Nick Davies

When Coventry police investigated the Rev’d Phil Aspinall’s behaviour with young boys, they cleared him of breaking the law. He had committed no offence. But for the Bishop of Coventry, the priest’s behaviour raised a different problem. Three adolescent boys separately had complained that Aspinall had made sexual overtures to them. Child protection experts had warned that he was guilty of inappropriate behaviour. In any other job, they said, he would have been suspended. The Church of England, however, tried to turn the other cheek…..

Daniel Handley was unlucky. He was riding his bike near his home in the East End of London one dark Sunday afternoon in October 1994 when he was spotted by two men who had gone out in their car that day with the specific intention of finding a boy whom they could abduct and rape and kill. Daniel died that evening. He was nine.

News story -

The Guardian
September 1997
No one is listening. For years, the muffled sound of scandal has been leaking from the closed world of Britain’s children’s homes, sometimes through the trial of a care worker who has turned out to be a child rapist, sometimes in rumours about paedophile rings and cover-ups and connections in high places. Whispers [...]

Story One -

It is an ordinary flat. The camera pans around the room catching sight of a bookshelf full of paperbacks, a desk which is untidy with letters and files, a couple of paintings on the wall, a chair or two, and then the doorway, the blank open doorway, and, as the camera waits, a man suddenly appears there. The only sound is the quiet crackle of the video tape.

The Belgian Minister of Justice looked weak and depressed as he sat before the world’s press this week and tried to explain how his police officers had failed to detect Marcel Dutroux, the 39-year-old builder who has confessed to the serial rape and abduction of young girls.

Feature 1 -

West Yorkshire. September 1992. Police report that a quarter of the prostitutes who are arrested in their vice areas are aged 16 or under. They say the figures have soared in the previous 12 months. During 1991, less than four per cent of prostitutes they dealt with were under age.

Scenes from a city. England, the autumn of 1993.
In a McDonalds hamburger bar, two boys sit at a table. Jamie is eleven; he is small and slim with blond hair, pale blue eyes and a face with the kind of impish innocence that makes old ladies want to pat him on the head. Luke is 13, chubby with pink puppy-fat cheeks and a chunky little body whose roundness is exaggerated by the padded red anorak which he insists on wearing indoors and out, regardless of the weather.