By Gemma Fraser
Head of content
Paul Stanfield’s story of a policing career spanning more than 30 years could easily find its way into the pages of a gripping crime novel.
From humble beginnings as an 18-year-old cop pounding the rural beat in Cumbria, Stanfield has gone on to undertake senior roles in the National Crime Agency, Serious Organised Crime Agency and Interpol.
Now he is chief executive of global child safety institute Childlight, which uses the power of data to safeguard children from sexual exploitation and abuse globally.
Stanfield believes that to have a chance of tackling child sexual exploitation head-on, you first have to understand the scale of the problem – and that’s where the data gathering comes into it.
“It’s a hidden pandemic,” says Stanfield. “You don’t have children dying in care homes and in the streets which is forcing the government to act.
“People don’t want to turn over that stone. It’s a subject people just don’t want to talk about.
“And we don’t have the data in one place. There is no one place in the world where you can go and say, ‘tell me, what is the prevalence of child exploitation and abuse globally?’”
And that’s where Childlight comes in.
Based at the University of Edinburgh, the collection of data is led by Professor Debi Fry, a world-leading expert who has produced the first global estimates of the scale of online child sexual exploitation and abuse.
And its findings are terrifying – so terrifying in fact that Stanfield says it can no longer be swept under the carpet.
“It’s a hidden pandemic. You don’t have children dying in care homes and in the streets which is forcing the government to act”
The data collected by Childlight reveals that, globally, 10 children every second are affected by abuse, more than 300 million children have been affected by abusive behaviours, and 3.5 per cent of children have experienced sexual extortion.
“The 300 million is probably conservative, but that covers a wide range of abuse and exploitation,” explains Stanfield.
“How do we transition this to a global public health emergency that needs the global response?
“We’re making a lot of traction: we’ve given evidence to [the US] Congress, we gave evidence to the UK Government, we’ve done a lot of work and we’re really making traction.
“However, we say children can’t wait and are under immediate threat to danger now, so we created the programme where we agreed a memorandum of understanding, with Interpol and others.
“We pulled all others working in the sector together who can help with data, technology, capacity building, training, mentoring, got them all together as a global taskforce, and we’re using our data to help them prioritise where the risk is.
“And what we’re doing – and you may be amazed that this has never been done before – but we’re setting minimum standards across policing, across 197 countries.
“When the data holder wants to send information to a country, they know that this person can receive it, they’ve been trained, they’ve got the capacity to do it, and they’re also thinking about the safeguarding of the children, not just the enforcement side of it.
“People don’t want to turn over that stone. It’s a subject people just don’t want to talk about”
“We started minimum standards accreditation and standard operating procedures to professionalise the way they do it.
“All that information then is fed back into the research, which then strengthens and enriches our business case to go to governments to say, ‘this is what you need to do’.”
Stanfield’s drive comes from the horrors he witnessed first-hand, particularly when working abroad.
After spending the first eight years of his career working in Cumbria, he took on a secondment with the National Crime Squad, as it was known then, which “opened up a new avenue” working on serious and organised crime.
From there he quickly worked his way up the ranks before landing a job at the newly-established Serious Organised Crime Agency in 2006, which took him to Holland.
“It provided me with an opportunity to work overseas for the very first time, which really interested me because most of the threats facing the UK in relation to serious and organised crime come from overseas,” he says.
“I really liked working overseas, so I was then asked to go and set up a post in Russia, so I spent seven months learning Russian, which was extremely hard.
“I went there, only on one occasion. People kept getting poisoned in the UK, which damaged the relationship, of course.
“But in the background, we’d been doing lots of work with Russia on drugs moving from Afghanistan, we were supporting them and helping them.
“There was a real opportunity to do something with Russia if you kept the politics out, but the politics just got in the way.”
Stanfield never did get to try out his Russian language skills, but the cancellation of his posting there led to him being sent to Nairobi in Kenya the following year where he was responsible for the serious and organised crime portfolio for Africa, representing the UK Government.
The posting to the newly-created National Crime Agency saw him focus on eight priority crime areas, with one of them being online child exploitation.
“I said to the team, ‘what’s your strategy on these eight priorities for the UK Government? And in particular child exploitation online work’?
“And people said, ‘look, we’re so busy dealing with drugs and everything else, we don’t have time’.
“I’d sometimes call them narco-warriors because people preferred to go after the drug traffickers, and it sounds interesting to get a tonne of cocaine or heroin, using military assets to do it, so people prefer to do it.
“They didn’t really want to turn over the stone and say, ‘what about all these children who are being abused’?”
Stanfield quickly discovered cases of men who had been convicted in the UK for child sex offences and had fled to Africa after serving their sentence, where they could repeat their crimes under the radar.
But apprehending them was difficult amid poor policing practices and corruption.
“This is what got me really motivated about this issue, because I was beginning to see all these cases… and this was just the British nationals.
“I was getting cases where, because we said we were interested, people were referring to us.
“Consulate departments were coming to us and going, ‘we’ve had this suspicion of activity’.
“But when we went to the police, the police didn’t have any specialist units across Africa. There were no specialist units to deal with this type of offending.”
He tells the heartbreaking story of a group of street children abused by a charity boss from the UK in a town called Gilgil in Kenya.
Simon Harris – who had previously been jailed in the UK for possession of indecent images of children – carried out sex attacks on boys in the area between 1996 and 2013.
“Gilgil was a garrison site for the military,” Stanfield explains. “And when there was pre-election violence in Kenya, a lot of families ran to there thinking they’d be safe.
“And the adults, all of them were slaughtered, and the children were then left to become street children.
“When I went there in 2013 it was almost like they were treated as vermin, they were just running round the streets.
“It was heartbreaking to see.
“Channel 4 were doing this documentary, and they came across a little lad, and he had a tear in his eye. There was a guy on a bike who was trying to look after the street kids, and he said, ‘look, he’s terrified of the Muzungu’ – Muzungu was the word for white man – who comes round.
“And it took me back to when your parents would say when you’re a child, ‘go to bed or the Bogey Man will come after you’.
“Well, his Bogey Man was this white British well-to-do man who had a white Land Rover.
“And when all the lights went out, because there was no electricity, he would drive round the small town and he would pick a different child each night.
“He was their Bogey Man. And this young lad, only six or seven, was in tears saying that’s what he was terrified of.”
“I’d call them narco-warriors because people preferred to go after the drug traffickers”
Harris was convicted of eight counts of indecent and sexual assault at Birmingham Crown Court in December 2014.
The case was one of the first of its kind using legislation allowing British citizens to be tried for sex offences committed abroad if it is also an offence in that country.
And Stanfield, based in Kenya at the time, was a driving force in ensuring this legislation was enacted so that it was properly investigated by UK police officers.
But it was a battle.
“All the things that I know as a police officer in the UK that you put in place as good practice don’t exist in many other countries across the world.
“People were saying it’s expensive, it’s costly, it’s challenging, it’s all these things.
“A minister was visiting at the time, I said ‘do you believe that we have a duty of care to children here where British nationals have offended against them?’
“He said, ‘we don’t have a legal duty of care but I think we must have a moral duty of care.’
“I argued and said we have a legal duty of care because that individual is a threat to children whether they’re in the UK or anywhere else in the world.
“He has come here because he thinks that he can offend without being caught.
“If we had the opportunity to gather evidence here and prosecute him and prevent him offending children whether it be in Kenya or the UK, but we decided not to act, and he came back to the UK and he raped a child, killed a child, how could you explain to the family that actually we had an opportunity to do something and decided not to?
“And also, are Kenyan children not as important as British children?
“Obviously I didn’t make myself very popular. I put on paper to say ‘there won’t be a thorough investigation, the person will continue to be a danger to children, we have legislation that was enacted in 2003 and 10 years later we haven’t even used it’.
“So, they agreed, they sent out a team. It was 18 months of investigation, it cost £1.5 million.
“It completely killed the budget of West Mercia Police who did the investigation who said, ‘we can never do this again’… and that was just one individual.
“Bear in mind the scale of it is massive.
“We had to have street children giving evidence from the centre of Gilgil into Birmingham Crown Court, so you can imagine trying to pull them together.
“We then had allegations of incentives because we were giving them food to make sure they were okay and looked after.
“We set up a task force – the police were last to come, but we had security, we had NGOs providing psychological support, we had a made-up court room in the middle of this village.
“But we made it work, and this guy got 17 years in prison.”
After establishing a global database, working with Interpol, governments, embassies and police forces across the world to implement a universal standard, a decade on from that operation, evidence and intelligence is being shared more readily.
This collaboration resulted in the recent life imprisonment of football coach Patrick Mbauni Muriithi who was abusing young boys in Kenya.
Muriithi had singled out two vulnerable boys to target, filming and photographing the abuse on his phone, storing the images which were reported to Kenya’s anti-human trafficking and child protection unit.
Childlight’s technical advisory programme helped identify Muriithi’s abuse.
“I go back to my policing thinking and say before you can tackle any crime effectively, you first need to understand it,” says Stanfield.
“And to understand it, you need access to good data. Not just any data, but relevant data.
“If we treat it as a public health emergency, we believe we can prevent it, we can treat it.”