Men on secret 1970s pedophile supporter list may still be working with children today
BBCA secret list of more than 300 people linked to a network that has publicly called for sex with children to be legalized has been handed to the BBC.
The BBC has discovered that some of those named on the list may still have contact with children through paid work or volunteering.
They were all members of a group called Pedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
The BBC Radio 4 Podcast team has been told that the Metropolitan Police had the list for about 20 years, from the late 1970s.
Spanning several dozen pages, with a pink cover page added by the police in the early 1980s, the typed list contains 316 names – all but a handful of men, most accompanied by addresses.
Most PIE members were based in the UK – but there are also descriptions of people in other parts of Western Europe, Australia and the Americas.
The BBC has established that a small number of men are still alive and may currently be in contact with or caring for the children through paid work or volunteerism. The BBC has found no evidence that any of them committed misconduct.
The Met told us it is unable to provide specific information about its landmark investigation into the Pedophile Information Exchange – but crimes will be investigated if sufficient evidence exists and the alleged perpetrator is still alive.
PIE was formed in 1974 – when the country was undergoing rapid transformational social change. Its leaders tried to further its objective Attempts to align themselves with the feminist, anti-racist and gay rights movementsIt was not an illegal organization and it cost £4 a year to join and receive its members’ magazine.
For more than a decade, PIE spokespeople have given interviews to the media arguing that adults and children have a human right to have sex with each other. He argued that the age of four was an age when most children could give consent.
However, while PIE leaders might have been happy to speak publicly, the names of rank-and-file members were kept closely secret.
The list – and dozens of other documents relating to PIE members – was given to the BBC team and journalist Alex Renton, who has written extensively about historical institutional child sexual abuse and presented BBC Podcast, In Dark Corners,
We then searched for names in media archives, crime reports and death register lists over the past 50 years.
They found records or additional information about 45% of the people on the list – with a reasonable degree of certainty – and discovered that half of them had been convicted or warned (or charged) of sexual offenses against children. And he died before trial). The charges include distributing abusive images, kidnapping and rape.
Of the very small number of men who are still in contact with children professionally, none of them have any criminal convictions that the BBC has been able to find – which means in-depth checks of their backgrounds when applying for jobs. Could have been done.
They are part of a wider group of around 70 people on the list who the BBC team identified as being in contact with minors.
Teachers make up half of that group – work addresses are typed in with some names on the list. The rest include social workers, sports coaches, youth workers, doctors, pastors, lay preachers and military officers involved in youth activities.
The podcast team tried to contact everyone who is still alive and working – the majority of whom are believed to be living in the UK.
One claimed that his name was on the list because of PIE’s connections with a gay youth support group in the 1970s.
Another admitted that he was a member, but only because he agreed with PIE that the disparity in age of consent laws was unjust. Men in England and Wales had to be 21 to have sex with other men before 1994 – when the legal age was lowered to 18. Six years later it was reduced to 16 years, in line with straight sex. The man told the BBC that he was not and had never been a pedophile.
A third person, who is currently teaching children at a private school outside the UK, declined to comment further after PIE was mentioned.
No one else has yet responded to the BBC’s view.
The BBC team obtained the PIE list from a former senior social worker – Peter McKelvie – who handed over a shopping bag full of three decades of historical documents, letters, internal memos and old newspaper clippings.
Through his work, Mr McKelvie began to see connections between child abusers in the information he collected through his work – but gradually became unsure about the abilities of the police or social services to stop pedophile networks. I was disappointed.
The PIE list came to him in 1998. By then, for almost 20 years, it had been in the hands of the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Unit, known internally as “The Dirty Squad”.
Dave Flanagan, the former officer who handed it over, told the BBC that he believed the list may have originally been seized in a police raid in the late 1970s.
The document given to the BBC contains notes written in the margins – and Mr Flanagan, a detective constable at the time, says he wrote some of them.
He also attached and dated the pink cover page – because he and his colleagues had added more updated PIE intelligence during the 1980s.
Police raided many of the people on the list, he says – but, in itself, this was useless as information for a search warrant.
“You can’t go before a magistrate and say: ‘Look, we believe he’s a pedophile. We believe there will be indecent images of children because he’s on the PIE list.'”
Legally, being a member of a pedophile support group does not make one a sex offender.
The police managed to shut down PIE in the early 1980s – focusing on three senior members who had links to contact advertisements in the members’ magazine, Magpie.
The men were prosecuted under a 17th-century law of “conspiracy to corrupt public morals”. Two were given conditional discharge, while the third was jailed for two years.
Publicly, PIE ceased to exist in 1984.
Dave Flanagan says his team’s detective work on membership lists has also ground to a halt.
“The information was passed to other police forces and they did what they did – we had no control over it.”
The BBC understands that the PIE list was digitized in 1994 by a police team that no longer exists. The National Crime Agency, which was formed in 2013 and whose officers handle child abuse cases, told us it had “no knowledge of receiving the (digitised) list”.
Dave Flanagan kept the original in his briefcase until he retired in 1998, when he handed it over to Peter McKelvie.
Mr McKelvie told the BBC that over the past 30 years he had lobbied the police, a Labor MP and a Conservative government minister to track down PIE members linked to social services and special schools, but without success.
He wrote a letter to the Health Department in 1993 outlining his concerns. Their letter began: “The infiltration of the social work profession by pedophiles appears to be a widespread and serious problem…”
He suggested the formation of an expert team of social workers and police to keep an eye on each member of the PIE working in social care. He says that no reply was received to the letter.
The Department of Health and Social Care told the BBC it could not comment on “individual historical cases”.
On Monday, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said Those who conceal or fail to report child sexual abuse may face professional or criminal sanctions Under a new offense to be introduced this year.
The proposal was one of 20 recommendations made by Professor Alexis Jay following a seven-year inquiry into child sexual abuse, which ends in 2022. Independent Investigation into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) It was established in response to concerns that some organizations were failing to protect children.
In a statement, Det Superintendent Nicola Franklin of the Met’s Central Specialist Command said the force is committed to tackling pedophilia, “an abhorrent crime”.
“If anyone has information that should be shared with police we would urge them to do so. Despite the passage of time, we will still investigate, provided there is enough evidence to do so and the perpetrator is still alive. yes.”
Reporting team: Alex Renton, Caitlin Smith, Gillian Whelan
