Few will be welcoming the homecoming of child sex offender Paul Gadd, alias former glam rock star Gary Glitter, should he decide not to disembark at Bangkok on his flight from Vietnam to the UK today.
There will be TV and press cameras at Heathrow to record his arrival. But, importantly, there will be police officers waiting to collect him and start proceedings to place him on the sex offenders register. Gadd - or Glitter - has spent the past two-and-a-half years in a Vietnam jail for sex crimes against two girls, aged 10 and 11. The Vietnamese will be well rid of him. For the UK it will underline the need to look again at how we deal with child sex tourism, a point made by children's charity coalition Ecpat UK in its report, Return to Sender. We make much of the benefits of data sharing in this country, despite statutory restrictions, and inter-agency co-operation. And it is true that huge strides have been made in controlling the movements of football hooligans by sharing information across national boundaries. A similar effort should now be made to control the movement of child abusers. According to Ecpat, abusers find work as teachers or volunteers in orphanages and travel from country to country to evade detection. They can do this because international organisations do not have access to information held in the UK about child sex offenders. The Gadd case shows how incumbent it is on the government to develop a mechanism to make this information available to agencies abroad. The Home Office does insist that progress has been made. Witness the new measures to prosecute paedophiles for crimes abroad, regardless of whether the abuse was legal in the host country. It is right that the government is sending such a signal to abusers, but, like Gadd, many of these offenders will doubtless plead not guilty as they are under the impression they have done nothing wrong. And the logistics in gathering child witnesses from, say, south-east Asia whose evidence would be necessary to secure a successful prosecution are immense. They are perhaps unworkable. Yet a data-sharing scheme that transcends national borders may prevent the offence happening in the first place. One other thing: Gadd was allowed to make his way back from Vietnam solo, with the known uncertainty of that stopover in Thailand. If he did manage to leave the plane there and slip through immigration, who would be responsible?
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