SPARE A THOUGHT this morning for Paul Reeve. Not many will. Mr Reeve is the man whose short-lived career as a PE teacher in a Norfolk school was destroyed last week. He has now gone into something like hiding at his parents’. Having never (we must assume) laid a finger on any child, Mr Reeve is so far the only victim of this wretched and tangled affair. All the others — from the Secretary of State for Education downwards through the ranks of her junior ministers and all her officials — keep their jobs.
Stay your pen, “Outraged of King’s Lynn” — I am not arguing that Mr Reeve should have been offered the job in the first place. With the benefit of hindsight it was a cruel blunder to take him on. But just for a moment let us divest the evidence of the Dayglo tags we attach to things, and inspect the facts unadorned.
What the apparatus of State holds against this man is what is presumed to be in his head. His crime was essentially a thought-crime. Paul Reeve has never (we must assume) behaved inappropriately with children. However, in the course of a trawl that the police made through credit card details of clients of internet sites, he was found to have paid to access a site that is thought to have contained downloadable child pornography.
Pause a moment for a little more divesting. Words like “trawl”, “pornographic internet site” and “download” lend a high-tech and creepily professional patina to the scene, but none of these is central to its principles. Trawling is a kind of finding out. Pornographic internet sites are a way of showing a picture. “Download” means “get”. So what are we reporting? That the police found out that Mr Reeve got pornographic pictures of children to look at.
Why have we criminalised what Mr Reeve did? There are two sorts of reason. The first is that the pornography industry itself victimises those people — adults and, worse, children — whom it uses as images. Paying for a picture, like buying a real tiger-skin rug, encourages the production of more. Stopping the purchase is a way of stopping the production. This is a decent argument for the creation of the crime with which Mr Reeve was charged — of inciting the provider to provide the images.
It is not, however, an argument for placing his name on a list hindering his chances of employment in certain jobs. That springs from the law’s second purpose: to discourage people from using pornography because looking at pornographic pictures may be linked to doing pornographic things. Even if (as some believe) habits of accessing pornography were merely the side-effects, not the causes, of dangerous urges, it would remain true that a list of those who want to look at bad things was a useful pointer to the possibility that they might — might — have bad urges, and one day indulge them.
As we construct the case for a sex offenders register, and the rules for its use, that “might” becomes important. The list is a rag-bag of quite different sorts of offence; and of sharply different degrees of gravity. That is why for some offences (like rape) the offender goes on to the list for life, while for others the name will only stay there for a specified number of years. Mr Reeve was not on the list for life. Are we saying he should have been? Were we saying this when the legislation setting up this register was under consideration? Were we insisting that everyone on it should stay there for life? Or are we saying that to employ a man like Mr Reeve this year was a terrible mistake, while to do so in ten years would be fine?
Put yourself, now, in Mr Reeve’s position after the initial shock of being approached by the police. He may at first have wanted to defend or at least explain himself in court. From the rather weasely phrasing of police remarks about the case I am not even clear there is evidence he looked at child pornography. But the police will hardly have needed to remind him that, if contested, his case would then be splashed all across the local newspapers and his reputation would be ruined, whatever the verdict. The advantages of admitting guilt and accepting a caution will have been obvious to him: a chance the news would never get out, on pain of inclusion on a list to which the press and public do not have access, for a limited number of years — and which was anyway not an absolute bar to employment in his vocation, teaching.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable about the theory of official cautioning. It has huge practical advantages and saves a great deal of time and money, but cautioning is too easily used by the police to add to their tally of successes while involving the minimum of evidence-gathering and evidence-presenting, and avoiding all risk of acquittal. Accused people who may have a case are seriously discouraged from pursuing it. I do not think cautioning sits easily with the jurisprudence of the English criminal law. That lawmakers do dimly recognise this will have been (I suspect) one of the reasons why inclusion on the register of sex offenders is not in every case for life, and why it was decided by education ministers that listed individuals would not be automatically barred from jobs in schools (as are those on the more serious “list 99”), but considered individually on the merits of the case.
Why does Ruth Kelly lack the guts to set out these arguments? No doubt she inherited the policy; no doubt it is only one of hundreds she may want to revisit; no doubt she had not found time to consider it properly. There would be no shame in saying any of that — after all, no child has been harmed yet.
But to allow the media impression to arise that Mr Reeve’s case had “slipped through the net” when in fact it was the natural consequence of a deliberate and settled departmental policy that for some reason she was scared to discuss, and to leave journalists sniffing around for some minister other than her to blame, while at the dispatch box she pushed the concept of “taking responsibility” to realms of fatuity hitherto undreamt of even by her boss, was deeply unimpressive. So panicky, so cowardly, so intellectually weak.
It has been so often said as to become almost trite, that it is rarely the setback itself, but the attempt to squirm out of it, that sinks our politicians. Try this instead for size, Ms Kelly: “Yes, Mr Reeve was on the list and told us he was. Yes, we did consider it and my junior ministers accepted departmental advice not to block his appointment. They acted thoughtfully and in good faith. I have not before now had time to think as hard as we must about the departmental policy of which this was a consequence. I shall revisit it urgently. I should like to apologise to parents who have been alarmed by the publicity surrounding this case. And I should like to apologise to Mr Reeve, who acted blamelessly in applying for the position.”
A nasty suspicion troubles me. I hope I am being unduly cynical. I hope the other ten (or so) listees across the country, so far anonymous, whose cases have been considered and who have been allowed to work in education, are not being discreetly approached this weekend and advised that an immediate and quiet resignation for personal reasons will keep them out of the newspapers.
If their cases are similar to that of Mr Reeve, they should slam down the phone. They applied honestly; they were appointed honestly; they have not abused their trust; and if to save her bacon Ms Kelly wants them sacked then they should go for every penny of redundancy money they can get. It ought to be a tidy sum.
