Did the failure to deal with known paedophile Ian Huntley before the Soham murders reflect a wider ambivalence about the sexualisation of young teenagers, asks Lynne O'Donnell
Sitting quietly in the Old Bailey throughout Ian Huntley's trial for the murder of schoolfriends Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells was a woman who burned to see justice delivered because of what she said he had done to her own daughter.
Without identifying herself, for that would reveal her daughter's identity, she said that many years ago, in the town where Huntley used to live, he had rendered her daughter unconscious and then sexually assaulted her. She didn't know exactly what it was that Huntley did to her girl to knock her out. But she knew that he was a dangerous man and that, with the horrific hindsight of the Soham murders, her daughter was lucky to be alive.
"He got what he deserved," the woman said after the jury found Huntley guilty on two counts of child murder and he was led away to prison to begin two life sentences.
Many people in the town of Grimsby knew that Huntley (29) was a paedophile. Since his conviction, allegations have been made public that paint a portrait of a man who was unable to keep his predilections to himself.
Examination of the way the police dealt with Huntley shows a disregard for applying the law and could arguably be seen to have granted an implied approval of his behaviour. Increasingly, it has become the norm in popular culture to regard sex as a part of young teenagers' lives - an attitude constantly reinforced by fashion and media images.
So open was Huntley in his pursuit of sex with children that his house in Grimsby was once attacked by angry neighbours sick of his paedophilic activities. Between September 1997 and July 1999, five complaints of rape were made against him, all involving teenagers.
The girl involved in the 1997 allegation was just 11 years old. She had called around to Huntley's house to visit the 15-year-old girl he was then living with. She said Huntley lured her into a nearby orchard and sexually assaulted her. She told her parents and they contacted the police, who then arrested Huntley, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. The girl, now aged 17, told an evening newspaper she felt the police did not believe her.
"I felt badly let down and very angry. If they had believed me and taken the matter to court, Huntley may well have been locked up," she said. "He certainly would never have got a job in a school. Holly and Jessica would still be alive today."
Quite apart from the harder-to-prove allegations of paedophilia and rape, police had an admission from Huntley in 1995 that he had engaged in sex with a 15-year-old girl. They took no action.
Huntley's colleagues, neighbours, flatmates and former girlfriends have spoken at length to the British media about his behaviour, often providing graphic details of sexual activities with young, sometimes very young, girls. They complained about his practice of taking girls, some wearing their school uniforms at his insistence, back to his house and molesting them.
On a number of occasions, parents of his prey and concerned neighbours complained to police about his activities, knowing that the girls involved were younger than the legal age of consent, which in Britain is 16 years old. Investigations went nowhere. In one instance in April 1996, social services were called in by the parents of a 15-year-old who was spending all her time at his flat, but Huntley persuaded the girl to say they were not having sex, so the case went no further.
Eventually, records of the complaints about Huntley - 10 between 1995 and 1999 - were destroyed through bureaucratic intemperance and he was able to secure a job as a school caretaker in a town 100 miles away, Soham. There he used the relationship between his girlfriend, Maxine Carr, a teaching assistant, and two of her favourite pupils, Holly and Jessica, to lure the two 10-year-olds into what is likely to have been a sick fantasy that went horribly wrong. He destroyed the bodies and has ever since lied about what he did to the children.
Carr (26) was found guilty of lying to provide Huntley with an alibi for the night of the murders. The jury believed she knew nothing of his culpability.
The official failings now uncovered, the wheels of British bureaucracy are turning, the knives are out and heads, more probably than not, will roll. While the British government and social services now wring their hands about the poor handling of documentation on Huntley that could have prevented the murders, little has been said about the root of the decisions not to pursue charges against Huntley when they were first presented eight years ago.
Questions about why the Grimsby police did not appear to take seriously a string of sex crime allegations, and how that might reflect on their ability to interpret laws relevant to sexual activity are yet to be raised. Official police comment does not extend to specifics and none of a number of British police associations could make anyone available to comment on the difficult task of policing the sexual activity of young people and protecting them from harm.
In a country where public debate encompasses lowering the age of consent to 14 years old, the line between childhood and responsible young adulthood does not appear to be clearly defined for the officials charged with protecting all members of the public, including children.
Child psychologists and experts in youth issues espouse a case-by-case approach to matters of youth sexuality, and most point to the difficulty in deciding whether or not sex between consenting teenagers should be acted upon by police concerned with drawing the line at the age of consent.
Few, however, are clear on how the police should deal with age-of-consent issues, and on why it was that the law on under-age sex was so obviously flouted in the case of Ian Huntley. Newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips, writing in yesterday's Daily Mail, points to the breakdown of previously accepted parameters of sexual behaviour that appear to have permeated police perceptions of how to apply the law.
"The trail that led to these terrible events," she wrote of the Soham murders, "consisted of a pattern of sexual behaviour that goes far beyond one man's history of sexual violence. It throws into alarming relief a culture in which norms of sexual restraint, self-respect, and parental and community responsibility have catastrophically broken down.
"For it is not merely that Huntley was previously investigated in connection with no fewer than eight sex offences. It is that many of these incidents were mired in ambiguity or indifference arising from a spreading acceptance that a sexual free-for-all is now the norm for everyone, including children who are under the age of consent."
The oblique issue of how young is too young does appear to be presenting police and social workers with a dilemma that could be leaving some young people - though experts are quick to point out that most child sexual abuse happens in the home - open to exploitation by predators such as Huntley.
"Possibly police are as confused about this issue as everyone else. When is a young person mature enough to make decisions about their sexual activity?" says Blossom Young, chair of the British Youth Council. "What you need to look at are circumstances. Sex between a 17-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl is very different to cases of much younger people who are at risk of harm and exploitation by older people. It's a really tricky issue and there are no easy or immediate answers. Perhaps we should look at the age of consent. A line must be drawn somewhere because some young people who don't want to engage in sexual activity before they are 16 need to be protected."
Part of the confusion can be related directly to the increased sexualisation of Western society and the apparent embrace of sex as part of modern youth culture. The corollary of this is the demand from people such as Young for the protection of young people's "rights to freedom of expression and of expressing their sexuality while ensuring they are safeguarded". Yet this approach would appear to put even greater pressure on police and law enforcement agencies to decide how to apply the law, rather than simply obliging them to apply its letter.
As Young says: "It's up to law enforcement agencies to decide, that's their job."
The obsession with sex that pervades western European society doesn't help law enforcement groups to define clearly
the most sensitive and useful approach to policing sexual activity. Could the sexualisation of young people, including pre-teens, through media, music and other cultural outlets, have been a contributing factor in what appears to have been a hands-off approach by police to Huntley's penchant for sex with under-age girls?
"The message from the media is that sex is everywhere, it is what you should want. The promise of sex is associated with everything good and powerful; we idealise sex as the pinnacle of human experience," says David Spellman, a consultant clinical psychologist. "This will affect children as well as adults. Emerging sexuality is a crossroads that everyone struggles with."
But there is a big difference, points out Spellman, between two young people engaging in sexual activity, and an adult pursuing sex with under-age girls or boys.
"The social services and police should be vigorous in their pursuit of any men who have sex with children under 16 - that's the law," he stresses. "We should be clear about the law and not send any unclear messages about it."
Observing young girls and women dressed as provocatively as Britney Spears, Kylie Minogue and Girls Aloud, many adults fret that the age at which young people become sexualised is encroaching on their childhood. But clothes are not the issue, the experts say. Whatever way young people dress is considered the norm for each generation, and does not necessarily imbue children with a precocious sexuality that puts them at risk.
"Let's not fall into the trap of blaming girls for the sexual interest of older men," says one child psychologist, who declined to be named. "The manner of dressing, which might seem provocative to older people, is normal and considered completely normal among young people and their peers of each generation, whether it's go-go boots or tattoos. And that applies equally to the girls' skimpy tops and the boys' long-slung jeans. The fact is that men who portray a sexual interest in younger girls and boys are often in their 30s, 40s and 50s, old enough to know that they are in the wrong."
Lowering the age of consent in an effort to reflect an earlier onset of puberty would only see an already arbitrary line moved in an equally arbitrary manner, says Dr Nick Barlow, consultant paediatric psychologist at Leicester Royal Infirmary. He questions the premise that society is "leaping towards greater sexualisation" simply because portrayals of sex are readily available to children through television and other media, aimed at them or otherwise.
"Puberty is coming at a younger and younger age, as is knowledge of sexual matters, which may not be a bad thing because people talk about it and there is an increased openness," says Barlow.
"We know about experimentation and expectations in adolescence - that blurred line between childhood and adulthood is represented by adolescence, it's the passage."
Ian Huntley's episodes of under-age sex brought him to the attention of local police on many occasions. Phillips says that police believed he had at least 30 partners, many of them younger than 16 years.
"If it's bad enough that such a man should be at large," she adds, "what's surely even more alarming is the collusion by children, parents, police and social workers with criminal under-age sexual activity."