Paedophiles: the enemy within?; A police officer who played a central

Brian Stevens reading at a memorial service for Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells before his arrest

TO the police, to the press and to the world he became known as The Rock. While the horror of the abduction and murder of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells unfolded around them, Detective Constable Brian Stevens was the man who had been there for Jessica's parents, Leslie and Sharon. He'd been their shoulder to cry on, their confidant and their unwavering friend.

Now he and another Cambridgeshire officer, Antony Goodridge, who'd also worked on the case, have been charged with child pornography offences. Ian Huntley, the man charged with the double murder of the two Soham 10-year-olds, was a school caretaker. Huntley's girlfriend, Maxine Carr, who is charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in connection with the deaths of Jessica and Holly, was a teaching assistant. Now Goodridge and Stevens, a police family liaison officer tasked to care for the Chapmans throughout the inquiry, are suspended from duty until the outcome of their trial for offences relating to child pornography.

The arrests of these trusted people, against a backdrop of child murder and abduction, is prompting many to ask: just how safe are our children? Who can we trust? If police officers can be charged with such crimes then who is truly safe?

At least seven police officer across Britain have been arrested in recent months with child pornography offences. In June, Newcastle child social worker Roger Bennett was convicted of accessing child porn from sites such as "Ukrainian Boy". Recent large-scale police raids have also seen architects, civil servants, solicitors, heath workers and care workers arrested. In Hull in May, primary school teacher Graham Jodrell was convicted of possessing child porn.

Paedophiles are not, it seems, just the stuff of popular imagination - the lonely weirdo, the anoraked dirty old man at the school gates. The problem reaches everywhere, even into the ranks of those who are charged with protecting our children. Paedophiles are no longer just outsiders, they can be the enemy within.

Stevens, who remains innocent unless convicted at trial, is ingrained in Britain's collective memory as the chubby and kind officer who stood in the pulpit of Ely Cathedral on August 30 at the girls' memorial service and moved an audience to tears as he read a poem dedicated to Jessica.

He had been with the Chapmans throughout the depths of their grief - and it was Jessica's family who asked this trusted friend to read the poem for them. Stevens said before walking up the pulpit steps that he would not betray the "honour and privilege" vested in him by Jessica's parents by breaking down in tears as he read the verses of Lord Of Comfort by Kathleen Golding, a Soham neighbour of the Chapmans.

On September 1, just days after Huntley's arrest, it would have been Jessica's 11th birthday. Apart from family and the closest of friends, the only other person allowed to visit the Chapmans was DC Brian Stevens. It was also Stevens who, because of his close bond with Jessica's parents, was asked by his superiors to break the news of the arrests of Huntley and Carr, and of their daughter's death, to the Chapmans.

Stevens, who is divorced but has children, also attended Peterborough Magistrates Court last week in order to keep the Chapman family informed of legal developments. The two families say publicly that the arrest of Stevens, and the other Cambridgeshire police officer, "does not affect our view of the fairness and credibility of the police investigation". Privately, however, the Chapmans are devastated. One friend said: "It is very distressing because this officer has been like a rock to them for the last five weeks."

Stevens was arrested at home on Thursday. His computer is now being examined by detectives. Cambridgeshire's acting deputy chief constable Keith Hoddy - who headed the Holly and Jessica inquiry - has called in West Midlands Police to carry out the investigation, which is being supervised by the Police Complaints Authority.

The arrest of Stevens and Goodridge was not connected to the Holly and Jessica murders in any way. Instead it is linked to the biggest child porn dragnet in American history - Operation Avalanche, run by the United States Postal Inspection Service. The USPIS oversees investigations into the distribution of child porn on the internet and via the mail in America.

Ray Smith, the national programme manager for child exploitation with USPIS, said Operation Avalanche began in spring 1999, when a US postal inspector was carrying out routine undercover work online. The official had stumbled on a site run from Fort Worth in Texas selling paedophile material.

The site was run by a company called Landslide Inc (thus the name Operation Avalanche) owned by husband and wife Thomas and Janice Reedy. Operation Avalanche is the most successful paedophile sting in history. Some 175 search warrants have been issued, 125 men charged and more than 100 sentenced.

Landslide Inc, which had a turnover of (pounds) 1 million a month, was closed down and Thomas Reedy was sent to federal prison for 1335 years - consecutive 15 year terms for each of the 89 counts of possession of child pornography and conspiracy to distribute child pornography. His wife was sentenced to 14 years.

The company is thought to have been the biggest child porn empire ever set up. Customers paid thousands of pounds to subscribe to the company's website. In some cases the bills were as high as (pounds) 13,000 per customer. The images involved children as young as three being raped.

Reedy had obtained his images - sometimes custom-made to client demands - from paedophile gangs in Indonesia and Russia. Among the images sold by Reedy were the so-called Helen Series, in which a man from Stockport in Lancashire photographed and sold images of himself raping his daughter from the age of seven to 12.

When police raided Reedy's flat they also found lists of some 35,000 men who had been buying the material throughout the world. USPIS are still working their way through every name on that list - which was described by USPIS investigators as the "holy grail".

The USPIS also put undercover adverts on the Landslide Inc website to which paedophiles from around the world responded. Ray Smith added: "We have shared our intelligence with Great Britain and other countries and are in regular contact with Interpol. Landslide had members in almost every country on Earth. We are still making arrests in the US and arrests are still being made overseas. These arrests will go on for quite some time to come."

In the UK, police operations based on USPIS information began last autumn when the National Criminal Intelligence Service was passed details of Britons who had used the subscription service. The UK arm of the investigation was codenamed Operation Ore. In May, a total of 36 people were arrested, and there has been a trickle of arrests since then, including seven police officers.

Cedric Hart, a forensic psychologist who specialises in treating paedophiles in British prisons, says the arrest of so many policemen may finally wake the public up to the reality of paedophilia.

"The public perception of the paedophile as a loner or a weirdo or a guy in a dirty mac is wrong," he said. "A police officer is just as likely to be a paedophile as anyone else. Employment and class have no bearing on whether or not someone can be a danger to children. It's time we realised that."

According to Hart, many paedophiles he has treated targeted specific types of jobs to enable them to get close to children - teaching, social work, youth voluntary work. For a self-confessed "leftie", Hart's solutions for the growing menace of paedophiles are tough and no-nonsense. "We maybe have to start asking early on why a certain man wants to be a primary school teacher rather than a secondary school teacher or a university lecturer," he says.

"We need rigorous vetting not just of new staff coming in but also of old staff. People have to look carefully at their colleagues and be aware of the risks. We can't just assume because Mr X has been a history teacher for 15 years that he's a safe bet - we have to check him too.

"We need this sort of action because this crime is horribly prevalent. Somewhere around 20% of the British population has been abused, so we are maybe looking at one in every 1000 men being a possible paedophile. That's quite terrifying.

"Treatment of sex offenders does not change their sexuality, it only enables them to control it. You are no more able to make a straight man gay than you could make a paedophile want to have sex with an adult."

The type of therapy he gave to some 1000 prisoners at HMP Albany on the Isle of Wight over 12 years tried to show paedophiles just how pointless their crimes were. "I asked them to consider what they lost through their crimes - their homes, their families, their liberty, their job, their income. And then I ask them what they gained. They gained nothing but an orgasm. The brutal logic of it works for some but not for all," he says.

Hart does not support the idea of pre-emptive justice currently being floated - the concept that a low-level sex offender, say a man who flashes at a child, is locked up indefinitely until psychiatrists rule he is safe to reintegrate with society. But he does support the "two strikes and your out approach".

"Once a man has committed his second sexual offence then he should be facing a mandatory life sentence," Hart said. "In all probability he will have committed more crimes and he will not be treatable. I feel strongly about individual liberties, but I also feel strongly about the rights of child victims."

Hart also posed the highly controversial idea that all men could be classed as potential paedophiles. He says he's treated men who never had any inclination towards sex with children, but at moments of crisis in their lives started to behave aberrantly and in some cases raped their own children.

He believes these offenders are low-risk and unlikely to ever offend again and could be dealt with by probation - preferring incarceration for predatory or repeat offenders.

According to Hart, accessing child porn is also an indicator that a man may very well start acting on his fantasies. "People access the pornography that is consistent with their sexual interests. If a man looks at pictures of women, he'll most likely want to have sex with women. It's unlikely a straight man who wants to sleep with women would look at pictures of a 10-year-old naked boy," he added.

Paul Roffey, a social work expert and a director with Ray Wyre Associates, a UK-based and internationally renowned agency specialising in dealing with child sex abuse, said: "The public have to realise that anyone can be a paedophile. Some 110,000 people have been placed on the sex offenders register since 1997, but the number of people who committed offences against children before that date run into the thousands and they aren't accounted for. Conviction isn't a measure of the rate of offending.

"Paedophiles create a secret world around a child and our society makes it difficult for them to speak out. We often only find out that children have been abused when they get into trouble for committing crime because they are so disturbed and tell under questioning what happened to them.

"This is the most major social issue facing Britain. In the 1970s we faced up to the sexual abuse of girls, then we faced up to the sexual abuse of boys, now we are facing up to the fact that trusted members of society are abusers. I predict the next big hurdle for us will be facing up to the fact that women can act alone as child abusers."

Roffey supports "pre-emptive profiling" of people in jobs with access to children - subjecting applicants to psychometric tests which could reveal if they have paedophile tendencies. "We also have to not just look for previous convictions when checking people, we need to look at previous allegations as well," he said.

He also wants to see anyone who works with children subjected to annual checks and random checks to let paedophiles know that "we are looking for them". Roffey added: "We need to intervene with abusers at an early age. We can pick up a lot in childhood. Many abusers, who have been abused themselves, start offending in their mid-teens. If we catch them then we might be able to control them.

"We get lots of resources to help children who are abusers but as soon as they hit 18 the help stops and they start offending again - that has to be addressed. Think of it as stopping smoking. If someone could have got help to get off cigarettes when they were 15, they might not still be dabbling in smoking at the age of 30.

"We also need to have a justice system in which high-risk offenders simply aren't released. The system should also have psychiatric evaluation tied into release. If someone is convicted then they should serve their sentence to completion but remain incarcerated until they are assessed as no longer a risk to children."

Naming and shaming, however, is one thing Roffey opposes bitterly. "I'd love to believe the public could handle such information," he says, "but they have shown time and time again that they are just not equipped to deal with this knowledge."

Two police officers who investigated the disappearance of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells have been charged with child pornography offences. Brian Stevens and Antony Goodridge face charges relating to "indecent pseudo-photographs of children" - superimposing the picture of a child's head on to a pornographic image. They were granted bail but prosecutors objected and they are now in custody until Monday pending appeal. They face a maximum of 10 years in prison.

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