Sex predators in our midst

By CATHERINE MASTERS AND EUGENE BINGHAM

The man sat by the toilets at Waterview Reserve in Auckland and eyed up the little girl.

After a while he made his move. He called her over, grabbed her and took her into the toilet block.

This 6-year-old was lucky. Members of the public saw what happened and ran after him into the toilets.

The man was arrested and served 18 months of a 4 1/2-year sentence for abducting a child for sex.

But now he is back in the community - one of the sexual predators the Auckland Central police paedophile squad is keeping an eye on.

"He said he was excited when he saw the child and had sexual feelings - this is the kind of prick you're dealing with here," says Detective Sergeant Joe Mills, who heads the squad.

It is incidents such as this that have politicians, police and the community calling for greater monitoring of child sex offenders.

Each year about 250 paedophiles are released from prison.

Most slip back into the community without the controversy surrounding the release of a Palmerston North man last week.

In fact, even the police are not told when many offenders are being released.

"They serve their sentence and they get released and I don't get notified where they're going to," said Detective Sergeant Chris Power, head of the Christchurch child abuse team.

"We lose track of them."

In Auckland, Mr Mills said police had a close relationship with other Government agencies such as the Department of Corrections, but there was still a lack of information.

"The only address they [paedophiles] need to give is where they last lived when they went into prison, and as long as they have come out of their parole period, all state interest in them ceases," said Mr Mills.

"We monitor as best we can, by name, address - if we have a current address - and photographs."

Even if police did know where an offender was, often they did not have the resources to do much about it.

"We try and visit them where we can, just to let them know we are keeping an eye on them," said Mr Mills. "That doesn't happen as often as we like because we're tied up doing other things, but as often as we can we do."

The danger, however, is often closer to home than most people would want to think.

"The majority of our offenders are family members so we're not talking about the man on the street that lures little children into a car," said a member of a South Auckland child abuse team. "That's the sad reality of it and that's the sort of thing that people don't want to hear about."

Since 2000, the Department of Corrections and Child, Youth and Family have had an agreement to talk to each other before an offender is freed from prison into a home with children.

An assessment is made of how safe the children will be and appropriate monitoring systems are set up.

CYF's general manager of social work and community services, Ken Rand, said about 150 prisoners a year were released into homes with children.

His department's sole focus was on making sure the child was safe and that social workers were closely watching. If there were any signs of danger, moves were made to remove the offender or the child from the home.

But the co-ordination between the departments does not always work.

John McCarthy, director of the Safe treatment programme for offenders, said he knew of cases where paedophiles have been released into inappropriate situations, such as with vulnerable children.

One of the problems was that no single agency was responsible for dealing with child sex offenders, he said.

He hoped plans announced this week would change that.

Justice Minister Phil Goff said he wanted to introduce supervision for high-risk child-sex offenders for 10 years after their release.

He also said he was considering a sex offenders register, as proposed by Act MP Deborah Coddington, and improving information-sharing between agencies.

"A number of agencies are currently developing a best-practice model in Dunedin to improve inter-agency management of child-sex offenders during their parole or supervision period," said Mr Goff.

"The model will help better identify gaps in inter-agency co-operation. Any need for legislative change, such as establishing a register, will be identified as part of that work."

The Dunedin model puts specific responsibilities on each agency.

Detective Senior Sergeant Kallum Croudis, of Dunedin, said seven offenders were on the programme so far.

"An investigator is put alongside each one and they'll talk to the other agencies and possibly go and talk with the offender," said Mr Croudis.

The agencies were still grappling with the scope of the programme and privacy issues.

Mr McCarthy and his colleagues at the Safe programme hope the public interest in the issue will lead to change.

He said: "It's a complicated and difficult thing to do but unless you have a really clear child protection focus it won't be any safer than it is now."