Paedophiles in perspective

A story from the Paulsgrove demonstrations in Portsmouth, told to me by a journalist who covered the events, neatly illustrates the dilemmas of housing sex offenders in the community. Coming across a group of children chanting "paedophile" outside a house one night, he asked them why they were doing this. One of the children said, "because Peter Foyle lives here." I wonder how many of the 15 to 20 households on the Paulsgrove residents' list of suspected sex offenders are "Peter Foyles"?

When it comes to sex offenders living in the community, the only element more potent than the risk they pose, it seems, is the rumour and misunderstanding that builds up around them.

Sex offenders and paedophiles are, unfortunately, nothing new. A Home Office study from 1997 estimated that there were at least 260,000 men over 20 convicted of sex offences, of which 110,000 were against children. Given that much, if not most, sex offending goes undetected, the figure could well be a lot higher. Compare this with the around 5,000 individuals currently in prison for sexual offences, and it becomes clear that the great majority are already living in the community, whether convicted or undetected.

It is worth bearing in mind that sex offending covers a wide range of acts. Most child abuse takes place in the family, and solutions may revolve around protecting the child within the family. A News of the World-style outing of sex offenders may reduce the reporting of abuse if children fail to come forward for fear of break- up of the family or public vilification.

Around one fifth of the 260,000 convictions were for acts not involving a victim (e.g. those only involving consenting adults). And while some paedophiles are responsible for truly shocking and vile offences, a seventeen year old boy who has consenting sex with his fifteen year old girlfriend is also, technically, a paedophile.

Given that sex offenders are distributed more evenly across all levels of society than, say, armed robbers or burglars, it is reasonable to assume that a significant proportion own their own homes. This should not hide the fact that it is the residue who are unhoused, unsatisfactorily housed, temporarily housed, or who cannot return home and need to be rehoused in a new area who present the social housing sector with a challenge.

One solution still favoured by some - the blanket ban on sex offenders - is really not a solution at all, and was implicitly ruled out by DETR guidance to local authorities and similar Housing Corporation guidance to RSLs in December last year. This challenges the exclusion from housing registers of sex offenders and encourages a wider view of community safety, seeing the proper housing of sex offenders as integral, rather than detrimental, to safer communities.

This is a welcome development, because "provider-nimbyism" cannot protect communities from those sex offenders who do pose a risk. When sex offenders are driven from their homes, or do not get housing in the first place, they do not disappear off the face of the earth. They are still in a town or city full of children but are now living anonymously, perhaps moving from place to place and changing their names to avoid being identified. In these circumstances it is harder for the police to exercise surveillance, and for the probation service to supervise them, or to involve them in treatment programmes which can control their deviant sexual tendencies. Social landlords' responsibility to the community is to reduce the risk that sex offenders will disappear, not make it more likely that they will do so.

Nacro remains deeply sceptical about widening access to information about sex offenders to the wider community, the so-called "Megan's" or "Sarah's Law". If events over the past few weeks have shown us anything at all, it is the folly of thinking that all members of the community will use information about sex offenders in a responsible manner. That said, social landlords can sometimes find themselves in the difficult position of having to manage someone deemed to pose a risk, without having been involved in the risk assessment or risk management planning. The way forward is for RSLs to give effect to the Housing Corporation guidance by informing themselves about local risk management protocols and building effective links to key players like the police and probation services. In this way they can more easily reassure their own tenants as to their commitment to cooperate with statutory partners to reduce risk.

Where greater involvement from the public is needed is in the context of an informed debate, backed-up by good quality information, about sex offenders and the real risk they pose. There is no doubt that the recent troubles on the Paulsgrove estate had their roots in a perception that sex offenders were and are being dumped in working class and poorer areas of the country. Though this might be exaggerated, the fact is that because of the relative cost of housing stock, you are not going to have a released sex offender in need of housing placed next door to Tony Blair or a High Court judge. If the public are expected to trust the professionals to manage sex offenders properly, then we need to ensure that the sex offenders register, community supervision and inter-agency cooperation is improved and loopholes plugged.

Despite the public alarm generated by individual high profile cases there is evidence that the public do understand that the problem cannot be wished away. I have seen this at close quarters on my own doorstep at Nottingham Prison, where the establishment of a special sex offenders unit to house high-risk offenders who had reached the end of their sentence not surprisingly generated some controversy. Over a period of time the initial hostility and anger gave way to a more practical negotiation on the manner of unit's operation and on the information to be made available to the local community on a continuing basis.