The 3 Cs: Contamination, Collusion, Concoction.
- Roy Catchpole
- May 2, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 1, 2020
I was alerted to this issue during the two years (2014/15) I was under suspicion of having sexually abused an elderly female member of my local congregation at her home while her husband was away at work.
The allegation had no truth in it - and this was later proven by the Crown - but I was disturbed to learn that, during the police investigation, somebody, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the case, had appointed himself a sort of police helper and was actively touting for other complainants to come forward via postings on the internet. I was equally surprised and saddened to learn that a second influential individual in the local community was voicing his opinion that I was guilty long before the trial had begun. He was to continue to express this opinion both during and for some years after the Crown's activity had ceased.
In the early part of 2014, right through to the end of my trial he continued to share his belief in my guilt. He continued to express this view publicly even after the Crown had publicly apologised to me for a wrongful prosecution. The local press had also reported this unusual outcome - it being a matter of some rarity - a cause célèbre. So it was clear to everybody that I was innocent. But this man's continual private briefings seemed to be a clarion call for more members of my church congregation, and people I had visited as part of my clerical ministry in the parish, with whom I had developed trusting pastoral relationships over 20 years, to come forward with accusations of abuse.
None did, of course, since no abuse had taken place. Still,I wondered if there were others who were covertly doing the same thing as this individual. People who had not come to my notice. There were bound to be. Some people love to see the downfall of a local hero.
Allegations of sexual and physical abuse have become an industry here in the UK, due to the prospect of generous compensation payments.
Although the sums paid to alleged victims of sexual abuse are limited under the government’s 'Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority' (CICA), personal injury solicitors have realised that most institutions – particularly churches, boarding schools and local authority children’s homes – have public liability insurance. This offers far richer pickings for claimants than CICA. Individual claims can easily top £100,000. Many insurers prefer to settle these claims out of court, rather than incur the heavy costs of official legal proceedings and the risk of the associated negative publicity. Note the large payment of £16,000 made by the Guildford Diocese to Bishop Bell’s accuser without, according to Lord Carlisle’s Independent Review in December 2017, a fair and impartial process.
What I found particularly concerning was the role being played by private individuals in actively trawling online for further allegations – true or fabricated – that might ultimately be used to claim compensation. In some cases, the target(s) may be deceased, but many others are still living and, in these cases, complaints can be passed onto the local police. In a few very troubling instances, the police themselves appear to be supporting these trawling operations by sharing intelligence with the private citizens who administer the web pages. While bringing genuine sex offenders to justice is a laudable and necessary aim, there are serious problems when private, unaccountable individuals - untrained vigilante investigators, deluded into thinking they are on the side of the angels - start to play a key role in identifying potential complainants, meeting them face to face privately, without witnesses or any official oversight, taking initial statements of ‘evidence’ and then coaching and grooming them prior to passing their details on to firms of personal injury solicitors or to the local police force. This can be especially worrying when the 'trawler' is an influential local individual with time on his hands and an axe to grind. Aside from the questionable ethics of this practice this raises three major concerns about the integrity of any evidence that may emerge via these 'trawling' vigilante operations. The 3 Cs.
• Contamination – where the individuals involved in trawling ‘implant’ (or even fabricate) memories of abuse, or make suggestions to often vulnerable or disturbed adults; or to those adults who are down on their financial luck.
• Collusion – by networking between complainants, either acting as 'a go-between' for information, or sharing unofficial statements made by other complainants from the same institution, thereby adding unmerited credibility to their allegations.
• Concoction – where completely fictitious, malicious allegations against innocent people are created and developed, before being presented to the police as spontaneous claims of sexual abuse. Even when allegations of abuse may be grounded in fact, the processes of contamination and collusion – if proven – may well result in a complainant's evidence being treated as unreliable. In such cases, the intervention of vigilante trawlers has the very real potential to do enormous harm to prosecutions. The end result may be that the guilty go free, due to the meddling of unqualified and irresponsible ‘enthusiasts’ or glory-seekers.
History shows that dispensing with the need for corroboration along with the change in the law of similar fact evidence has made prosecution into a numbers game - 'the more similar allegations from the more people there are, the more difficult it becomes to challenge it.' This mindset ignores not only private vigilante activity, which is unrecorded but also the powerful impact of social media in which people communicate and share their stories. All of this occurs very easily under the radar of the courts. It is untraceable, especially in light of chronic under-funding of all aspects of the law courts and the tsunami of digital data, loading an increasingly unrealistic workload on investigators. Not surprisingly this often results in non-disclosure as in the case of Liam Allan. There is also the inescapable fact that those who operate this trawling have no professional training or duty of care when engaging in these extra-curricular activities. Implanting or encouraging false memories can have devastating consequences, not only on an innocent target but also in cases where damaged or vulnerable people are effectively being manipulated to suit the trawler's own objectives. It isn’t unknown for this type of obsessive to publish personal details of those alleging sexual abuse, even against the wishes of the person who may have disclosed highly sensitive information to him or her. In such cases, the clear goal of the trawler is self-aggrandisement and the cultivation of a ‘saviour/hero’ figure. Any damage to those who have unwisely shared their real or fantasy experiences with such individuals is dismissed as collateral damage. In some cases, irreparable harm can be caused to individuals and to families.
A Darker Motive But there are some who indulge in trawling activity who may well have much darker motives. There are doubtless a number of individuals who find stories of sexual crime – real or imaginary – stimulating and exciting.
These voyeurs – for that is what they are in reality – enjoy listening to every salacious detail of what they are imagining. Yet they would deny vehemently any such suggestion from puzzled observers, who might enquire why they are so fascinated by the sexual degradation and abuse of others or the desire uncover things that might be used to persecute an innocent individual. It would not be unfair to describe such obsessive characters as aural scopophiliacs… deriving pleasure from listening to other’s accounts of sexual abuse. Many of these perverts are very accomplished at hiding in plain sight.
Private individuals – whether they be vigilantes or sexual abuse obsessives – who engage in these trawling operations are not bound by legal safeguards and rules which are designed to protect suspects from the contamination of evidence or collusion between accusers. But any police investigation that has been launched as a result of information emerging from this type of trawling may well be compromised from the very beginning. This is especially the case if the role played by the trawler is actively concealed as exculpatory evidence by detectives from the defence and the jury in criminal trials. There is a very real risk of miscarriages of justice and innocent people being wrongly convicted, due to the manipulation and even creation of bogus ‘evidence’, especially when prosecutors often rely on similar fact evidence to convince juries of a defendant’s guilt. How many wrongful convictions may have occurred as a direct result of this kind of behaviour, both in the local community and online?
All defence teams ought to be alert to possible contamination of evidence and active collusion between former pupils, church congregants or club members as well as the concoction of completely false abuse claims by unscrupulous, malicious, mendacious adults, who are seeking substantial compensation payouts or local hero status for creating/grooming/initiating allegations sexual abuse that may never have taken place outside of their own fetid, disturbed imaginations. Just like the individual who spent his time making false allegations against me until recently, and who may still be doing so privately without my knowledge.
These allegations, once made, however false they may be, continue to impact on potentially innocent individuals and families, and influence even the highest in the land...
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