Donald Findlater - Lucy Faithfull Foundation

ePolitix.com speaks to Donald Findlater, director of research and development with the Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF), about the organisation and the Stop it Now! UK & Ireland campaign.

The Lucy Faithfull Foundation (LFF) is a child protection charity working to protect children from sexual abuse. LFF's staff works with adult male and female sexual abusers, young people with inappropriate sexual behaviours, victims of abuse and other family members, as well as with other professionals working in this field.

Established in 1993 and named after its founder Baroness Lucy Faithfull of Wolvercote, LFF draws on its cutting-edge knowledge about child sexual abuse in its broad range of activities.

These range from research-based assessment and treatment of known offenders and their families, consultancy and training for professionals, to the prevention campaign Stop it Now! UK & Ireland and its Ministry of Justice-funded 0808 1000 900 Helpline, which is available to the general public and to professionals.

Question:  How big is the problem of child sexual abuse?

Donald Findlater: From research conducted over many years, most significantly by the NSPCC in the UK in 2000, one in six children in the UK experiences sexual abuse.

As a parent and a child protection worker I am not happy to report that monstrous figure; but we need to know it in order take to the risk seriously. It ensures we do all we can to prevent children in the present and the future from suffering as children in the past have done.

Question: Do we do enough, across the UK, to manage sex offenders in the community?  If the problem is as bad as you say; shouldn't we just lock up all convicted sex offenders forever?

Donald Findlater: From what I've learned about sex offenders and their management across the globe, the UK has one of the best, if not the best mechanisms for the assessment and management of known and convicted sex offenders.

Our Sex Offender Registration system, with some 35,000 individuals currently listed has a high compliance rate and the structures and co-operation at local level – the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) – are highly effective.

They are not perfect so when assessment and management goes wrong, lessons need to be learned and people held to account.

We need to remember that sex offenders can be enormously different from each other – in age, gender, risk, type of offending, relationship to victim and so forth.

It is imperative that we take these and other factors into account in our response to different sex offenders, so that we deliver justice but, more importantly, so that we properly protect children and commit most resources to what we know to be the biggest risk.

We could lock all convicted sex offenders up forever. We'd end up spending a massive sum on containment for people, some of whom at least are of low risk. More importantly, we'd be deterring other child victims from reporting when their offender is known to and loved by them – father, mother, brother, and granddad. In the end, we’d be protecting fewer rather than more children.

Question: Who does sexually offend?

Donald Findlater: It is true that the majority of sexual offences are committed by adult males. What most people don't realise is that one third of all sexual offences against children are committed by other children and young people.

And adult females, whilst being a very small proportion of the conviction statistics, perpetrate between 5 per cent and 15 per cent of all sexual offences against children.

What we do know is that some 90 per cent of sexual offenders are known to their victims and their families: indeed, more than 80 per cent of sexual offences take place in the home of either the victim or the offender.

Too often we've seen an emphasis on "stranger danger" when by far the biggest risk to children is from people close to them; in their families, communities or in the children's workforce.

Question: But I ask again, aren't they all so dangerous we should throw away the key?

Donald Findlater: For too long the public, maybe even politicians, have been led to believe that "once a sex offender, always a sex offender". This just isn't true.

There are, of course, those sex offenders who didn't stop, won't stop or don't believe they can stop offending. But they are the minority, and police, probation and prison service, working with colleagues in health and children's charities, have become skilled at identifying this dangerous subgroup in order to manage them better and prevent further harm.

Most sex offenders stop offending – in fact, two-thirds of young people who come to attention for sexual offences never come to attention again. Once arrested, the majority of adult offenders are never reconvicted for a similar offence.

I realise, in saying this, that many won't believe me. But the research data, including criminal reconviction data, speaks for itself. Professionals working with sex offenders know this to be the case – but the media and the public either don't seem to be told or simply won't believe it.

And with treatment, we know we can reduce the likelihood of reoffending further still.

Question: What happens in sex offender treatment?

Donald Findlater: In the UK the vast majority of sex offender treatment is delivered by staff in the prison or probation services, with a few programmes run by health services and children's charities.

Most sex offender treatment is delivered as group work, with an emphasis on changing the beliefs and attitudes of offenders so they recognise their behaviour as wrong and also understand something of the harm they have caused.

In addition, treatment helps them better manage sexual thoughts and fantasy; as well as to plan an offence-free 'good life'. Sexual offending is recognised as being highly addictive, so like the alcoholic, the sex offender needs to recognise risky situations and avoid them. Most sex offenders do go on to lead 'good lives' with friends, work, accommodation and so forth.

We may not particularly want them to ever enjoy themselves again, but we need to remember if a sex offender is leading a 'good life' then he's not hurting any more children, which surely is what we all want.

A few sex offenders, maybe 10 per cent, struggle with managing sexual fantasies. For them, ways are being found to use medicines to help suppress the power of their fantasies or some of their more obsessive qualities. But to be clear – this is a minority; the notion that 'chemical castration' will prevent reoffending is not even vaguely accurate.

Done well, sex offender treatments can reduce reconviction rates by 40 per cent to 50 per cent.

Question: What about Megan's Law or Sarah's Law? Shouldn't we just tell all parents who the sex offenders are and where they live – so they can protect their children?

Donald Findlater: Like most of the other children's charities, I'm interested in keeping children safe and doing what works. There is no evidence that public disclosure works to protect children; in fact, there is evidence that it drives sex offenders underground where they are more risky because police and probation can't monitor them properly. Sex offender registration compliance in the USA is much worse than in the UK.

But we also need to think about why we want to tell parents who and where the sex offenders are. Presumably we want to help parents keep their children safe.

The problem is that the biggest risk is not from the registered sex offender who the police know and are managing; it is from the sex offender who is not registered and who no-one knows about. There are probably 10 of these unknown individuals to every registered offender. We run a grave risk, then, of distracting parents by causing them to worry about the wrong people.

That said, the police are already able to notify a parent if they believe a known sex offender represents a risk to their child. This may not happen very often, but it does happen and I believe this targeted disclosure when a risk is evident is far better than the global disclosure we see happening in USA.

Question: Well, if not through disclosure, how can parents protect their children?

Donald Findlater: It is tragic that we do so little to prevent child sexual abuse. It's as if we don't believe prevention is possible, so we simply do our best to catch offenders afterwards and pick up some of the pieces.

The trouble is, most children don't tell, so we're rarely able to help, with the result that the damage often lasts a lifetime.

Parents and carers need to recognise the signs of possible abuse – both by taking an interest in who spends time with their children and by observing changes in the behaviour of children themselves.

So if, for example, we notice someone who won't allow a child privacy, who insists on physical affection even if the child seems reluctant, who seems overly interested in children's sexual developments, who maybe buys them expensive gifts, who babysits alone or treats a child as a favourite, such matters should cause concern.

In a child, we may notice sleeping problems, perhaps personality changes, with unaccountable fears of people or places, outbursts of anger, physical soreness in genital areas or inappropriate sexual acting out with toys or objects. These are just some of the signs we ought to attend to and at the very least, get advice about and talk to our child about.

Stop it Now! UK and Ireland has extensive, accessible information about these and other areas of concern for adults and children. Leaflets are freely available and can be downloaded from our website.

A free, confidential call to our helpline – 0808 1000 900 – will also put a caller in touch with a trained operator who can discuss concerns, give advice and agree actions that the caller can take to protect their child and prevent harm or further harm.

For the next 12 months, Stop it Now! is piloting public education seminars for parents and carers in Surrey and Birmingham, to offer information, advice and support and to evaluate the benefits parents achieve.

The Surrey pilot, called SMART enough?, launches today. It is hoped to extend the reach of these programmes over the years ahead, funding permitting. These Home Office-sponsored pilots will run concurrently with disclosure pilots that are running in four other areas of the country.

Question: Has the internet created more paedophiles or is it just exposing more of them?

Donald Findlater: There's still much we don't know about the impact of the internet. What is not in doubt is that lots of people, worldwide, are using it for sexual purposes of all kinds.

Children are being groomed and abused across the globe – it gives such ready access. And hundreds of thousands of people are using the internet to view child pornography – much of which includes images of child abuse.

We need to be cautious about assuming that users of child pornography will go on to sexually abuse a child. The vast majority do not and in many ways there are lots of differences between these two groups.

There is though no excuse for viewing such images. But we need to pay attention to the facts and to engage in research. The internet makes available a whole raft of illegal, extreme and bizarre sexual material. But most users do not go on to act out the images depicted.

Through Stop it Now! we provide education courses for internet offenders and their families, to prevent further interest in offending. We also provide internet safety seminars for parents and carers, to alert them to many of the dangers that the internet and new technologies can present to their children.

So many dangers are preventable, if only people are given the information, advice and support to take appropriate action.