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More child abusers could be put behind bars thanks to a revolutionary new programme run by a Lancaster professor.

For the past 14 years, forensic anthropologist, Professor Dame Sue Black, has used her research on hand identification to identify suspected paedophiles and rapists.

The professor's research suggests that hands are more unique than DNA, helping prosecutors to match the hands seen in sexual abuse images with offenders. This has led to 30 life sentences for child abusers including, Britain's worst paedophile, Richard Huckle.

Now Professor Dame Black is leading H-Unique, a hand identification research programme, which will help with the sentencing of thousands more sexual offenders.

The Lancaster professor told LancsLive: "It think this extremely important, this is a crime that is not going away.

"Child abuse is so immense in terms of its volume, the police can't arrest their way out of the problem, they need technology to assist them.

"It's also about helping the courts, and helping the jury to reach a decision that they are comfortable with based on strong scientific evidence."

The professors journey began back in 2006 when she was contacted by a police officer concerning a child sexual abuse case.

Professor Dame Black said: "It was a case where a girl had accused her dad of going into her bedroom at night and sexually interfering with her.

"Her mother didn't believe her. So, clever girl that she was, she kept her laptop camera running.

"The next night it captured a hand and a forearm doing exactly what she had accused her father of."

Professor Dame Black was sure she could match the image with the father's hand by comparing the vein patterns, proving that he had abused his daughter.

But the jury found the offender not guilty and he was released.

"You blame yourself in these situations," said Professor Dame Black.

"I asked the clerk: 'what did we do wrong?' she said we didn't do anything wrong, the jury just didn't believe the girl because she didn't break down in court, she didn't cry.

"That's no way in which justice should be decided, that's why we started doing the research."

Over the next 14 years Professor Dame Black began researching the anatomy of human hands, bringing her evidence to court and helping to convict dozens of peadophiles.

In more than 80% of cases where the professor's evidence has been used, the defendants change their plea from not guilty to guilty.

The more research she conducted, the more effective conclusions she was able to draw.

"Even twins don't have the same backs of their hands," said Professor Dame Black.

"It's almost a stronger identifier than DNA, sometimes people can find it hard to differentiate between genetic material but your hands have more than a genetic basis.

"The pattern of your veins are set by you when you're a fetus, its an individual anatomical feature.

"Then, when you're out in the big wide world, you abuse your hands and you see more differences, burns, scars, freckles, moles, all the ravages that age brings with it."

In 2009 the professors evidence helped identify Dean Lewis Hardy after matching freckles on his hands to indecent pictures he took of young girls.

He pleaded guilty to two charges of indecent assault on a girl under 14 years, four charges of taking indecent images of children and one charge of possessing indecent images of children and was sentenced to six years in prison.

It was the first time in Britain that a plea was changed due to hand identification evidence.

Professor Dame Black would go on to work on high profile sexual offences cases including the conviction of Britain's worst paedophile, Richard Huckle, and Reynhard Sinaga, who was dubbed Britain's worst rapist.

Now, she is part of a programme which will definitively say whether the backs of our hands are totally unique.

She said: "It will provide 100% certainty.

"I will be able to give a statistical probability to a jury as to whether two hands match.

"At the moment, when I go to court, all I can say is this is definitely them and if I can't say that, then the question becomes: 'What is the probability it is them?' And I can't answer that.

"With this I can give some statistics, the likelihood that they match.

"It saves the court tremendous amounts of time and money in the court but it also means that these victims don't have to stand up and give evidence against their abusers."

If the programme works, the algorithms created will also allow police to match child sexual abuse images with the hands of convicted paedophiles, catching the criminals who make and distribute the original, or first generation, images.

Training the computers requires a large number of photographs of hands and Professor Dame Black, as well as her team, are seeking help from the public.

They are calling for anyone over the age of 18 from all ethnicities, nationalities and backgrounds to contribute anonymous photographs of their hands.

They need 5,000 in order to provide enough data to prove beyond a reasonable doubt whether our hands are unique.

The research team is today (February 27) launching a new web-based app to make it easy for people to contribute their images to the project.

People just need to use the web browser on their smart phones to visit the H-Unique site.

Those images are then sent anonymously to the research team and used as part of a research database for developing the hand comparison algorithms. The images are not shared with any external agencies and will be destroyed at the end of the research project.