Big Brother is Watching You

Another interruption to my tranquil life!!!

After sorting out WOL this morning there the doorbell rang and on opening a police identity card was flashed at me “DC Madgin of Sussex Police Child Protection Team”

Did we have neighbours who might be abusing their children? He gave my wife’s Christian name and wrong surname and asked if she lived at our address. I gave her correct surname and he asked if he could come in for a chat.

A few weeks ago some Belgium naturist friends who we meet regularly on holiday had posted us a video compilation of several naturist holiday resorts. The various resorts had been filmed to let potential visitors know about the facilities on offer.

When the video arrived there had been a note that it had been opened and examined by Customs. DC Magin explained that he was visiting because some shots of naked children had been included and might be extracted for use by paedophiles. I underlined that these were videos shot by professional companies with links to the naturist movement or travel companies and showing the facilities at naturist resorts.

I indicated that as with many other people I support steps to protect children from paedophiles but this seemed to be excessive and extremely expensive response especially when most sexual abuse takes place within the family (NSPCC information)

Surely, I pointed out, the Child Protection Team or Customs would be able to see that these were genuine holiday promotional videos. Any nudity was incidental to showing an enjoyable family holiday and nothing to do with exploiting children.

It then seems that the letter with the video was read and regarded as potentially sinister. Our friends had asked after the welfare of our daughter. As I’ve mentioned in another thread she was in intensive care over the Christmas period. I established that our daughter (must remember to buy a 30th birthday card) was adult and did not live with us.

Finally it seems the whole investigation might have been a mistake. Another person with my surname had been ‘flagged’ by the computer. I was somewhat amazed that a call had been made on the basis of the full Christian name of the ‘flagged’ person not being checked against those at the address to which the police were visiting.

Seems a serious case of paedophobia.

Wonder if the disconnection of my telephone service in the early hours of this morning may have been the result of “Big Brother” checking to see if I was downloading child pornography

SGS will vouch that I was just changing out of my cheerleader outfit.

I would not have been happy with that visit at all. I mean you have to be pleased they are doing their job but it all sounds a bit too much like the gestapo.

We all want law and order so we give up some privacy and civil liberties to make it easier to enforce the law. Onc day we will find we have given away too much.

I too would have been most unhappy at that sort of questioning in my own home.

I hope they gave you assurances that this was the end of the matter?

Assurances were given that was the end of the matter but.......

I now know that there is someone with my surname 'flagged' in the West Sussex police area.

It's rather a breach of confidence as far as the 'flagged' person is concerned even if it was an attempt to provide an explanation as to the apparant mistake.

I have sent my version of events (a copy of the main post) to Sussex Police Headquarters for their comment.

Do you think they will be examining my graphic to make sure the young lady in cuffs in over eighteen years of age?

No response or acknowledgement of email complaint to Police Headquarters.

Printout taken this morning and Member of Parliament to be contacted.

I should hope so too. If someone was too lazy to correct their files you may find this is on your 'record' forever.

See update on:-

Make this an election issue

This saga seems to have links to questions raised in other threads recently. Hope this update is something that concerns others too !!

Dear DI xxxxxxxxxx,

Thank you for your email of 11th June.

We are pleased to have your assurance that the matter on which we were originally visited is closed and that you confirm that neither of us has committed any criminal offences and that we are not suspected of involvement in Criminal activity.

xxxxxxx and I accept that there were may similarities between the personal details of the known sex offender and those of xxxxx. What was not clarified was the apparent confusion between the names "Mcxxxx" and "Macxxxx"

The memorandum that from Customs to Sussex Police, of which you read us extracts, confirmed the decision made in the case of James Scarlett of Tower Productions and HM Customs concerning the importation of naturist videos. Cheltenham Magistrates, quite rightly, found that naturist videos were not "child-porn" as was argued by HM Customs and Police.

Whilst we have no personal complaint against DC xxxxx we remain unhappy that:-

there seemed to be a breakdown in basic investigative procedures insofar as at the end of the interview DC xxxxx had not established whether xxxxxx was "Mcxxxxx" or "Macxxxxx". He established our surnames as "Mcxxxxx" on a short second interview after having left and returned to our property. When DC xxxxxx's Sergeant contacted xxxxxx subsequently he too was unaware whether he was dealing with "Mcxxxxx" or "Macxxxxx" and asked xxxxxxx to verify this again.

we stressed that there must be an absolute obligation for the Police to know the location of any current or past sex offender for whom they are keeping open records. It seems a waste of police resources and time to investigate people having similar names (hate to think how you cope with the Imrahn Khans, Patels and Singhs!)

as innocent people we are concerned that our names are being kept in Police records and fear that as time passes someone might pull out a file (or check a computer), read the information quickly and in panic visit ourselves again instead of the true sex offender.

Our view remains that the file of the known sex offender must be tagged with a warning that this person has been confused with that of an innocent person with very similar person details and furthermore that mistake has been subject of a formal complaint.

With the "Ombudsman" service the personal ID's of all those lodging a complaint are replaced by false identities and the true identities of the complainant are only kept at the highest level of security. We wonder if similar arrangements can be made on the storage of this complaint. We would then have not objection to the "censored" information being stored on the file of the original sex offender.

We consider this entire incident to be a serious intrusion on our rights under Article 8 of The Human Rights Convention. If his offence has expired, the rights of the known sex offender may have also have been compromised.

It concerns us greatly that there are proposals by Europe to extend data storage to include peoples emails and internet usage. Abuses of the Human Rights Convention, of which this is probably not the most serious example, are now happening now with the relatively small amount of information currently available. Even if current procedures are improved these new proposals extend the risk of making serious mistakes and infringements of the Human Rights Conventions.

We will await the observations of Howard Flight once he has received the comment he has requested from the Home Office.


Yours sincerely

Way to go WorldLife..keep them on their toes

Thanks for the follow ups makes very interesting reading!

No apologies for posting this at a time when the CIA are seeking draconian powers to deal with terrorism. They are asking for power to assassinate!!

How certain can we be that databases will be accurate? Fortunately the error by Sussex Police was not a fatal one in this particular case!

Extracts from letter dated 20 August 2001 from The Rt Hon John Denham MP, Minister of State, Home Office to Mr Howard Flight, Member of Parliament in response to complaint by Worldlife

Thank you for your letter of 15 May to Jack Straw about this one from (Worldife and wife) regarding the recent incident in which they were visited at their home by a police officer. The Home Secretary has asked me to reply as I am responsible for policing issues.

I am very sorry if (Worldlife and wife) have been caused unnecessary stress. I understand that a senior officer in Sussex Police is looking into this matter. In the circumstances, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the details of the matter.

………No doubt the Chief Constable will let both (Worldlife and wife) have a full reply once the investigation has been completed

Italic shows details amended for security reasons

hello bro,
Yea I can understand your point, BUT, my late wife an me, we did a children in need thing every year, garden full of cartoon figures, doing different things and what have you, but we collected money for the kids, we were visited by the NICE POLICEMEN, many times, 'why were we doing this,' Never bothered us. We knew why!!!, as did the people in the village we live in. it will only bother you, or them, if they are not so sure of why they do it.
Somehing to think about, yea!!!

Of course - my own theory nowadays is that the moral panic surrounding pedophilia has come about partly as a result of the abolition of child labour and introduction of compulsory education, since the industrial revolution.

At first, when the working classes were told that their children couldn't work and had to go to school, they resisted. It's not hard to understand why - child labour brought in wages, which bought food and paid the rent. Working class families saw their children as an essential survival strategy, maybe even as a chance to better their lot - if they ever saved up enough. That's in stark contrast to today, where many people now think of children in terms of how much it costs to bring them up. Add to that the need to have enough children to compensate for the high infant mortality rate, and you can understand why families tended to be large. Abortion and birth control was simply unthinkable.

So the powers that be introduced the concept of childhood - as a time of innocence. A time to play, and have fun - and definitely not a time to be working 13 hours a day six days a week at a cotton mill - even if it does mean that the family won't have anything to eat from time to time. The idea caught on after a while.

But then they raised the compulsory education leaving age from 13 to 16. You might as well have had the child labour debate all over again. Parents say it's fair enough to consider people under 13 to be children - but over? That's just taking the mick!

But the authorities stuck to their guns, despite the obvious biological truth of puberty at around the age of 13.

Pregnancy and childcare tend to distract from education somewhat - so the authorities found that they were forced to regulate sexual activity in people under the age of 16, who were previously considered adults, but who are now considered children.

But they managed it in the end, by giving the children the message that they ought to wait until they've grown up. Yes, we know that childhood is a time to play, and have fun - but sex is the exception, because sex isn't innocent. Oh - and those who are truly adults - ie, over 16 - they should know better about impressionable minors. That includes 16-year-olds in relationships with 15-year-olds. No ifs or buts, just don't go there.

This idea also started to catch on too. But it was more difficult to convince people not to have sex with willing 15-year-olds than to convince them that 5 year olds shouldn't be working in a mill. Although people appreciated education, they sometimes forgot the issues affecting it. So the moral message needed to be stronger.

What better way to get the message across than to invent the concept of pedophilia? You already think of children in terms of how much it costs to bring them up - so what better way to gross you out, than with the idea of sex with a baby? Who has yet to be toilet-trained? Ew.

Now that you're sufficiently disgusted, the moral ambiguity gets cleared up. Fifteen months or fifteen years, it makes no difference, a child is a child is a child, end of story. And so the problem of teenage pregnancy is very efficiently solved. Okay there's still the odd one that slips the net, but it happens so rarely nowadays that we hardly need worry about it. And that's why pedophilia - which no-one had heard of 100 years ago, still less gave a monkeys about - is now considered to be a threat to the very fabric of society.

Which is fine. But then there's the third world, where education doesn't exist, and where child labour is still an everyday necessity. Where life expectancy is short, infant mortality is high, and people have very large families to try to compensate. Sound familiar? It's easy for us to be self-righteous about Gary Glitter in the attic of his nice big detached centrally-heated house, surreptitiously looking at a few girlie pics on his computer. But is it so easy for us to find fault with a mother who sends her children to work, because she honestly doesn't know where their next meal is coming from?

So what do we do? Boycott foreign supplies? I don't think that will work, because if you don't profit from cheap imports, then someone else below you in the supply chain will. Economic isolation simply won't happen.

But I don't think anyone need feel guilty - third world child labour could destabilize the western economy anyway, regardless of whether you feel guilty about it or not. I think that national child education isn't enough. If we take education seriously, then we need to aim for global compulsory education. Can't see it happening in the next year or two, but hey - I think it's a nice dream.

Yes there is a hell of lot hysteria about it. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves and the kids have them fearing not just for their jobs but their reputation and safety if an accusation is made.

I have to confess to being mystified at why certain "sexual preferences" are now accepted and not others as it is quite marked; look how good old Elton John for example is knighted and bad old Gary Glitter is banished and disgraced............ask yourselves honestly which is the greater pervert?

No it doesn't make sense to me either!

No doubt we'll see pay (paed) rights in a few years time if the present Politically correct fashion of tolerance carries on as it is.

What bothers me about the whole thing is we are bringing up the next generation to believe that is someone you don't know, is in any way pleasant, smiles or speaks to you is the devil incarnate.

I also think in our over fed (in so many ways) society we are running out of taboos to break.
When I can read up on sexual positions including "golden showers" in the place where I went to look for a haynes manual for my motorbike it's obvious things have moved on.

People get a certain pleasure from what's not available - the glimps of an ankle in victorian times, the more we push the bounderies of what is acceptable the deaper people will dig to get the "naughty" kick.

Just what young people think of "normal" these days I can't imagine. there is sufficent porn available that most boys of "just become interested" age must think all females have perfect bodies and all over tans and that all blokes are built like...you get the idea.

---

"I don't believe it!"

my god I just relialised I've become a bitter old man.

Just so you know - my opinions have probably changed a lot since the last time I posted in this thread. So I'm not going to bother trying to defend anything I might have said earlier.

I now see pornography as being just one aspect of our consumer culture. I believe that our attitude to pornography says more about our attitude to materialism than it says about our attitude to sex.

I think that some people have a need to collect and hoard pornography that doesn't actually turn them on in the same way that some people collect useless knickknacks from souvenir shops.

Think about it. When you watch a film, it's interesting for the first time - but if you keep watching the same film over and over again, you learn the plot, and you eventually get bored of it. It's exactly the same with pornography. It turns you on the first time - but not if you keep looking at the same image over and over again.

A person who doesn't have a hoarding problem is far more likely to get rid of second-hand books at a car boot sale. In the same way - if they ever buy a girlie mag, they'll look at it once or twice, get their quick thrill - and then they'll trash it. If the police search their house, they'll find nothing. The only people who get in trouble with the law for unsuitable images are the hoarders and OCD sufferers.

Actually - on second thoughts - I don't really believe that. A person who is supplying illegal material will obviously stockpile it. However, stockpiles don't prove intent to supply.

I have always thought of sex as a "hands on" pastime whatever your taste.

The viewing of it has never appealed to me.There again nor do Large boobs,always reminds me of my mum,God bless her

An ugly old broiler is still a lot more pleasure than a collection of Porn and the five fingered widow

Rigger