The Times- Sex offenders free to abuse children after changing ID

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Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman: their killer beat the rules to work in a schoolJuly 15 2021, 12.01am

Sex offenders free to abuse children after changing ID

TIMES INVESTIGATION

Hundreds of registered sex offenders have changed their identity to escape scrutiny by exploiting a loophole that places countless children at risk of serious harm, an investigation reveals.

The Times has been shown examples of convicted child sex abusers changing their name by deed poll, failing to inform the authorities and using their new identity to gain access to children.

In the most serious cases men barred for life from working with children used their new name to gain employment in schools and homes where they committed multiple further offences.

One, who worked as an au pair, was jailed last year after police in Belgium uncovered a paedophile ring with nine million child abuse images. Another is in custody in Spain suspected of abusing 36 young girls at a school.

Both were British teachers convicted of child abuse and placed on the sex offenders register. Each changed his name by deed poll, acquired a passport and in one case clearance from the disclosure and barring service (DBS) to work with children. The Times has been shown a copy of the DBS certificate.

A source close to the DBS said it was aware of cases in which registered sex offenders had, by changing their name, gained DBS certificates clearing them to work with children. It wanted to find a way to “close this loophole”.

The government has known for at least 17 years, since the Bichard inquiry into the Soham murders in Cambridgeshire, of the risks posed by child abusers who apply for jobs under a new name. Ian Huntley, who murdered the ten-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, gained his caretaker post at a local school after applying using the name Ian Nixon.

Ian Huntley slipped through criminal record checks by changing his name

As Huntley, he was suspected of sex offences against young girls in Humberside but a national check of criminal records by the Cambridgeshire force, carried out when he applied for the job, looked only for the name Ian Nixon.

Calls since Bichard for decisive measures have fallen on deaf ears. The Safeguarding Alliance, child protection experts who have campaigned on the issue since 2019, criticised the Home Office’s failure to act. Emily Konstantas, the group’s chief executive, said: “We’re allowing hundreds of registered sex offenders to slip through the net, make a mockery of our legal system.”

All registered sex offenders are required to notify their local police force within three days of changing their name. Failure to do so is a criminal offence but the onus is placed entirely on the offender to comply with the law.

Figures obtained by the Safeguarding Alliance, which received responses from fewer than half of the 43 police forces in England and Wales, showed that 913 registered sex offenders went missing from 2017 to 2019.

In the same period 1,349 sex offenders notified the authorities of a name change and the Crown Prosecution Service took action against 10,461 people on the register for failing to comply with notification requirements.

Sarah Champion, the Rotherham MP, has been urging the government to close “this gaping hole in safeguarding”. The Home Office announced this month a “time-limited review” of name changes “to better understand whether current processes are being exploited”.

A Home Office spokesman told The Times that the UK “has some of the toughest powers in the world to deal with sex offenders living in the community” but said it was “working with the courts and the DBS to ensure the system is as robust as it can be”.

Potential solutions include placing a digital marker on the files of all registered sex offenders at the DVLA and the passport office, or to remove the do-it-yourself option for the name change process.

However, Victoria Atkins, the minister for safeguarding, said last month there was “a great tradition in common law of people being able to change their names and we would not want to trespass upon that. What we are trying to do is target sex offenders who are not doing what they should be.

Abuser with new ID became an au pair

A registered sex offender who changed his name and moved to Spain is being held in prison suspected of sex offences against dozens of youngsters.

Ben Lewis, a former primary school teacher who ran a summer camp in Hertfordshire, was convicted in 2016 of taking and possessing child abuse images.

Ben Lewis left Britain and also became a teacher in Madrid

A judge at St Albans crown court gave Lewis a two-year suspended prison sentence, banned him from unsupervised contact with children and ordered him to register as a sex offender.

A day after the sentence was passed, Lewis changed his name by deed poll to Ben David. He applied for and by the autumn of 2016 received a new UK passport and an Israeli passport in the name of Ben David Rose.

By October 2016, when a letter was sent to his UK address by the disclosure and barring service (DBS) to inform him that he was being placed on the children’s barred list, Lewis had already moved to Spain, initially gaining work as an au pair to a family with three young children.

He was later employed as an English teacher by a Spanish language academy then by a secondary school before in 2019 he applied for a post at a prestigious private school in Madrid.

Lewis showed the school a DBS certificate issued in April 2019 that gave him enhanced clearance to work with children. It seemed to confirm that he had no previous criminal convictions and was not on the children’s barred list.

He is being held in Spain, suspected of making indecent images and videos of 36 girls aged from four to eight at the Madrid school. Lewis was arrested last year after hidden cameras were found in the girls’ changing rooms.

In April, Spanish police called Lewis, 31, a “dangerous child sexual predator” and revealed their initial tip-off came from Australian police investigating the distribution of child abuse images on the dark web.

Specialists linked some of the images to Madrid. Spanish police raided Lewis’s rented flat and seized laptops, mobile phones and memory cards.

Police said he “used hidden paedophile forums on the TOR dark web browser to publish the material he generated himself and obtain images generated by other people”.

The case is in a pre-trial phase while a judge examines the evidence.

A copy of the enhanced DBS certificate used by Lewis in 2019 has been seen by The Times. The DBS was asked to confirm if the document was genuine or a forgery, but said it “does not comment on individuals’ certificates”.

Another British sex offender who “always changed his name”, according to a court in Belgium last year, was Samuel Kinge. He was jailed for six years for his role in a paedophile ring that triggered the country’s largest investigation into child abuse images.

Samuel Kinge, a Briton and part of a paedophile ring, was jailed for six years in Belgium

Kinge, 40, was one of four men convicted in phase one of a criminal inquiry into a secret database containing nine million photographs showing the abuse of children from infancy to adolescence. Most were boys. The men were found guilty of child abuse, inciting sexual offences against children, human trafficking and the production, possession and distribution of child abuse images. The Belgian prosecutor described it as the “most horrific case I have ever seen”.

It was as Daniel Kinge, an award-winning Warwickshire primary school teacher, that he was first sentenced in 2005 after he admitted nine charges of making indecent images of children and one of possessing indecent photographs of young boys.

Jailed for nine months, barred from using a computer with a web connection and banned from working with children indefinitely, he was ordered to register as a sex offender for ten years.

After announcing his own death on the Friends Reunited site, Kinge changed his name by deed poll to Samuel Kinge and soon launched Sparklebox, a widely admired and much used online lesson planning resource for primary school teachers.

In autumn 2009 he was again held. Police found 424 indecent images of children on his computer. He was jailed for 12 months at Worcester crown court after pleading guilty to 17 charges of making indecent images of children.

He received a 15-year sexual offences prevention order and was banned from contact with children aged under 16.

Police returned to court in the autumn of 2010 to seek and gain a foreign travel order that banned Kinge from visiting Uganda until 2015. Officers found evidence that he had twice made undeclared trips there and had contact with children at an orphanage.