Until it was broken up, the Landslide website offered its subscribers access to the most violent and obscene pictures of child abuse available. Some of its members entertained one another by raping and torturing babies and children live on the net. Others swapped soundtracks of children screaming as they were assaulted. By the time American investigators infiltrated the website three years ago, it had more than 80,000 paying subscribers, and was making £1m a month. When they cracked the codes surrounding the site, and jailed the couple who set it up, investigators were able to use credit card details to identify the subscribers. More than 7,000 of those people appeared to live in the UK, and some 2,500 had visited the site at least 10 times. Last year, information on these suspects was passed on to the British police, who sent the details on to individual forces in early summer. And that's when the problems began.
You might imagine that the police would take instant action when presented with the names and addresses of thousands of people who appear to have committed serious crimes. After all, most policemen spend much of their time fruitlessly engaged in the opposite occupation: they know a crime has been committed, but they can't identify the criminal. What could be easier than arresting people on the basis of detailed evidence supplied by the FBI?
That isn't what has happened. Fewer than 200 people have been charged. The vast majority of those on the list haven't been investigated yet, and children's charities fear that they never will be. It turns out that most of Britain's police forces simply don't have the necessary resources or the computing expertise.
It takes six officers simply to arrest a suspect. Two watch the back and the front of the house, while two make the arrest. Then the whole house has to be searched. The computer has to be dismantled and removed, but the images that the police are looking for can be hidden anywhere - in tiny memory sticks, disks, videos, boxes of photographs or digital cameras. Then the difficult work begins. The computer and its hard drive need to be analysed, but the majority of forces have only a handful of officers who are technically competent to do the work. Consultants can be called in, but they need to be vetted, and charge around £2,000 for every machine. Every negative has to be developed, and every tape and CD-rom, no matter how apparently innocuous, has to be watched in its entirety.
Peter Spindler, a detective superintendent who specialises in child protection for the Metropolitan police, says the detailed analysis is necessary because the police aren't just trying to corroborate the American evidence. They're also looking for any indications that suspects are abusing children themselves. Someone has to produce all those millions of images, and the Americans have found that a third of all their net paedophiles have been active abusers. In Britain, the Greater Manchester police are finding that the figure is one in five (by which estimate, some 1,400 of the 7,000 people named by the Americans were - still are, perhaps - actively abusing children themselves). So investigators here might find that a video of a James Bond movie is suddenly interrupted by a five-minute record of a child being raped. All the children that the suspect has come into contact with have to be considered as potential victims. They have to be traced and interviewed, and, if necessary, taken into police protection.
Faced with this reality, police forces are concentrating their resources on identifying people who are in sensitive occupations or who have easy access to children - teachers, doctors, policemen or lawyers. These are the suspects who have been picked up in the last few months. But the police say they need more money if they're to track down the rest.
Surely, though, the police already control huge budgets, and isn't policing their job? What could be more important than protecting terrified children from violence and violation, and identifying the people who consume the images of their destruction so greedily?
It turns out that many things are more important. Child protection is not listed as one of the priorities that the government sets for police forces. Burglary, drug-dealing, street robbery and car crime are what ministers think the electorate cares about this year. Only a handful of police authorities, such as the Met, have chosen to add child protection as a local priority. Most forces have no incentive to spend money on this area, because it isn't one of their targets, and they won't be judged on it.
Children's charities are dismayed by the low priority some forces give to this problem. Cambridgeshire, for example, received its list in early July, but deferred looking into it until August 5. On August 4, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman went missing, so the meeting was postponed until September 10. Only then was it realised that one of the leading officers in the Soham investigation was on the list.
The Met's deputy assistant commissioner Carole Howlett, who speaks for Britain's police on this issue, says that the Home Office must make children's protection a national priority in the first ever national policing plan, which is due at the end of the month. If it did so, every force would divert resources to deal with it.
She's also lobbying for more money -£2m this year - on the grounds that the scale, complexity and rapid growth of this relatively new area of crime is more than the police can absorb. The Home Office has yet to respond to her request. It points out that it has already funded a national hi-tech crime unit and overseen increased police budgets. But the police who are working in this area feel overwhelmed. The practical and social constraints that restricted paedophiles in the past, when child porn could only arrive by parcels in the post, have evaporated. Curious individuals now find that their fantasies legitimised and fuelled by what they read and see on the net.
Peter Spindler says that individual ministers are committed to action. The real constraint, he says, is us, the public. We can't bear to know what's happening behind so many front doors. We focus on the rare cases of child abductions, but we don't want to acknowledge that the most paedophile violence takes place within the home, with children being secretly and systematically raped by stepfathers, uncles, and others. We don't want to lift the lid on it. And we certainly don't want to pay the costs of dealing with it.
Even if we were to locate and arrest just the 7,000 suspects from this single website, what would we do with them then? Do these people need punishment, or treatment? We'd find it impossible, currently, to offer them either. Sending them all to jail would raise the population of our overcrowded prisons by 10%. Yet we can't treat them outside jail, because the only residential clinic that treats paedophiles has lost its premises, and no community is willing to offer it another.
This government is considering new measures to cope with paedophiles. Electronic tags may be implanted in those convicted. The sexual offences bill, which will be outlined this week, proposes to make the grooming of children for sexual purposes a criminal offence and to remove the concept that young teenagers can consent to sex with adults. But creating new offences and dealing with known offenders isn't sufficient. We have to confront the real issue: thousands of children are being abused, and we simply don't know how to protect them.
