When Douglas Slade was convicted of 13 offences against children between the 1960’s and 1980’s on Wednesday DS Paul Meton of Avon and Somerset Police said: “It’s clear from the evidence that both Slade and Skeaping were part of a network of men who wanted to abuse children.
“Evidence showed Slade would be contacted by some of these men asking him how to go about abusing a child – one of the many horrifying aspects of this case.
“Slade is the worst example of a predatory and depraved paedophile and he used every method he could think of to find children he could abuse. No child will ever be safe in his company.
“He’s shown absolutely no remorse for his sickening crimes or for the lasting emotional and psychological damage he’s caused his victims.
“If he hadn’t been arrested, charged and now convicted, I’ve no doubt he’d have continued to offend.
“Our investigation into Slade and his associates is ongoing and we believe there will be more victims who haven’t yet come forward.”
In a victim impact statement, one of Slade’s victims said: “He is evil and a coward who has not shown any remorse for his actions.”
Only 3 victims formed the basis of the charges, but clearly a career paedophile such as Slade who operated with others, in particular, Christopher Skeaping, must have abused many children over the years. He is 75 years old.
His offences have an international dimension in that he was expelled from the Philippines in 2015 and brought back to the UK to be charged with the offences.
Back in the 1970’s, when the Paedophile Information Exchange was more active, Slade, and others campaigned to lower the age of consent for sex by children to as low as 11 years.
This case throws up the following points:-
- The healthy state of the criminal law, without limitation in time for sexual offences against children is an example of a law that should not be changed despite our intended departure from the EEC.
- The deportation of a sex offender who fled to the Philippines underlines the true international dimension of child sex offending.
- There is no reason why his three victims should not be entitled to compensation for the way in which Douglas Slade has abused them even though there are differences in the law of limitation in civil cases.
- No sentence of imprisonment for a sex offender is long enough because sexual abuse imposes a life sentence of suffering on any victim.
- Because Slade shows no sign of remorse for his crimes he is undoubtedly a dangerous offender to children who will never be safe to be allowed into society without some degree of risk. As such I would advocate the imposition of an indeterminate sentence for the protection of the public, which was abolished by the present government in 2012.
- This case illustrates the naivety of society in the 1970s when Slade together with others were able to campaign through the Paedophile Information Exchange (“PIE”) for a lowering of the age of consent to 11 years of age. Slade, like others involved in PIE, disguised their predilection for paedophilia behind a façade of respectable lobbying for changes in the law of sex offenders to recognise the increasing development of sexual liberalisation in society.”
Paedophile Information Exchange
According to Wikipaedia:- “The Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was a British pro-paedophile activist group, founded in October 1974 and officially disbanded in 1984. It was described by the BBC in 2007 as “an international organisation of people who trade obscene material.”
The group’s stated aim was “to alleviate [the] suffering of many adults and children” by campaigning to abolish the age of consent thus legalising sex between adults and children”
In 1975 PIE submitted a 17-page document to the Criminal Law Revision Committee, in which it proposed that there should be no age of consent, and that the criminal law should concern itself only with sexual activities to which consent is not given, or which continue after prohibition by a civil court.
Its existence was very much the product of a rebellion within young people for sexual liberation in the liberal 1970’s, following on from the free thinking 1960’s, and a social change in attitudes towards any sort of restriction on freedom.
PIE’s work included giving advice and counsel to paedophiles who wanted it, and providing a means for paedophiles to contact one another
They published a magazine called MAGPIE which was a bulletin in which members placed advertisements, giving their membership number, general location, and brief details of their sexual and other interests. Replies were handled by PIE, as with a box number system, so that correspondents were unidentifiable until they chose to exchange their own details.
In March 2014, evidence emerged that PIE had received grants totalling £70,000 from the Home Office.
A number of senior Labour Party politicians were linked in newspaper stories to PIE in December 2013, and again in February 2014, as a result of their involvement with NCCL at time of PIE’s affiliation.
In June 2015, documents emerged as a result of a BBC freedom of information request that revealed the then Conservative Home Secretary, Leon Brittan, himself the subject of historical child sex abuse allegations, refused to support a bill designed to outlaw PIE because he considered the law on incitement of sexual activities with children to be ‘not so clear’.
On the 19 July 2015, Australia’s 60 Minutes broadcast an investigation of an alleged paedophile ring, into which abused children were supplied by one of PIE founders Peter Righton, who was also a former director of education in the National Institute for Social Work and a legal aide to the British government. The alleged network was said to include senior politicians from all three main parties, such as Leon Brittan, Greville Janner and Cyril Smith.
