The most harrowing job in the world



After a teenage girl is lured to her death by an internet predator, this is a unique insight into the police who dedicate their lives to bringing child abusers to justice. Their stories are deeply disturbing, but should be heard.



Detective Inspector Tony Smith looks as if he is trying not to cry.



We are sitting in the boardroom of the Child Protection Unit for West London, housed in a drab, faceless building on Earls Court Road.



The room is devoid of colour apart from the dozen or so synthetic blue chairs and the pile of lurid photographs that lies on the big table between us. The photographs are of Amber.

The first shows that she is a beautiful, dark-skinned child, not quite four years old.

Pain: Many horrific child abuse cases go unheard (picture posed by model)

Her closed eyes are long-lashed under a high forehead. Were it not for the plastic tube up her nose, held in place with a strip of sticking plaster, she would look serene and cherubic.



The second photograph is of the back of Amber's head. There are two big, bloody, scabby and suppurating patches where the rest of her black, curly hair once was.

Tony explains that Amber's father swung her around the room by her pigtails.



Then he ripped her pigtails out with such force that he scalped her. I have never known what a 'scalping' looks like until now.



Tony says Amber's hair will never grow back. There are about a dozen more photographs of Amber. Two are of her

hands, reduced to pink, skinless messes by severe scalding or burning.



One photograph shows the ugly deep cut on her knee that someone has tried to hide with a big plaster. Others detail the swelling and bruising all over her body from constant kicking by an adult.

Most of Amber's injuries were inflicted by her father, though it is not clear who was responsible for burning her hands. Tony thinks her mother may have been involved.

The photographs were taken during a police examination, which was carried out under general anaesthetic because Amber was in so much pain.

'Without a shadow of a doubt they'd have killed her if we hadn't got her out. Her little body simply couldn't have gone on taking that level of abuse,' says Tony, closing Amber's file.

'Amber's was the worst case I have ever come across. I've never seen anything as bad.

'I'm welling up now,' he suddenly adds, and this time I am in no doubt that he is close to crying.

Computer-savvy paedophiles can be hard to trace

Originally from Lincolnshire, Tony has a kind face framed by feathery, white hair that makes him look older than his 40 years.



He is clearly a sensitive man. Yet here he is, a high-ranking officer, currently acting as Detective Inspector in West London's Child Abuse Investigation Team (CAIT), dealing with case after case of cruelty, neglect, violence and sexual abuse.

Such child protection officers have recently received criticism over the death of 'Baby Peter', which happened despite 60 visits by social workers and other agencies.



Earlier this month came the warning from a Government watchdog, Ofsted, that three children a week are dying in this country because of failings in the child protection system.

Now we have Ashleigh Hall, the teenager killed by a 32-year-old registered sex offender she met on Facebook.



Tricked into believing he was a boy of 16, Ashleigh met the man only to face a terrifying ordeal before her death.



She was bound and gagged before being thrown into the back of a Ford Mondeo. Later her body was dumped in a ditch.



Child protection officers have recently received criticism over the death of 'Baby Peter', which happened despite 60 visits by social workers and other agencies

As a registered attacker of young women, Ashleigh's Facebook predator was required to inform police of any change of address.



But when he moved home, he did not do so. He appeared simply to fall off the radar. Such is the ingenuity and cunning of computer-savvy paedophiles in the modern world that the police find it increasingly difficult to keep track of them.

The police, of course, face enormous challenges, the scale of which made me question what kind of person becomes a child protection officer, coping not just with the business of saving children but with having to confront the men and women who neglect, harm, torture and rape them.

I first came into contact with CAIT in April 2008 when I was investigating the crimes of a paedophile named Roger Took for a series of articles, one of which appeared in the Daily Mail.

A writer and leading member of Britain's art establishment who lived in Chelsea, Took was sentenced in February 2008 to a minimum of four- and-a-half years for 17 crimes relating to child abuse.

They included molesting two of his step-granddaughters, aged nine and 11, and the possession of 260 photographs, including 102 'Level Fives', which means they contain images of children being tortured or penetrated, including by animals.

Many images on Took's laptop showed children in obvious pain, shackled to chains or bars. The computer revealed that Took had taken part in 742 chat logs of a sexual nature relating to children, adding up to over 1,500 pages.

A shocking aspect of his case was the way many of his distinguished colleagues appeared to excuse his perverted behaviour, even bringing pressure on his wife, Pat, to hush up the whole episode as though child abuse did not happen in the upper echelons of society.

Yet, we all know - and none better than the child protection officers - that cruelty and sexual deviance is as likely to occur in a mansion or vicarage as on a council estate.

The first time I saw the Took chat logs was in the Family Room at the Earl's Court CAIT office. Intended to reassure children, it is equipped with cuddly toys and furnished with sofas in cheery hues.



Ashleigh Hall: The teenager killed by a 32-year-old registered sex offender she met on Facebook

Detective Sergeant Kevin Hudson and Detective Constable Steve Dobson made me tea and brought up the five boxes containing Took's files. The officers had worked together to convict Took, which meant reading the chat logs from beginning to end.

'I spent two weeks, ten hours a day trawling through that stuff,' Kevin, a married father of three told me. He added that this aspect of the job was wearing him down and he needed a change.

Another officer who had looked through the Took files went further. He confided: 'It was vile. My personal life was really affected. I mean, kissing wasn't normal at home during that time, let alone anything else. It really did haunt me.'

Reading the Took chat logs, I was aware I was crying only when Kevin and Steve offered me a box of tissues and more tea. They asked if I was alright. I felt I ought to be.



After all, I had spent years in Africa as a film-maker, recording all kinds of abuse to women and children. Yet this British case left me in profound shock.

It was not until this year that I was granted unprecedented full access to child protection officers on the Earl's Court team and was allowed to talk to them about the impact of their work on their own lives.

Steve, who worked with Kevin on the Took case, is a younger man of 29. He joined the police after art college and is a sensitive soul.



His girlfriend is a primary school teacher and they live in a leafy London suburb. He does not discuss details of his work with her and only rarely these days with his friends.

He recalls being on a stag weekend in April 2008, two months after Took was sentenced.

'There was a whole load of us from up North and we were somewhere awful in Spain for a week,' he begins.

The public is often unaware of the horrors inflicted

'My Northern mates rarely talk to me about being a police officer, but one day I was walking on the beach with one of them and he was asking what I did.



'He was giving me all the usual, stock responses like, "Oh, I'd want to kill the bastard!" and "I don't know how you do it."

'I started justifying my job. I was trying to express how devastating the effect of Took's crimes was on those little girls and his family.

‘I got so upset and emotional that I started to cry. I'd never experienced that before. I've been doing this for three years, but now I'm tired.

‘I've had enough. The problem is there isn't anywhere to go after here. These kids genuinely need our help. Anything I do after this will seem trivial in comparison.'

All the child protection officers talk of deriving satisfaction from rescuing the innocents, and the notion of punishment for those who harm children is very important to them.

Tony says the police need closure as much as the victims. Amber's parents were eventually sentenced to 22 years between them for cruelty, neglect and the injuries they inflicted on their daughter.

'If they hadn't been found guilty . . .' His voice trails off as he contemplates the unpalatable thought.

Amber's father was arrested and taken to Paddington Green Police Station.



'The jailer, a sturdy chap who'd seen it all before, was taken in by him at first,' adds Tony.

'Amber's dad was speaking really softly and asking the jailer to be careful with his wife as she was pregnant.

'This made the jailer think he was a good bloke. He was taking him a cup of tea and that kind of thing. When the jailer found out what this man had done, he nearly went berserk.'

I guess that's the normal reaction to this kind of crime. It's incredibly hard not to be angry when you see such a small, defenceless child in such pain.



Not long after, I meet Detective Constable Gabriel Chrystal. He wears a lilac shirt with silver cufflinks and is as polished as a smart shop manager in London's Bond Street.

He ushers me into the CAIT boardroom, talking straight away about the cases he has worked on.

One involved a young, wealthy couple from the Home Counties who booked into a London hotel with their nine-month-old daughter.

A few hours later the baby was in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital suffering from a massive drugs overdose.

The parents resolutely denied they had been taking Class A drugs and feeding them to their baby, claiming the girl had choked on a hair-tie or a crisp.



Because the doctors did not have the correct information to diagnose what was wrong with the baby, she nearly died.

Another case involved a woman who had disciplined her 14-year-old son by beating him with electric cable, biting him and dragging him along the carpet so violently that his legs were raw.

Then there was the play centre worker for Westminster Council who had groomed a girl in his care from the age of eight and had sex with her twice when she was 14.

Gabriel speaks articulately and is clearly motivated by catching and punishing the perpetrators of these crimes. He goes back to the case of the Home Counties couple.

At the hospital, Gabriel was given the task of taking hand swabs from the baby to see if there were signs of drugs.



They came back clear, though her bottle clearly bore telling chemical traces. Gabriel was suspicious of the parents from the beginning.

'When I took those swabs and saw that baby lying there, it really affected me. I got huge satisfaction that the baby survived and her parents went to prison.'

One evening I leave the CAIT office with another child protection officer and we talk about the case of Baby Peter before saying our goodbyes.

'The people who did that to that little boy are pure evil,' he spits with anger.

'His spine had been broken like a French loaf, right in half, like that - snap!' With his hands he makes a sudden sharp movement which I remember vividly even now.

Despite feeling enraged, the officers spend their time, energy and resources removing the children from harm's way and sending the criminals to prison. They do so against the odds.

Worryingly, there is a growing belief among thinking people, who should know better, that the media reporting of paedophilia and child abuse is sensationalist, particularly in the wake of Baby Peter.

Alternatively, many tend to think that child protection officers, social workers and so on are blinkered zealots, prone to wrenching children away from their parents and shoving them into care at the merest hint of inappropriate behaviour.

Of course, there have been innocent adults who have been wrongly accused of 'abuse'.



Yet my faith that we live in a generally safe society for children has been eroded by the weeks I have spent with CAIT.

It is not that I now suspect every other adult of being a paedophile. Nor do I support some of the recent Government measures to 'vet and clear' almost anyone who comes into contact with children.

I have no definitive answers as to how to make society a safer place for our children, but I have come to realise that the public remains uninformed of the full extent of crimes against them.

Some details are deemed by editors too shocking to report on (and there are often court restrictions on what can be publicised to protect the identity of the child victims), which means that many members of the public are simply unaware of the horrors inflicted on the innocent that the police are dealing with.

'He was only looking at photographs,' was one of the phrases I heard several times in Took's defence. When I asked one man what sort of photographs, he told me naively that they probably involved scantily dressed teenagers.

Child abuse is not new, but the internet has given paedophiles access to each other globally as well as to photographs, films and child pornography.

Through the net, a paedophile now has a self-validating community of like-minded people affirming to each other the 'normalcy' of their perverted activities.

It was in just such a community chatroom that Roger Took was able to expound his fantasies that extended way beyond mere sexual abuse to torture and murder.



The police believe him to be very dangerous, and their job as guardians of children is to make sure that such a man is incarcerated.

Yet after all of Kevin and Steve's commitment to, and work on, the investigation, Took could be eligible to leave prison next April. He will have served just four years.

No wonder these child protection officers feel jaded.

© Charlotte Metcalf, 2009.