Since I started this thread about the govenment playing the 'paedo card' to support their web monitoring plans, I found the following Sun story interesting in this light.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4237695/Child-sex-offence-every-20-minutes.html

"The 43 police forces in England and Wales recorded 23,097 child sex offences last year. That included rape, incest, child prostitution and pornography.

The annual figure is equivalent to 444 attacks a week - or one kiddie abused every 20 minutes.

Just as worryingly, only 2,135 of offences reported - ten per cent - led to someone actually being convicted and sentenced. Thousands of paedos escape scot-free.

Mr Brown, head of the NSPCC's Sexual Abuse programme, said: "When you have a situation where more than 60 children are being sexually abused every day, something is very wrong. ""

Now I don't want to make light of this, and my heart goes out to any kid who is abused, but the article could just have been headlined with 'It's Paedogeddon'.

And I'm sorry Sun but an allegation of child abuse /= a crime happened. Accoring to the logic of this story an allegation or 'report' = guilt. So much for due process. So the true headline is 'child abuse allegations are at a rate of 1 every 20 mintues'. This story is very irresponsible. Also the NSPCC who are obviously on a donation drive and should know better. It's interesting this story comes so close on the heels of the government announcing web monitoring proposals.....

Also if only 10% of allegations results in a conviction, could that not also mean 90% of allegations, result in innocent people having their names dragged through the mud. To me that is more worrying.

Captcha: topsy turvy

Edit:
My favourite part:

"London's Metropolitan Police dealt with the most abuse cases, a total of 3,420. The Leveson Inquiry into Press standards has heard Scotland Yard has 150 cops working on its phone hacking investigation - and just 27 devoted to nailing paedophiles.

London's Deputy Mayor Kit Malthouse also told the inquiry the Met's bill for probing phone hacking is forecast to hit £40million.

In contrast, £36million is spent annually on investigating child abuse in the capital."

Yeah, police stop investigation our sister papers hacking and get back after those paedos.

I'll take freedom and the right to privacy over safety any day, and it's not even safety but more the fear for our safety, the use of emotive language regarding child molesters/rapest/murders to help pass the legislation is just disgusting, and people actually fall for it. The fact is these crimes are rare and don't need such a heavy handed approach. You're more likely to die in a car crash so why not loads of legislation to improve car safety or fix the god awful roads here (UK).

Whole point of this (IMO) is to just legalise what they are already doing. After MPs comments about it being used in public trials, it just screamed the whole "secret evidence" crap that keeps cropping up.

Not that it matters anyway, they will do what they want, and there isn't a damned thing we can do about it, the only difference between any of them are in the colours of their parties.

That said though, maybe Cherie's Human Rights Act, could be made to work in Joe citizens favour for a change, its likely a blatant breach. Wonder how quick they'd scramble to rectify that if it started working against them.

Surely the very fact that we HAVE caught people like Ian Huntley mean we don't need these laws?

orangeban:
People seem to be rather confused about this monitoring legislation. Here's the thing:

1) The police won't be able to read your emails, all they can do is see what websites you go on and who you are contacting via email and things like that.

None of those are acceptable.

2) This isn't the dawn of a new Orwellian regime, we already have laws that allow the police to do these things, only with regards to phones. The police can find out who you've been phoning without a warrant, but they need a warrant to know what you are saying.

This is also unacceptable, people are working to remove their ability to do this. There are also ways around it.

3) This is legislation i.e. a proposed law. It is by no means definite that it will pass.

So no, I'm not signing that petition, because this legislation is doing is bringing our current laws up to date with new technology.

Current laws are wrong already (my opinion) as they are the result of gradual erosion of rights and personal freedom.

Edit: Oh, and with regards to CCTV cameras, which always come up when people talk about privacy in Britain. CCTV cameras monitor you on public streets (or at least, the government ones do). Don't claim that your privacy is being invaded by them, because you don't have privacy on a public street. If you're doing something that you don't want people to know about, you shouldn't be doing it on a public street anyway.

I disagree as I am of the opinion that no one should be recorded in any way without their express permission.