In the name of the children

Lewisham Council in south London is warning parents of a convicted paedophile living in their area, a man the council considers potentially dangerous. So parents know ... but what happens next?

This week a short note from the council has been dropping through thousands of letter boxes in Forest Hill, south London. The message is simple. Guard your children carefully. There is a dangerous paedophile wandering around. Your child could be in danger.

"The man is white, aged 44, slim build, 5ft 6ins-5ft 8ins tall," says the letter. "He has a flat boxer's nose with a small scar on the bridge, and blue eyes. He pronounces `Rs' as `Ws' and is shabbily dressed."

And that's all the detail given - no name, no photograph, no address. Just a warning that London Weekend Television will be screening a programme on sex offenders on Good Friday and that if they watch, they'll learn more.

He has, according to the programme-makers, a record of five convictions for indecency involving boys, the last in 1986. The council said that it had no evidence that the man had committed any offences since moving into the borough, but they regarded the man as particularly dangerous and wanted parents to be alerted over the Easter period.

So what do you do with such information, with the knowledge that a shadowy figure of vague identity might be ready to abuse your child, given the slightest opportunity? Bolt the front door at night? Stop the children going out? Check every dodgy passer-by for an oddly shaped, scarred nose?

It's a dilemma that will become increasingly common as convicted paedophiles are outed by councils around the country and new legislation, effective after the election, will give the police discretion to pass on information from a new compulsory sex offenders list. In the best-known case, in Birmingham earlier this year, local women hounded George Taylor out the Garrett's Green area, after it became known that he had been convicted of assaulting a 12-year-old girl.

Parents in Runcorn, Cheshire, have been living with the problem for several years. In one case, according to John O'Sullivan, from the pressure group Parents Against Child Abuse, a family found themselves living next door to an active paedophile, who was known to have touched up local children.

"They didn't let their children out for two years," he says. "The parents built a six-foot fence around the garden, but still didn't feel safe enough to let the children play there. They even ended up giving up work so that they would be there when the children came home from school. In the end, that family had to leave the area. The paedophile wouldn't move out. They couldn't carry on.

"No one in the street lets their kids out to play on their own now. These aren't babies - these are 10-and 11-year-olds. But the police didn't do anything about him. The whole community feels disgusted and let down.

"There's another man in another part of Runcorn, who's also a problem. He's a convicted paedophile - he slashes the backsides of boys to mark them so that other paedophiles don't touch them. I was recently on a bus and a bunch of children just got off as soon as he got on, because they are so scared of him. It was their bus, but they got off."

O'Sullivan is adamant that such people should be identified to the community. "If there was a wild lion loose on the street, the police would tell us. A paedophile in the neighbourhood is the same. They might not rip the flesh, but they are just as damaging to the mind of a child. We need to know who they are."

But the case for such openness is by no means proven. There have been many instances of mistaken identity. In 1994, a girl of 14 was killed near Solihull when arsonists set fire to the home of an alleged paedophile. The man was not at home at the time. And exposure can ruin an ex-offender's life, even when he is going straight.

"I have phone calls from offenders who are terrified of being identified publicly," says Ray Wyre, a sexual crime expert with the Lucy Faithful Foundation. "One man rings who runs a business now, having been jailed for five years for sexual offences with a 12-year-old girl. Now he has remarried a woman who has two boys. If his conviction becomes public knowledge, then his business is finished and his wife and their children would be seriously affected."

Mr Wyre argues that just identifying a convicted abuser offers little extra protection to children. "It's not that people become more vigilant, they become vigilantes. They merely push the offender away into another community so that even the professionals find it hard to keep track of them."

He sees no hope of sex offenders obeying the new law requiring notification of changes in address and name, unless their details are kept from the general public. "Notifying people in Forest Hill about this man is not going to stop him. He'll go elsewhere. So the policy is a failure, not just in terms of the right of offenders but in terms of child protection. It's just a case of the council covering its back."

Mr Wyre also warns of the danger in isolating an offender. "He'll be frightened. He'll be worried about what might happen to him. A sexually motivated offender will probably use the fact that society does not want to care for him as justification of his behaviour.

"Putting a man on a course to self-destruct can be very dangerous. Look at Thomas Hamilton's reaction. He finally concluded that, if he couldn't have access to children, then no one else would either, and we got the Dunblane killings."

In the long run, the answer to the presence of paedophiles in the community does not seem to be turfing them from one community into another, where they will be harder to track. In any case, naming the few who are known does not make children much safer: there are probably plenty of paedophiles wandering around the Forest Hill area this weekend who have neither a "boxer's nose" nor an odd way of pronouncing their R's. And if paedophiles can be hounded and identified to everyone, then why should we not expect the same rights with respect to convicted burglars, murderers and other criminals living in our midst?

Mr Wyre argues that new methods should be used to deal with sex offenders which would not leave the worried parents of Forest Hill and Runcorn as powerless as they must feel this weekend. He argues for reviewable sentences for sex offenders. He highlights several former prisoners who, on their release, handed to prison officers written fantasies of offences they planned to commit once they were out. The authorities had no powers to detain them. "Everyone," he says, "knew that the two killers of nine-year- old Daniel Handley were dangerous, but no one could do anything about them."

The trouble is that the prison system jails people and then behaves as though punishment cures them. It clearly does not succeed, but the authorities have few additional powers left to control the behaviour of paedophiles. They can neither order compulsory psychiatric care nor adequately control their access to children in the community. As a result, all that the 8,000 parents notified in the Forest Hill area can do this weekend is keep their children at home and fret