Chennai: Child abusers enter countries through the school and orphanage route and get access to vulnerable children. Some even start orphanages and act as Good Samaritans that the local community refuses to believe that such people are offenders, said activists working in the field of child sexual abuse.
Speaking at the seventh annual Tulir-CPHCSA lecture on Wednesday, they said we need to educate people on such offenders and no child abuser should flee the country they should be convicted.
Delivering a lecture on the journey of travelling child sex offenders, Ms Christine Beddoe, former director of End child prostitution, child pornography and the trafficking of children for sexual purposes (ECPAT- UK) said in five years, 293 Britons were arrested for child abuse outside the UK.
“In 2008-09, 33 cases were involved in teaching position abroad and 23 had been previously arrested or convicted in the UK. Information should be shared between countries on such abusers,” she said, adding that common factors among sexual abusers are that they groom the local community and build reputation as Good Samaritans that people believe in such perpetrators.
Ms Beddoe, who has spent 20 years working to eradicate sexual abuse of children, said such people do not have professional qualification and they are not trained teachers. “We need to check on these people and their identities. Sex offenders have contacts with one another and they travel from one country to another,” she said, recommending a central hub for information, protocols and contacts of offenders.
Pointing out the case of Raymond Andrew Varley, who was part of an international ring of paedophiles who preyed on several young children in Goa, she said the Indian government’s appeal for his extradition was rejected by the UK courts and that such a situation should not be allowed to happen again.
Former CBI director, Dr R.K. Raghavan, said child sex abuse was a global problem and many Indians do commit such crimes in other countries.
