlation between IIOC Offending and contact sexual offending against children although causation cannot be established"

and

"Anyone who possesses IIOC poses a risk of committing contact sexual abuse against children"

There is also the 2005 US Butner study, detailed in here. which states

"a study was carried out on 155 US prisoners jailed for viewing child abuse images. At the beginning, 26 per cent admitted a physical contact offence with 75 children. By the end of the study, which used a lie detector test, 85 per cent had admitted to contact offences with 1,777 children"

therefore linking the viewing and downloading IIOC with contact sexual offenses against children.

Would you be happy if you had a young family,  and were knowingly living next door to a suspected paedophile?