Rumour, hearsay fuel riots of hate in Britain

News of the World's campaign against paedophiles has led to 'lynch law' in one English housing estate. Reuters File Picture

By BILLY ADAMS herald correspondent

LONDON - A small but powerful army is on the march.

One foot soldier, a boy of 4, struggles to lift a placard that reads: "Paedophiles - don't house them, hang them." A girl aged 3 holds aloft another sign: "Kill paedophiles."

These are the unwitting backers of a campaign to rid an area of the child molesters within their midst.

For seven nights a vigilante mob hunted down paedophiles, intent on hounding them out. Windows were smashed, missiles hurled, cars overturned and burned out. A policeman was injured. Five families fled.

All were innocent and wrongly identified, sometimes because they had the same surname as convicted paedophiles. It was hardly surprising. Many of the 20 targets had been identified purely on the basis of rumour and hearsay.

This week's riots in a sprawling housing estate in Portsmouth have earned chilling comparisons with a similar outbreak of hysteria in 17th Century Salem.

The allegations of a vindictive child, Abigail Williams, sent 20 harmless citizens to the scaffold. Those who wonder how such an outrage could have happened then should cast an eye over the modern-day witch-hunt which has infected the Paulsgrove estate in recent days.

Residents there are living in fear of paedophiles ... or their neighbours.

"I disagree with the tactics of these people marching through the street but I dare not say anything," says one teenage boy. "Because if I do I'm scared they will turn on me. And many people feel the same way."

The echoes of Salem, and all good witch-hunts, are loud and clear. Fuelled by basic human instincts of fear and prejudice, the mothers of Paulsgrove have taken the law into their own hands and embarked on an ugly campaign of summer madness.

"Everyone on this estate knows who the paedophiles are," says Katrina Kassel, mother-of-four and self-styled leader of the Peaceful Protesters of Paulsgrove (PPP). "They have approached children and asked them into their homes. We have 100 per cent proof that they are guilty and we don't go attacking innocent people's homes. I just want every sex offender to know that we are on their trail and will hunt them down."

Those people wrongly identified are passed off as "casualties of war."

The Portsmouth protests are the most visible aspect of a series of events that have their roots in the murder of 8-year-old Sarah Payne last month. When her body was found a nation grieved, and national debate focused on the threat to children posed by paedophiles.