PAEDOPHILES IN DISGUISE

Sandra Barwick on fake

social workers who get to examine children

FASHIONS in dress and music have long been analysed for deeper lessons they are thought to hold about the society which spawned them. There is a new fashion in crime for the 1990s and it too, perhaps more forcefully, certainly more grimly, reflects its time.

What crime it is exactly is difficult to classify. So far, Out baldly, it would sup- port charges of attempted child abduction and indecent assault, but that hardly begins to identify its perverse nature. Even the police are not certain what to make of it.

Twelve times at least since last summer men and women, pretending to be social workers, have entered homes where there are children and asked to examine them with all the authority of the state. Usually they have succeeded. Most often the in- truders have been content to look at and touch these girls and boys, aged from five months to three years old, once their mothers have stripped them naked. Twice they have returned, bringing another bogus doctor, or fake social worker: once one of these claimed to have a warrant to remove the family's children. In no case have they — yet — escaped with a child. Detective Superintendent David Foss, the officer at Rotherham police station in Yorkshire who has the unhappy duty of being in charge of the inquiry, is uncertain of their motives. They might, he believes, be awaiting their best opportunity to steal a child. They may have more immediate Purposes. 'If they are paedophiles,' he says, 'you find them of both sexes and their objective is the same — to look at children with nothing on.' To take pains to look at and touch a naked child, in risky circumstances, is common paedophiliac behaviour.

More extraordinary perhaps than the crime is the brazenness of those who Commit it. Not only have they twice risked returning to homes, but last week on the day descriptions and photofits were pub- lished in the national press, and given front Page prominence in local papers, there were not one but two fresh attempts by a woman — at 9.15 a.m. in Liversedge near Leeds, and at 11.50 a.m. at Thorne, near Doncaster. It looks like compulsive be-

haviour, or as though the increased risks are heightening the excitement.

At least two women are involved, and at least two men, but there may be more, for descriptions are vague and the crimes have happened across the country, beginning on the 26 May in Exmouth, continuing in June in Plymouth, and in September in Bristol, in October in Bath, and another in the same month near Durham before a spate begins in Yorkshire in January of this year. The police are linking most of the York- shire crimes, but even there they are not certain how many they are looking for. Some may be copy-cat incidents: the tech- nique (though this is speculation) may be circulating amongst paedophiliac net- works.

One pair, at any rate, of the doppelgan- ger social workers came to the small Victorian terrace house of Dawn Macdo- nald in Rotherham only two weeks ago. One of the women was a small, plump, motherly-looking type of about 45, with greying hair. The leader of the two was a woman around 30, with brown hair drawn off her face, a dark suit and a confident manner.

She was so perfect in every way,' says Mrs McDonald, herself 27, and working four hours a day as a petrol pump atten- dant to supplement the family income. `She was so attractive, model looking. She was one of those girls you think: she's got bloody everything.'

These are well dressed women, often wearing suits of skirts and jackets, some- times carrying a mahogany-coloured brief- `it's our souvenir of the royal birth.' case, nicely spoken. That the devil may seem a gentleman has long been known: that he may also appear as a gentlewoman is a fact this generation may soon be forced to accept. In only two incidents are the perpetrators men alone; twice women have worked as a pair; four times it has been a woman alone.

Female paedophilia is believed to be rarer than male, though Ray Wyre, an ex-probation officer who works at a treat- ment centre for sex offenders, the Gracewell Clinic in Birmingham, has four females attending at present. 'Bogus school doctors and that kind of thing has been happening for years, but the female element is more unusual. It raises an anxiety about what we're really dealing with here, what they are trying to get the children away for.'

There is an element of brusqueness, of bullying, in these women's behaviour. In Mrs McDonald's case, as in most, the aggression came in the accusation that her one-year-old son, Lee, had been sexually abused. Once the shock of that had won them admittance the two women asked to be left alone with the child, and were refused. One took notes in a small black book. They inspected the naked child expertly, as it seemed to Mrs McDonald, as they might at a hospital, but not obviously indecently. They warned her this perhaps the most sinister touch of all — against sexual abuse by the child's father, telling her she should not leave the child alone with him. They told her the telephone call alleging abuse had come anonymously, that the child seemed to be all right, that someone must have been making mischief. Once they had gone, and Mrs McDonald had realised the deceit, she was left, like the other parents who have been visited, with a residue of terror.

The bullying can be more open. At Liversedge the female stranger became abusive when the mother, Julie Har- greaves, refused to allow her to examine her sleeping baby son. These people come unannounced, as strangers, anonymous, superior, to run-down estates and rough areas where they may be least challenged.

And the parents involved have rarely questioned the right of the state to intrude into their houses — once at 8 p.m. unannounced, and strip their children. The majority, however indignantly, have co- operated.

A few centuries ago it was leprechauns, gypsies, wolves in sheep's clothing who were said to steal infants. Now they dress in navy suits, clipboards in their hands, with Ford Escorts waiting outside. If they continue, methods of identification and notification of visits will have to be much improved and formalised, and parents' rights to refuse officials entry, to double check their identities and motives, to call lawyers when there is first suspicion that they may be about to be accused of crimes, will have to be much publicised.