On October 7 1994, Avon’s Child Protection Committee held a special meeting to discuss what they themselves described as “a potential paedophile ring” at 49 Churchill Road. Three social workers and a police inspector reviewed all the clues and agreed to check all their records and to interview the children they believed to be involved; the social workers sent a minute of the meeting to their area manager; the police inspector said he would talk to his superintendent and to the Crown Prosecution Service; the wheels all started to turn… and essentially nothing happened. The door stayed closed. Two years later, two more boys made allegations about the house. Again, the door stayed closed. The rape and seduction and all the rest of it continued unabated as it had done for years before.
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By the time the trials were over, John Gay and Lee Tucker had been arrested, and the Panorama team were ready to gather more evidence on them and to get to grips with the long queue of up to 60 other suspects. With the triumphant success of the the trials behind them, they hoped to be given a clear run. But the truth was that their time was running out. Avon and Somerset police had by now ploughed huge resources into the inquiry, on a scale that was unmatched by other forces and, crucially, that was unsupported by the Home Office. The Bristol detectives could pursue all the loose ends effectively only by setting up a full time paedophilia unit. But the pressure from Whitehall was to focus resources on the 37 performance indicators. Senior officers regretfully told Rob Jones’ team that they must look for ‘an exit strategy’. In the meantime, the team was cut back. Six of their twelve officers were taken. They were already short of admin staff. Now they lost another and had to use a constable, who happened to be able to type, to input information into the computer.
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On this limited basis, they launched a new inquiry, Operation Parallel. They drew up a list of priority targets, weeding out those whose victims were reluctant to give evidence or whose offences were historic and/or minor. In this way, they discarded some 40 of the suspects. They had done their best to satisfy themselves that they were not dangerous. It was, as one officer put it, “a harsh decision”. Now, in the final stage of the ‘exit strategy, Jones’ reduced team were given a dozen extra detectives for a single week in March this year, to arrest and process the dozen or so suspects who remained on their list.
This time, it was a very different operation. Jones’ officers knew that they were not expected to press victims for information about other offenders and other abusers. It was over.
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The political reality is that the Home Office continue to steer police resources into dealing with reported crime, like vehicle theft and burglary: the most unreported crime in the country carries little political weight. In its major 1996 inquiry, Childhood Matters, the NSPCC concluded that: “The legal system, designed to provide justice and redress for victims of abuse, is failing to do so consistently.”
internet can be fucking slack sometimes
