Online paedophiles avoiding jail because of lack of prison space
Too few paedophiles are being sent to prison, the head of the National Crime Agency (NCA) has said.
Just 20 per cent of people convicted of viewing indecent images of children currently receive an immediate jail term, with the vast majority given suspended or community sentences instead.
A lack of available space in prisons and a huge rise in the number of people being convicted of online viewing offences is thought to be to blame.
Graeme Biggar, director general of the NCA, said while rehabilitation could work for some offenders, the balance at the moment “does not feel right” and he said in his view more online paedophiles should be sent straight to jail.
Speaking to journalists, he said: “We are in ongoing discussions with the Home Office who are thinking about this and are trying to establish what would be the right approach.
“Judges will look at each case and will think about a particular case in a way that is very hard for me to take a view of the totality…I just think that balance needs to shift slightly.”
Asked if he thought that more people should go to jail, he replied: “I do.”
‘Contact abuse and re-victimisation’
His colleague, Rob Jones, director general of operations at the NCA, admitted that the scale of the problem meant that not all people who had a sexual interest in children could be jailed.
He said: “Our assessed position is that there are between 680,000 and 830,000 of these individuals in the UK, so we need to do other things in terms of treatment, diversion and disruption because wherever we sit with sentencing they are not all going to be in prison.”
But he hit out at the perception that viewing images online was not a serious offence
Mr Jones said: “There is no ‘just looking at images’ to this, you have got to confront that somebody gets gratification from seeing horrendous images.
“They horrify me, they horrify the people who work for me, they horrify any right-minded person.”
He went on: “In the new world there is no real difference between online and the real world, it is one continuum. Those victims - if it is a known image - are being re-victimised when they are being viewed and if it is a new image that has been created, these people are causing contact abuse.
“So that online world I think sometimes is underplayed and separated from the real world. It is all the real world, particularly for victims and survivors.
“So what we are trying to update is the approach to that and make sure we are challenging the perception that someone is ‘just viewing indecent images of children’ because it is contact abuse and re-victimisation.”
The NCA chiefs also warned that the decision by Facebook owner, Meta, to introduce end-to-end encryption on its platform, would make the job of catching online paedophiles even more difficult.
Mr Jones said: “Meta has acted, over the years, very responsibly in referring images to us through the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and that was because they could see what was happening on their platform.
“They have made a business decision to no longer see what is on their platform by moving to encryption, so they can no longer refer intelligence leads through the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. I am astounded that has happened.
“Things have got a lot harder for us because of that and the net impact is that that platform is not as safe as it was for children because nobody knows what is going on on there.
“Children are masquerading as adults because there is no effective age verification and paedophiles are masquerading as children to establish relationships and grooming potential victims.”
Asked if he thought Facebook was no longer safe for children, Mr Jones said: “I would advise parents to think very carefully about allowing children to use that platform.”
