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Faith in Practice

That was enough

Hannah Kowszun

From Child Protection to the Paedophile Unit, Rachel Andrews (1) has spent years protecting children from those who seek to harm them. Inspired to help parents understand the risks, she now writes about her experience.

FiP.jpg It isn’t the kind of career you choose at school, working in a Paedophile Unit. If God wasn’t there I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I coped with my work because of his protection.

Very few children would make stories up about abuse, why would they? And if they are making it up, it probably means they have suffered some type of abuse in the past and are drawing on the experience. How else would they know what to say? This is a frightening subject because people don’t want to talk about it. But it is a truth, a nasty truth, that children are abused. The NSPCC figure is 1 in 6 children suffer from abuse – that is all abuse, not just sexual – but those are just the reported cases. It may be as many as 1 in 5 or even 4. Fear-mongering is easy because the subject deserves to be feared. The media plays to these fears, but it doesn’t help. I don’t want to fear monger – my passion is to educate and inform so that we all know how to best protect our children.

What led me to write a book was someone saying: ‘It’s alright for you because you know what to look out for and how to protect your children.’ Another thing that prompted me to write was a nightmare coming true at my church, which made me realise the dangers of ignorance. A church can have a policy, but without the resolve to enforce it the leaders are powerless to offer protection. There is also a perception that dealing with something like this would be a hassle: people end up choosing sides. Often that of the abuser.

My unit estimated that 70-80% of people on the sex-offenders’ register attend church. Most sex offenders are never even reported, so those on the register are only the number reported and convicted. It would be nice to think they were seeking redemption, but that simply is not the case. They are known to be virtually untreatable: another nasty truth.

Sex offenders operate through deception and secrecy. Their actions are not noticeable in the way that, say, a thief’s are. When it comes to child protection, people often rely on feeling alarmed, seeing a creepy bloke or spotting something out of the ordinary. When it comes to sex offenders you can’t do that – you have to put in place things that will prevent their hidden tactics from being effective. This means not making presumptions, moni- toring the computer in the home, being aware and accountable for the people your children spend time with.

Offenders groom their victims. In order to do this an offender would have to have lengthy, trusted time alone with a child. Children have a right to privacy, but not when it comes to phones and comput- ers, where parents don’t know who can access them. Parents are paying for these things, use of them is done in their name.

Parents and carers can be lured into a belief that their child is safe. I’m not trying to cultivate fear, but I do want to encour- age understanding: parents need to know who is spending time with their children.

My dad is a minister and I grew up in a Christian home. I have had my faith tested, but God is faithful. During my time in the unit, God had to come out of the church walls and become real. I had that gritty sense of God walking with me as a friend, relying on his strength.

I do believe that God protected me. I saw things, but I didn’t absorb them. Always before viewing things as part of my job I would pray and, one by one, put on each item of the armour of God. Once I was about to view some stuff and realised I hadn’t done this so I had to excuse myself quickly and go to the ladies to pray!

Some might say I ended up in this line of work because God led the way. I was working in the police force when a lady with learning difficulties was brought in to the station. She had been sexually abused but it was hard for her to explain what had happened. She was passed on to me and I was able to draw the details from her. The next week the Child Protection course was starting and someone had dropped out. The chief officer of the unit had seen my work and offered me the vacancy. I did the course and joined the Child Protection Unit. A vacancy soon came up in the Paedophile Unit, and I applied and joined. I did several years there. That was enough.

I’m suspicious and I’m careful but I’m not neurotic. My children are as vulnerable as others, but I just have to be careful. When they’re older they’ll have to look after themselves and I want them to learn how. Eventually children have to take responsibility and keep safe contact, espe- cially women. That’s a lifelong thing and it comes down to education.

My daughters don’t know the full extent of what my job involved. In the Paedophile unit I often wore t-shirts and casual clothes to be discreet, and my youngest would ask why. One time she asked so forcefully, as if to say ‘Don’t fob me off this time!’ I told her: ‘Mummy looks after children who get hurt at home.’ She sat in thought for a while and then asked, ‘Like if a burglar snatches their toy?’ She had such a lovely innocence, the worst thing she could imagine happening to a child would be having their toy stolen.
My girls know I worked with children that had been badly looked after, but that’s it for now. The rest will come in time.


1 Rachel Andrews, a pseudonym, was talking to Hannah Kowszun. Her book Policing Innocence is out now.

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