The Power of the Paedos - another high profile case hits the 'never happened' wall?

[Jan Klimkowski]

OK - they want this scandal shutting down one way or another.

The threat of bankruptcy through libel...

Non-suspicious hangings...

Bait and switch. Oh Jimmy Jimmie...

Burnt alive with all the smoke detectors deactivated....

The BBC either got played, or the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is employing absolute ingenue idiots...

Yes - Auntie Beeb has been ritually castrated...

If things get really difficult, there's always Apartheid-loving intelligence services to help out with a wet job...

Lauren - I see you initially gave a mundane explanation for your posting of the location of Haut de la Garenne, before going all Levendaesque on us...

[Lauren Johnson]

Lauren - I see you initially gave a mundane explanation for your posting of the location of Haut de la Garenne, before going all Levendaesque...

The mundane explanation is accurate. When you asked your question, I went back and started looking at Google Earth. Then I noticed the strange shape -- a neolithic tomb? WTF? A castle with Nazi observation towers less than 1k from what would be named after hunting little helpless things --"rabbits"-- was occupied as a Nazi communication center -- land owned by the crown. Kinda made me wonder whose land surrounds that tomb.

Yah, I you could say I went All In. Apparently it's a good weekend for it.

[Jan Klimkowski]

With involvement from investigative reporter Eileen Fairweather, here's a 1997 documentary only ever shown in Wales about one of the North Wales "care communities", Bryn Alyn, which was run by convicted paedophile John Allen.

Fire.

Did someone shout FIRE!!!!!

Too late for the Bryn Alyn kids.

Death by fire. Death by truck. Death by bruised and lacerated overdose.

Nothing to see here. That's why only a few thousand Welsh viewers ever got the chance back in 1997.







There are other deaths by all consuming fire too.....

[Jan Klimkowski]

Lauren - I see you initially gave a mundane explanation for your posting of the location of Haut de la Garenne, before going all Levendaesque...

The mundane explanation is accurate. When you asked your question, I went back and started looking at Google Earth. Then I noticed the strange shape -- a neolithic tomb? WTF? A castle with Nazi observation towers less than 1k from what would be named after hunting little helpless things --"rabbits"-- was occupied as a Nazi communication center -- land owned by the crown. Kinda made me wonder whose land surrounds that tomb.

Yah, I you could say I went All In. Apparently it's a good weekend for it.

It's only a short boat ride from Belgium, Dutroux Land, too....

[Lauren Johnson]

Lauren - I see you initially gave a mundane explanation for your posting of the location of Haut de la Garenne, before going all Levendaesque...

The mundane explanation is accurate. When you asked your question, I went back and started looking at Google Earth. Then I noticed the strange shape -- a neolithic tomb? WTF? A castle with Nazi observation towers less than 1k from what would be named after hunting little helpless things --"rabbits"-- was occupied as a Nazi communication center -- land owned by the crown. Kinda made me wonder whose land surrounds that tomb.

Yah, I you could say I went All In. Apparently it's a good weekend for it.

It's only a short boat ride from Belgium, Dutroux Land, too....

One of the troubling things about this is that it is all over the planet, and not just the fact that there is abuse of children. It's that it seems to be almost ubiquitous among the elites.

Also, since the Haut de la Garonne is a goto place for procuring children, which place was it that the perverted ones could get adult victims?

[Jan Klimkowski]

BBC Director-General resigns.

A fool, perhaps honourable, perhaps not.

Entwhistle was hopelessly out of his depth, and had to go.

More importantly, the paedophiles win this round, as the headlines read "BBC in crisis", rather than "Horror of powerful child rapists".

BBC in crisis as George Entwistle quits over Newsnight fiasco

Television boss leaves job for abuse story lapses in what Trust chairman Chris Patten laments as his 'saddest day'



Lisa O'Carroll

The Observer, Saturday 10 November 2012 22.37 GMT

The BBC has been plunged into the deepest crisis in its history with the dramatic resignation of its director general, George Entwistle, after just 54 days in the job.

Entwistle fell on his sword after being engulfed by a crisis that escalated following confirmation on Friday that the BBC had wrongly implicated Lord McAlpine, a former senior Tory politician, in the wake of a second scandal to hit Newsnight.

In an extraordinary scene outside Broadcasting House, in central London, just after 9pm, Entwistle, flanked by the BBC Trust's chairman, Chris Patten, said he felt it was the "honourable" thing to do.

His resignation was accepted by Patten who said it was one of the "saddest evenings of my public life" to see Entwistle end his 23-year career at the BBC in such ignominious circumstances.

Looking composed, but battle-weary, Entwistle read from a prepared statement: "In the light of the fact that the director general is also the editor in chief and ultimately responsible for all content; and in the light of the unacceptable journalistic standards of the Newsnight film broadcast on Friday 2 November, I have decided that the honourable thing to do is to step down from the post of director general," he said.

Tim Davie, currently director of audio and music who was scheduled to take over as head of BBC Worldwide, was named as the acting DG while the hunt for a new boss takes place.

His resignation came less than 12 hours after a catastrophic interview with John Humphrys on Radio 4's Today programme in which Entwistle admitted he was completely unaware that Newsnight was going to make such serious allegations about a senior Tory politician. Critics said he gave the impression of a man completely at sea when he admitted that not only was he unaware of the allegations, but that nobody had brought to his attention an article in Friday's Guardian that the victim of child abuse in the Welsh care home, Steve Messham, who had made the claims, may have mistaken the identity of the perpetrator.

The pressure on Entwistle intensified on Friday morning when McAlpine broke cover after eight days of rumour and innuendo going viral on Twitter, branding the allegation as entirely false and threatening to sue the BBC.

John Whittingdale, the chairman of the influential select committee that grilled Entwistle over the Jimmy Savile scandal, said he thought Entwistle had made the right decision as his "position had become untenable, once he had said he was unaware that the programme was being broadcast". He told BBC News: "It left the impression that the management of the BBC had lost their grip on the organisation and I think the decision is undoubtedly the right one."

This is one of the worst crises the BBC has faced since it was founded in 1927: director generals have resigned in the past, but none has risen and disappeared within such a short space of time.

On Saturday afternoon Jonathan Dimbleby, one of the corporation's most revered broadcasters, said he feared the public now perceived the BBC as "a rudderless ship heading towards the rocks", adding he hoped somebody would "seize the helm quickly".

Entwistle was branded "totally clueless" by one influential Labour politician after admitting on one of the BBC's flagship programmes, Radio 4's Today, that he was completely unaware that Newsnight was to make such serious allegations about a senior Tory politician, albeit unnamed, until the day after the broadcast eight days ago.

Culture secretary Maria Miler said Entwistle had made the right decision. "It's a regrettable situation, but the right decision. It is vital that credibility and public trust in this important national institution is restored. It is now crucial that the BBC puts the systems in place to ensure it can make first class news and current affairs programmes."

Sir Christopher Bland, a former chairman of the BBC board of governors, said: "It's arguable that it's a necessary sacrifice, but it's tragic for George and tragic for the organisation."

Michael Crick, the former Newsnight political editor, who was instrumental in revealing the mistakes made in the recent investigation into false claims concerning Lord McAlpine, tweeted: "George Entwistle's resignation v sad. A good, decent man, badly let down. V few people could have coped with recent rush of awful events." Former Labour culture secretary Ben Bradshaw tweeted his unhappiness that Entwistle had been "forced" out.

Enwistle was appointed as director general this summer and took over from Mark Thompson in September, but within two weeks was hit by the extraordinary revelations that Jimmy Savile, one of the BBC's biggest stars, had been a serial child abuser and had molested under-age girls on BBC premises.

But he was immediately put on the back foot when it emerged that the BBC had squashed a Newsnight investigation into Savile last December, just weeks before three tribute programmes were due to be scheduled.

Entwistle had been warned that it might cause a problem, but had failed to inquire what the subject of the investigation was, leading to criticism that he displayed "an extraordinary lack of curiosity" about his own organisation.

The Humphrys interview in which Entwistle admitted for the second time that he did not know anything about the content of a controversial Newsnight programme compounded the apparent lack of judgment, with politicians lining up on Saturday to question whether he was the right man for the job.

Bland added that the BBC now needed to establish "calmly and accurately what went wrong" to safeguard against future blunders. He said it was extraordinary that the "bog standard checks" had not been made by Newsnight the programme makers had not contacted McAlpine about the allegations or shown a photograph of McAlpine to Messham, the victim of child abuse who made the accusations.

He said serious questions needed to be asked of other executives. "Where were the lawyers; where was the chain of command?" said Bland.

Senior insiders say the mistakes were made because the Savile scandal had effectively torpedoed the management structure in BBC news and current affairs with senior executives, including the head of news and the editor of Newsnight, standing down from their posts while two internal inquiries took place.

One senior journalist said the chain of command was now "breakable brittle rubber" rather than the rod of iron normally in place which would ensure the highest editorial standards in the world.

[Magda Hassan]

...Also, since the Haut de la Garonne is a goto place for procuring children, which place was it that the perverted ones could get adult victims?

Not far at all. On the same island if an adult was required - St Saviours Mental Hospital was the venue. This is according to Bill Maloney who made the documentary about Haut de la Garonne posted a few pages before in this thread.

[Magda Hassan]

BBC Director-General resigns.

A fool, perhaps honourable, perhaps not.

Entwhistle was hopelessly out of his depth, and had to go.

More importantly, the paedophiles win this round, as the headlines read "BBC in crisis", rather than "Horror of powerful child rapists".

BBC in crisis as George Entwistle quits over Newsnight fiasco

Murdoch must be doing a happy dance some where watching all this. And the privateer vultures are probably circling the BBC carcass for rich pickings too. It will be social and alternative media that carries this now. Unless Tom Watson cares to name them in parliament. I think it would be good protection for him to do that.

[Jan Klimkowski]

All twelve copies of the Jillings Report into child abuse North Wales were believed pulped.

It was produced years before the presumed coverup Waterhouse Inquiry, and then buried.

Here's the official Freedom Of Information response:

Mr P John Eich Cyf/Your Ref
Ein Cyf/Our Ref R005428
Dyddiad/Date 08/11/2012
Gofynner am/Ask for Sheila Bickerton
Rhif Union/Direct Dial 01352 702423

Dear Mr John,

I refer to your recent FOI request, and the following statement has been
issued by Flintshire County Council Chief Executive Colin Everett and
Council Leader Aaron Shotton:

"The Jillings report was commissioned by the predecessor Clwyd County
Council which no longer exists. On legal advice, Clwyd County Council did
not publish the report and in March 1996 its full Council noted the report
and agreed to refer it to the Secretary of State for Wales to assist him
in considering whether or not a public inquiry should be instituted.

Flintshire County Council, as one of the six successor councils to Gwynedd
and Clwyd, is establishing whether secured archived copies are held by any
of the six authorities. If so, we will urgently take independent legal
advice about disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, working in
the spirit of the legislation.

"We understand the Jillings report was disclosed to North Wales Police and
the Waterhouse inquiry at the time.

"Flintshire County Council is deeply concerned to hear the claims by abuse
victims that their cases were not fully investigated in the series of
investigations, reports and inquiries which were held in the 1990s.

"The Council supports the calls by victims for any unresolved cases to be
fully and independently investigated.

"We will cooperate fully with the new police inquiry and the investigation
into the terms of the Waterhouse inquiry announced by Home Secretary
Theresa May yesterday (6 November).

"The modern Flintshire has a strong track record in safeguarding of
children in care of which it is proud.

"We will work with partners to ensure that specialist counselling and
support is provided to people who have suffered from sexual abuse."

Yours sincerely

Sheila Bickerton
FOI Contact Officer

A copy of Jillings has turned up with the Independent on Sunday, but much of the evidential and subsidiary material is missing.

The Jillings report: How the truth about North Wales child abuse scandal was suppressed

Council insurers demanded that the first full investigation into the care home scandal was pulped.

Roger Dobson who has one of the few remaining copies details an astonishing cover-up

Roger Dobson Sunday 11 November 2012

A damning report that laid bare the North Wales child abuse scandal might have aired the issue of sex attacks on children in care nearly half a decade before an official judicial inquiry in 2000.

Instead copies of the report were ordered to be destroyed because the council that commissioned it feared it might be sued, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Only a handful remain, including one obtained by this newspaper.

The suppressed report, by a panel of experts led by former social services chief John Jillings, outlined the widespread abuse of children in care, some as young as 10, years before the tribunal chaired by High Court judge Sir Ronald Waterhouse reported.

The copy held by The IoS shows:

* The then newly appointed North Wales chief constable, who was uncontactable yesterday, refused to meet them or help with access to the police major-incident database. "We were disappointed at the apparent impossibility of obtaining a breakdown of data. We are unable to identify the overall extent of the allegations received by the police in the many witness statements which they took.''

* Some 130 boxes of material handed over by the council to the police were not made available to the panel.

* The council did not allow the inquiry to place a notice in the local press seeking information. "This was considered to be unacceptable to the insurers,'' says the report.

While the report went unpublished, coverage of the scandal by this newspaper eventually helped to set up the Waterhouse review, which reported in 2000. Mr Jillings, a respected independent social services expert, was succinct yesterday about what he had found out back then: "What we found was horrific and on a significant scale. If the events in children's homes in North Wales were to be translated into a film, Oliver Twist would seem relatively benign." The scale of what happened, and how it was allowed, he said, "are a disgrace, and stain on the history of child care in this country."

Some 300 pages were compiled in the face of fierce opposition and obstruction: Mr Jillings and his team Professor Jane Tunstall and Gerrilyn Smith were so frustrated they almost quit. The results were pulped: one of the few remaining copies has now been sent to the Children's Commissioner for Wales, Keith Towler. According to the report, the insurers Municipal Mutual suggested the chair of the council's social services committee, Malcolm King, be sacked if he spoke out: "Draconian as it may seem, you may have to consider with the elected members whether they wish to remove him from office if he insists on having the freedom to speak."

Mr King yesterday described the report's suppression as the destruction of an effective weapon against abuse: "Because it was suppressed, the lessons of the Jillings report were not learned. It was the exchange of financial safety for the safety of real people. It was one of the most shameful parts of recent history."

Mr Jillings's report paints an alarming picture of a system in which physical and sexual violence were common, from beatings and bullying, to indecent assault and rape. Some staff linked to abuse may have been allowed to resign or retire early.

Children's carers were recruited without proper references, without application forms, and, in one case, with a rugby club acting as a contact point for vacancies. Children who complained of abuse were not believed, or worse, punished for making false allegations.

The report also revealed that its members had considered quitting: "As the constraints emerged, the panel considered whether it could continue or abandon its investigations," it said. "We determined to continue despite the very considerable constraints placed upon us.'' From the outset there was difficulty and confusion over access to files.

Despite such obstructions they stuck to their brief to investigate child care in Clwyd in the wake of a number of allegations and court cases involving carers. Most of the allegations covered the period 1980 to 1988, and a four-year police inquiry saw 2,600 statements taken and 300 cases sent to the Crown Prosecution Service. Eventually eight men were charged, and six convicted. The panel was tasked with looking at what had gone wrong, reviewing practices, and making recommendations for change.

After reviewing internal reports and interviewing more than 70 witnesses, the picture that emerged was one of dysfunctional homes where children were abused sexually and physically. "It is the opinion of the panel that extensive and widespread abuse has occurred within Clwyd residential establishments for children and young people," they concluded. How many were abused is not clear, but estimates range up to 200. In the 1990s, around 150 had already sought compensation.

"The most striking fact to emerge is that five men who shared in common their employment as residential care workers at the Bryn Estyn home were convicted of serious offences involving at least 25 young people. Twenty of the victims were boys, five were girls. The age range was 10 to 16. Many of the allegations involving these men consisted of specimen charges; many others were left on the file,'' they reported.

There were allegations of widespread physical abuse, sometimes with care workers inflicting gratuitous violence, others involving other boys being used to attack victims. The report also says it was common practice for staff to take residents home for the weekend.

Staff recruitment was frequently chaotic. "In some cases references were provided which were barely adequate as recommendations for employment. There appears to have been no application forms in a disturbing number of cases. More than one staff member described the recruitment process as taking people off the street.''

There was also a culture of silence. "At Bryn Estyn, professional misgivings were discouraged and complaints viewed as disloyal. As a consequence, abusive and dangerous practices escalated out of control and unchecked.'' The report denounced those who should have stopped the abuse, saying: "Our findings show that time and again, the response to indications that children may have been abused has been too little and too late."

A key issue in North Wales has been whether there was a paedophile ring at work. One internal Clwyd council report from the time like Jillings, unpublished said: "There remain worrying current instances of conviction and prosecution for sexual offences of persons who are known to have worked together in child care establishments both in the county [Clwyd] and in other parts of the north-west,'' it said.

"These suggest, that abuse could have been happening unabated for many years and, that there could be operating a league or ring of paedophiles who help one another find sources and situations where abuse can be perpetrated and the addiction fed.''

There were allegations too of abusers outside the care system: "There were numerous claims and suggestions that senior public figures including the police and political figures might have been involved in the abuse of young people,'' the report said.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here's the documentary about Sidney "Hissing Sid" Cooke and his band of murdering paedophiles.

Their victims, such as 14-year-old Jason Swift, are still to this date called "rentboys".

They weren't.

They were children groomed and then horrifically abused and, in the worst cases, murdered by adult men.



The film is stomach churning.

However, Nick Davies' 1998 article, and evidence hinted at in the film, makes it clear that only a small part of his ring was ever convicted.

The sheer scale of child sexual abuse in Britain

The Guardian
Published April 1998 One comment... »



In November last year, every newspaper in Britain carried the story of how Scotland Yard had worked with police forces around the country to raid the rooms of teachers at private schools in search of evidence of their involvement in a paedophile ring. The more interesting story, however, was the raid which never happened.

In the weeks before the operation, specialist detectives from the Paedophile Unit at Scotland Yard had discussed with Thames Valley the possibility of raiding a teacher at the most prestigious private school in the country Eton College, whose pupils include the off-spring of some of the most powerful families in Britain, including the heir to the throne, Prince William.

The move started after a teacher who had recently left Eton went to Thames Valley police and claimed that one of his colleagues had been indecently assaulting boys at the school. Detectives investigated and discovered that the suspect teacher had been the target of similar allegations in the past; and that police in Yorkshire had seized a collection of child pornography and found letters from the teacher in which he referred to "sending the happy items".

Clearly, this did not amount to proof that the teacher was guilty. His former colleague may conceivably have had a grudge against him; the letters in Yorkshire may have had some innocent explanation; other witnesses who also suspected him, may simply have been mistaken. But the whole series of raids was being mounted on similar intelligence which Scotland Yard believed was strong enough to demand that suspects be interviewed and their property searched. Yet when the raids finally took place, Thames Valley held back, arguing that the evidence was too weak to justify action.

The result: the truth about the suspected abuser was never found.

Earlier last year, the Guardian revealed the international police hunt for two unidentified men who had made the "Bjorn tape", a chilling video which recorded their relentless sexual assault on an adolescent Dutch boy who was carried in front of the camera, limp and hooded, before being strapped into a chair where he was defenceless against the indulgence of his two attackers.

Following the story in the Guardian, which was linked to an ITV documentary, Dutch police traced Bjorn's accent to an area in the north of Holland, where they combed through files of reported child abuse and found him. It turned out that he had contacted the authorities a year earlier to complain that a Dutch man, whom he named, had been drugging and raping him since he was only three years old, most recently with the assistance of an English man. The Dutch man had been tried and in the absence of the video he had been acquitted. He had then sued Bjorn for making a malicious complaint against him. Bjorn had collapsed into mental illness and been given refuge in an orphanage.

Now, the tape not only proved that the boy had been telling the truth in all its grim detail, but it also confirmed the identity of the English man who had taken part. He is John Peters, a former soldier who went AWOL in the early 1970s after being charged with having sex with a 14-year-old boy in public toilets near his base in Sutton Coldfield. Since then, Peters has been convicted in Denmark of a separate offence of child abuse.

Although Bjorn's Dutch abuser is now due to be tried again in Holland, Peters remains at liberty. Just as he evaded the police in Sutton Coldfield in the 1970s, so now he has evaded them again in Holland, simply by crossing a border. He is believed to be in Asia, whose population of impoverished and vulnerable children has become a magnet for paedophiles and whose police have no active intelligence link with the British or Dutch. The result: the abuser has escaped.

That same story in the Guardian also disclosed the activities of Warwick Spinks, a British paedophile who was then serving a sentence of five years after Scotland Yard arrested him for abducting and raping two homeless boys from the streets of London. He had sold one of them into a brothel in Amsterdam.

Spinks is a paedophile of grandiose ambition, a man who has commercialised his obsession, first by running an agency in Britain which sold boys to like-minded punters, and then by moving to Amsterdam where, as the Guardian disclosed, he worked in brothels and joined a group of British men who produced videos in which five boys were alleged to have been raped and murdered for the pleasure of viewers.

As he approached the end of his five-year sentence, Spinks was transferred from prison to a probation hostel in south London where, last September, he was asked to fill in a form so that the police could enter his details on the new register of sex offenders. He is precisely the kind of compulsive offender for whom the register was designed so that police can keep an eye on their movements. Spinks, however, refused to fill in the form.

He simply walked away from the hostel and sent his probation officer a postcard with an invitation to come and see him in Amsterdam. Since then, he has travelled to Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Moscow and Prague pursuing his own special interests with never a care for the sex offenders' register or any other limb of the child protection system. The result: another abuser has escaped.

The sexual abuse of children is a special crime, not simply because of the damage it does to its victims, nor even because of the anger and fear it provokes in communities, but more particularly because it is so easy easy to commit, easy to get away with.

Recently, it has broken into the headlines, through the communal fear of a handful of child killers like Robert Oliver and Sidney Cooke; in the exhumation of the crimes of Mary Bell; with the reluctant resignation of Grampian's Chief Constable following his force's bungled inquiry into a paedophile murder. But the debate that has followed has been fragmentary and confused, discoloured by populist reactions from ministers.

Over the last six months, the Guardian has conducted the most detailed and exhaustive investigation of paedophilia that has ever been undertaken by a British newspaper. We have tracked down abusers and their victims, we have spoken to the social workers and detectives and Customs officers who deal with them, to private agencies and to the most senior officials who lead the defence against child abuse.

We have seen the results of courageous work by thousands of dedicated men and women but also we have seen the results of cover-up and concealment, occasionally of corruption, of whistleblowers who are punished for trying to expose the truth, of local authorities, churches and other organisations who have closed ranks to deny or conceal allegations against their staff.

In an investigation of this, the most secret of crimes, we have found evidence of what is an open secret among many of those who fight it that after twenty years of scandal and alarm, after numerous inquiries and reports, and despite the best efforts of those who work in it, we have created an elaborate and sophisticated failure, a child protection system which does not protect the children.

The origin of the problem is the easiness of the crime, the violent equivalent of taking candy from babies. It is physically easier for a rapist to overpower a child than an adult, to subdue a victim who has less than half his body-weight. In February of this year, for example, police reported that a paedophile had boarded a train outside Brighton one evening and abducted not one, but three young boys, aged between eight and eleven. Police said that the man forced the three boys to get off in the village of Glynde, where he marched them into the public toilets and indecently assaulted all three of them before threatening to kill them, raping one of them and putting them all back on the train.

Equally, it is easier to confuse a child than an adult. A woman who spent four years from the age of seven being raped regularly by her stepfather, told the Guardian she had never thought to complain: "I thought it was normal, I thought everyone was going home from school and being hurt by their dad." Children have emerged from abuse to report variously that they were told that there was a bomb inside them which would explode if they disclosed what was happening; that there was no point in telling because no one would believe them and they would be put into care; or, commonly, that the abusive parent would be sent to prison, thus destroying the family and bringing hardship and misery to the other parent.

Children are conned by their abusers in a way that no adult would be. Bruce McLean, for example, who is serving nine years for indecent assaults in Cheshire, was using Manchester United tickets to entrap boys. A man who is now awaiting trial for producing a small orgy of child pornography videos in the north of England bought adolescent girls with Kentucky Fried Chicken and toffees, according to one who has spoken to the Guardian.

The ease of the crime is reflected in its scale. No one knows the exact numbers, but to construct a picture is to watch an arithmetical explosion. Start with a hard fact. At the last count, there were 2,100 child sex abusers behind the bars of British jails. Now think of all those who have previously been convicted but who have been released back into the community. You have to multiply by 50: according to the Home Office Research Department, there are 108,000 convicted paedophiles in the community.

Now, think of all the child victims who are conned and confused and never report their abuse in the first place; and all those cases which are reported but which fall short of the demands of the courts; and all those cases of rape and indecent assault which are convicted but which are not statistically recorded as crimes against children. At the most conservative estimate, the NSPCC and specialist police agree with studies here and in the United States, that the official figures for convictions record no more than ten per cent of the paedophile population. Which means that today in Britain, there are probably 1.1 million paedophiles at large. Other studies suggest that the figure is very much higher.

This vast scale appears to be confirmed by "prevalance studies" which take samples of the population and establish how many were childhood victims of sexual abuse. In the UK, the United States, Germany, Switzerland and Australia, studies consistently find that around 20% of women and around 8% of men suffered sexual abuse as children. In the current population of UK children, that would cover 1.5 million girls and 520,000 boys, a figure that is consistent with the projection of 1.1 million offenders.

Child sex abuse is not only easy to commit, it is also easy to get away with. It is the least reported crime on the planet. Numerous victims say that they were silenced by their own emotions the same emotions which gag the adult victims of rape, but which are magnified in a child's mind. Some children simply cannot report it: social workers in East Sussex four years ago found paedophiles deliberately targetting children who were too disabled to give evidence. Others had picked children who were terminally ill and who died before the system could catch up with them.

Those children who do report what has happened to them are uniquely likely to find their stories rejected. Often, like the adult victims of indecent assault, they will have nothing but their own word as evidence. And the word of a child is viewed with suspicion from one end of the criminal justice system to the other. It is for that reason that the tribunal of inquiry into abuse in children's homes in North Wales is only now attempting to get to the truth of hundreds of complaints which were first made by children up to 20 years ago to council officials, doctors, social workers and parents who, almost without exception, believed not a word of it.

North Wales is only the beginning. It is now clear that during the last 30 years, children's homes in Britain suffered an epidemic of rape and violent assault. It was an epidemic that went unnoticed, like a plague that struck dumb its victims or else blinded those around it.

There are now literally thousands of men and women, in North Wales, South Wales, Manchester, Liverpool, Sunderland, Northumbria, Edinburgh in seventeen different police areas in all who have come forward to make detailed, credible allegations about their childhoods of abuse in care. The combined force of these different inquiries amounts to the biggest contemporary police operation in the country. And yet, at the time that these people were children, at the time that they were being used as human aids to masturbation, just about all of them were overlooked by just about every agency that was supposed to protect them the police, social workers, the Social Services Inspectorate, health visitors, doctors.

The passage of time, itself, often allows abusers to escape. In Cardiff, Paul Conibeer, who is now aged 28, is trying to persuade the police to prosecute Alan Williams, Lee Tucker and John Gay for buggering him and passing him around their friends when he was a 13-year-old in care. The three men have since been convicted of paedophile offences and become involved in the abuse of children in Portugal and Amsterdam, where they shared their pleasures with Warwick Spinks. Police in Cardiff, however, say Conibeer's story is too old to be proved. Conibeer has a grim alternative: "I'm giving it a year. If nothing is done in a year, I'm doing it my own way. If I can take three scum off the street that would be my debt paid back to society, because I have been a bad bastard in my time."

The fact that the sexual abuse of children is so hidden is not entirely the result of the age its victims. This is also a crime of conspiracy, of the abuse of power and, from time to time, of incidents which suggest that a paedophile with prestige may be more likely to escape justice than a more humble offender.

For example, police now invest relatively little time in the surveillance of public toilets where gay men go cottaging. The one thing that is likely still to trigger such an operation is a complaint that under-aged boys are involved unless, that is, the toilets in question happen to be those behind the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, in which case, under the terms of a long-standing Metropolitan Police policy, the operation will take place only if it has the approval of an officer of the rank of commander or above. According to experienced London officers, the reason is that those toilets are used by High Court judges and barristers, and the Metropolitan Police have always said they do not want to encounter such a powerful offender without special authority.

Fleet Street routinely nurtures a crop of untold stories about powerful abusers who have evaded justice. One such is Peter Morrison, formerly the MP for Chester and the deputy chairman of the Conservative Party. Ten years ago, Chris House, the veteran crime reporter for the Sunday Mirror, twice received tip-offs from police officers who said that Morrison had been caught cottaging in public toilets with underaged boys and had been released with a caution. A less powerful man, the officers complained, would have been charged with gross indecency or an offence against children.

At the time, Chris House confronted Morrison, who used libel laws to block publication of the story. Now, Morrison is dead and cannot sue. Police last week confirmed that he had been picked up twice and never brought to trial. They added that there appeared to be no trace of either incident in any of the official records.

A lot of paedophiles are loners. The NSPCC found that 70% of them were closely related to their victim and, contrary to popular belief, they were not always men. Dr Michelle Elliott from Kidscape says she has dealt with more than 700 cases of women sexually abusing children and that she takes on one or two new such cases each week. Academics who have analysed the history of sexually abused children on the At Risk register have found that one in three were assaulted by adolescent or pre-adolescent children. The Young Abusers Project in London, has dealt with one abuser who was only seven years old.

Even though most abusers whatever their age or sex work alone, there is clear evidence of some conspiracy, of the existence of paedophile rings, sometimes deliberately infiltrating parts of the child protection system, often taking advantage of each other's political or social power to conceal their activities.

Researchers at Manchester University trawled the records of eight police areas in search of cases of organised abuse and they concluded that nationally they would expect to find 242 cases every year where children were the victims of adults who had colluded together to use them for sex. They noted, in line with other specialist researchers, that these official records probably captured only one tenth of the truth. It is these cases of organised abuse which present some of the most frightening incidents.

Some are never brought to trial like the group of men who were believed by police to be abducting homeless girls from the streets of London in the early 1990s and holding them in a converted garage with padded walls, where they were being abused and finally killed. The closest they came to being caught was when the man who was said to be disposing of the girls' bodies, for £2,000 a time, was identified by Number Eight Regional Crime Squad, in Wales, as an ex-convict, a man with a history of spectacular violence who was living in Cardiff. Police investiged him but were unable to identify those who had hired him or to find evidence to charge him.

Others come to trial only partially like Robert Oliver and Sidney Cooke and their friends who together abducted, drugged, raped and killed Jason Swift, Barry Lewes and Mark Tildesley. They were convicted of manslaughter. Officers from Operation Orchid were frustrated, first because there was insufficient evidence to convict them of murder, and, second, because they were never able to bring any charges at all in relation to six other boys who, they believed, had also died at the hands of the same ring.

Often the links between abusers lie beneath the surface of less horrific conspiracies. Take, for example, the case of Greystone Heath, an approved school for boys in Warrington, which for years enjoyed an unsullied reputation until police finally discovered that it had become a hot spot for paedophiles. This one institution whose history of abuse is echoed now in scores of others is a model of everyday paedophile collusion.

It appears to have started in 1965 when a 21-year-old student teacher named Keith Laverack went to work there and embarked on a campaign of buggery and indecent assault. Over the ensuing four years, he raped at least 16 boys, three of whom he shared with his colleague, Brian Percival, the clerk and storeman at the home. Once these two men had established sexual rights over the boys at Greystone, other abusers joined the staff: Alan Langshaw, who raped at least 24 boys; Dennis Grain who raped at least 18; Roy Shuttleworth who raped at least ten; Jack Bennett who indecently assaulted two; and Steve Norris who assaulted an unknown number.

The Greystone abusers then fanned out. Keith Laverack went to childrens' homes in Cambridgeshire; Alan Langshaw became Principal of St Vincent's Catholic boys' home in Formby; Grain and Shuttleworth were both promoted to other homes in the Warrington area; Steve Norris went to North Wales. At their new homes, all of them continued to rape boys who were in their care and wherever they went, they crossed the paths of other paedophiles.

In Cambridgeshire, Keith Laverack worked with numerous colleagues, four of whom are now also suspected of abusing children. Dennis Grain worked in Doncaster for the same group of private schools as Terence Hoskins who went on to become headteacher of St Aiden's Community Home in Widnes, where he liked to thrash naked boys with a cane, which he then pushed into their backsides, while his housemaster, Colin Dick, indecently assaulted those who caught his eye. Dennis Grain had previously attacked boys in Danesford childrens' home in Congleton, opening the door to three others, John Clarke, Joseph Smith and Brian Hudson, who set about the boys with relish. Dennis Grain, in the meantime, went off to work at Eton, where he became a housemaster. The web is almost endless.

While he was Principal of St Vincent's, Alan Langshaw recruited a care worker named Edward Stanton, who joined in Langshaw's orgy. Stanton appears to have got the job through the good offices of Roy Shuttleworth, who was continuing to abuse the boys at Greystone and who is believed to have known Stanton from their time in Birmingham when they took the same course in residential child care.

That course in Birmingham, in turn, is believed to have been lectured by Peter Righton, a notorious paedophile who attempted to legitimise his obsession in a series of academic studies. Righton, for his part, belonged to the Paedophile Information Exchange, along with Jack Bennett who joined in the abuse at Greystone. Righton had earlier worked in the same childrens' home in Maidstone, Kent as Peter Howarth, who went on to become a legendary abuser in the homes of North Wales where he shared his indulgence with Steve Norris, formerly of Greystone.

Each of these men claims to have abused alone. Even though their paths connected so frequently, even though the Greystone abusers were assaulting boys in buildings within yards of each other, even though several of them were raping the same boys, they claim never to have colluded with each other. No one who has been involved with investigating Greystone believes them.

The evidence suggests that such abusers not only collude to give each other work and access to children, but also to infiltrate the child protection system. Peter Righton lectured not only in Birmingham but in numerous other colleges. Before he was finally taken to court and convicted, he became a highly regarded consultant in child care and, eventually, the Director of Education at the prestigious National Institute of Social Work in London, a position from which he was able to have some influence on Government policy.

With similar cynicism, Keith Laverack, who opened the catalogue of abuse at Greystone Heath, went on to run the Guardian Ad Litem panel for Cambridgeshire County Council, with the job of representing the interests of children in court cases. This job not only introduced him to the most vulnerable children in the area but also gave him access to files on abused children all over the country. Terence Hoskins, who worked with some of the Greystone abusers, used connections with South Yorkshire police to get access to his own file, from the supposedly secret National Criminal Intelligence Service, NCIS.

Roger Saint who spent years assaulting his foster children in Clwyd secured himself a job on the local adoption panel, from which he could referee complaints about people like himself.

But this is only the beginning. Beyond the inherent difficulty of detecting and preventing this most secret crime, beyond the obstacle course of concealment erected by the collusion of clever paedophiles, the child victims of sexual abuse are betrayed by organisations who repeatedly prefer to avoid embarrassment by concealing awkward allegations and by a system of protection which simply does not work.