Monday, December 15, 2008 

Scum-watch: Is the paedophile still dead?

The Sun really can't give it a rest with the open apologia for the murder of a "paedophile" (Cunningham, going by what we know about him, is probably more accurately described as an hebephile or ephebophile), today publishing the views of a former girlfriend:

AN ex-girlfriend of murdered paedophile Andrew Cunningham said yesterday: “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Annette Morris, 47, claimed Cunningham, 52, bedded their 15-year-old babysitter — then detailed it in his diary.

She said: “What he wrote was disgusting.

“It made me feel physically sick.”

Annette, who had a daughter with Cunningham, was 17 when they first met.

She said: “Even I wasn’t young enough for him. He had this obsession for 15-year-olds.”

Annette said: “The world is a better place without him.”

Err, so he met her when he was 22 - but the way the paper has phrased it is to make you imagine that this was some sick much older man preying on a innocent young teenager. It would be interesting to know when Cunningham and Morris got together, especially so we could also place when his relationship with his ex-wife broke down. Presumably this 15-year-old babysitter was the one he was convicted of having unlawful sexual intercourse with. Even considering the somewhat unique circumstances, it seems rather over-the-top for Morris to be glad that he's dead and that the world's a better place without him, which does make you wonder whether that is what she really thinks - prompted possibly by financial reimbursement, or simply exaggerated somewhat by Antonella Lazzeri.

In any event, perhaps because the "evil peados deserve to die" group has already got bored and moved on, the comments are in fact this time rather more balanced:

What a blood thirsty bunch of people.We do not have the death penalty in this country, for good reason.If the courts cannot sentence criminals to death, then no member of the public has the right to arbitrarily decide who can happily be murdered.This is so wrong an attitude.No matter who or what he was.
I am the mother of one son who was brutally attacked years ago, aged 15 at the time, and raped by a man of 42 odd who was married with 3 kids of his own.Do I want him dead? No.Incarcerated yes,and he is.

So now we've gone from 'raping a child' to having consensual sex with a 15 year old.
And still the pitchfork mob cheer the lynching on here.
What a dreadful race the Brits have become.

Am I the only one to find the attitude of people towards this brutal and horrendous murder to be barbaric. He served the sentence which was passed, whether people agree with it is neither here nor there, no one has the right to take the law into their own hands and decide to brutally murder someone

Is the the first step to the complete breakdown of law and order ?

Yes funny how the lynch mob are still thirsting even though its now "consensual sex" with a 15 yr old!

In fact, the whole idea that he was killed by a mob is also being played down. The Wandsworth Guardian reports:

Detective Chief Inspector Nick Scola said he was keeping an open mind on suspects and motives, adding that no rowdy groups were seen in the area on the night.

There had been no reports of sex offences in recent years, quashing a rumour the 52-year-old had fondled a local two-year-old.


Elsewhere, predictably the Scum is making the most of the cock-up on the weekend's Strictly Come Dancing:

YOU can’t trust the BBC to organise a dance-off in a ballroom.

Millions had their weekend viewing ruined after yet another phone-vote shambles.

This time calls and texts to decide who made the final of Strictly Come Dancing were ruled invalid after a counting cock-up.

The Beeb have already been caught conning the public on Comic Relief, Children in Need, Blue Peter and Sport Relief.

The twerps in TV Centre should have learned from these mistakes.

Viewers will rightly expect that in future they behave like Strictly contestants.

And don’t put a foot wrong.

Indeed, who could possibly make similar mistakes? Certainly not ITV, where on programmes such as Ant and Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway those who rang in had no chance of winning if they weren't lively enough or in the right area, or on Soapstar Superstar, where the viewing public were asked to vote for which participant should sing certain songs when the production crew were the ones doing the selecting, or the X Factor, with this year's winner featuring on the Sun's front page today, where in 2005 13.9% of votes in the final were received too late to be included. I'm also sure that Sky's 17.9% share in ITV, with the X Factor being by far their most successful show, as well as competing with Strictly, has absolutely no influence whatsoever on the Sun's view of the BBC performance.

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12/15/2008 09:43:00 PM | | | links to this post

Friday, December 12, 2008 

Scum-watch: Another victim of crime they don't pretend to feel the pain of.

Here's a conundrum for you: you set yourselves up as a crusading, justice seeking newspaper, demanding that heads roll when social services fail to protect the lives of beautiful blue-eyed baby boys, sharing the pain and agony of families that lose loved ones and providing space for their personal manifestos of what must change to prevent it happening again, no matter how unrealistic, and you call society "broken", mainly as a result of politically correct loons, entrenched socialism and welfare scroungers. How then do you react when an exclusive comes your way that suggests that a marauding mob might have murdered a man in cold blood?

Simple. You splash it on the front page and use the most base, unsympathetic and sensationalist language you can possibly muster:

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that he was a convicted sex offender, which, of course, makes all the difference. For comparison, the Times headlined their article "Paedophile stabbed to death in 'vigilante attack'", the Mail's story, which has been updated throughout the day, is now headlined "Convicted paedophile 'who struck again' stabbed to death, stripped and mutilated in suspected vigilante attack", while Sky goes with, simply "Paedophile Found Stabbed To Death". At the bottom of Sky's article there's an appeal:

:: Anyone with information is asked to contact the Metropolitan Police Incident Room on 020 8721 4138 or Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.


The Sun's is vaguely similar:

DID you know him? Call our newsdesk on 020 7782 4104, text 63000 or email exclusive@the-sun.co.uk.


Yes, don't call the police, call us first and possibly earn some money at the same time. Did he feel you up as well? Call now!

If all this is inspiring some deja vu, then the exact same thing which happened when the Sun published the details of the murder of Gordon Boon, another convicted sex offender murdered in mysterious circumstances is naturally now taking place underneath the story. Yes, did the evil dirty paedo deserve to die or should he only have had his bollocks chopped off?

no sympathy from me and lets hope the poice dont waste too much time looking for the people that did the world a favour


The best news I have read all morning. I say "1 down with plenty more to go "

Rot in hell Sicko.


This is what should happen to all sex offenders,paedophiles and child abusers. Anyone who ruins innocent childrens lives should suffer & rot in hell too.


I do not think that anyone deserves to die at the hands of a mob but the flip side of the argument is how many lives had he ruined with his actions and how many more could he have ruined ? Chemical castration is the answer , no one dies and the kids are safer...


Four months for raping a little girl? Yes he did deserve to die.

I will never agree with vigilante groups but when are the police and the courts going to do something about serial offenders?


As a father of 3...i think this is exactly the fate this man deserved you cannot molest children and expect karma to be kind to you..its a shame the government/courts dont take sex crimes against children more seriously then the people who killed the fiend would not now be looking at a murder charge. bring back capital punishment for convicted paedophiles simple.


I beleive this is called 'Justice'. Although I do not condone the overall violence of the incident this man surely deserved these actions. If the thugs and knife carriers on our streets are going to aim their anger at anyone it should be Paedophile's, Rapists and the like.


in reference to General26's comment 'did this man deserve to die?', er yes. did the girl under 13 deserve to be horrifically raped? er, no.

eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.


Mob Rule is the way forward. Police cannot rid the world of these people. I hope these vigilantes don't get caught, they did the Police and the world a favour.

And so it continues for 268 comments, the vast majority either giving the thumbs up or condoning the murder in the same contradictory way as some of those above. Only problem is, that as so often seems to be the case, the Sun article appears to be inaccurate. Not to give the Daily Mail any great credit, but they correct a couple of mistakes in the Scum's exclusive:

He had served four months in prison for a sex attack on a local schoolgirl aged 15, in 2000, and was on the Sex Offenders' Register until March this year.

The Guardian further explains that his offence seems to have been "unlawful sexual intercourse", also sometimes known as "statutory rape", where consent is usually given but the victim is under the age of consent. His apparent predilection for girls around the age of consent is backed up by a quote from a friend:

Linda Whelan, 43, a friend of Mr Cunningham, said: 'He was a lovely guy. He did used to like younger girls. Andrew was in his 50s and liked girls who were about 19 but that doesn't make him a paedophile. I can only imagine if he slept with someone under 16 that he didn't know she was underage.

Then there's the bit around a mob "burning his house down":

Mr Cunningham moved to the caravan because vigilantes set fire to a bag of rubbish outside his former house in Wandsworth in 2003. It came after he was arrested over allegations he was openly grooming children. He was released without charge.

No evidence then whatsoever that he had re-offended except hearsay, doubtless based understandably on his past.

As for his employer, who also found his body:

He said: 'He had a stab wound in his neck and there was blood everywhere. The bed was soaked with it and his head was lying in it. He was a lovely man, he couldn't do enough for me. The customers loved him, people used to say, "I don't want anyone else, I want Andy".'

A lovely man, but obviously a nonce who was asking for it.

In fairness to the Sun, both the Mail and Times also have their comment sections open, featuring much the same logic and faux-celebratory circle-jerking. The Mail at least though seems to have bothered to investigate slightly further, and not condemned the man in the same disgusting, judgemental terms as the Sun did:

But his warped lust for children had made him enemies for YEARS.

Despite there being little to no substantial evidence that was the case at all.

For a newspaper that so often claims to be on the side of the victims and uses their pain for its own ends, it shows remarkably little concern for their feelings when someone with a blemished record is murdered in such horrific circumstances. Don't they deserve something approaching respect, rather than having little more than open high-fiving facing them on the front page of the country's biggest selling daily newspaper? Or are they, simply by his crimes, branded as also being beyond sympathy and the normal reaction of civilised society?

Even the paper's usual first port of call when it comes to paedophilia, Sara Payne, is unequivocal:

Sara Payne, the campaigner whose daughter Sarah was murdered by a convicted paedophile in 2000, said the attacker or attackers were "no better" than the man they had killed and that his murder would set back her campaign for the names and addresses of sex offenders to be made available to the public.

The exact same campaign which the Sun supports and which would almost certainly lead to paedophiles being forced further underground, with more vigilante attacks taking place. Perhaps some good might come from the Scum's dog-whistling after all.

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12/12/2008 11:42:00 PM | | | links to this post

Monday, March 12, 2007 

Scum-watch: We need Sarah's law. And the comments prove it.

Is Rebekah Wade reflecting the concerns of society or is she exploiting the population's most base fears? That's the conundrum I always mull over when reading the latest hysterical report on why we need Sarah's law and now. Is the campaign motivated out of sales, genuine belief there's a problem that's being underreported or out of some own demon from Wade's past which she's getting her galley slaves to constantly write about?

This isn't to trivialise child abuse. It is a serious problem, but as one of the more sensible commenters on the report mentions, it's far more likely to occur within a close circle of family and friends than from a random stranger. The next question that has to be asked is whether "exposing" these "monsters" is actually scaring the public or making them more secure. It's not one that I have an answer to. I do however remember the hysteria created by Wade's previous campaign at the News of the Screws, which inspired the kind of mob justice, especially in protests in Portsmouth, that you more associate with fiction than with modern Britain.

Today's report focuses on court rooms across the country and the sex offenders passing through, with the courts only being monitored for three eight-hour days. As you might expect, there's the usual variety of people who've downloaded child pornography, as well as those who are actual abusers. There's also a few anomalies which I don't think have any right to be presented in such a sensationalist manner. This, however, is the Sun. It's the only way it knows.

Here's the introduction, complete with scarily-staged (correction: it seems to have been photoshopped now I look at it) photograph of the stereotypical image of a paedophile: someone most likely with a body odour problem, wearing dark clothes, hat, glasses and unshaven, stalking a playground while a child swings, oblivious to the danger that's right in front of her. The reality, as painted by the actual cases in the courts, is often very different.


PAEDOPHILES and child sex offenders are the scourge of modern life. There have always been perverts preying on children, but the arrival of the internet has opened up new channels of depravity for sick individuals.

As well as those who physically assault youngsters from a position of trust and those who lure kids into danger, many download obscene images of children – ensuring all too real abuse.

Every day our justice system is battling to catch and punish these vermin. Often the sheer number of cases is such that only the most shocking make the Press.

We watched courts around the country for three eight-hour days last week to get a 24-hour snapshot of life in Paedo UK.

Below we outline just some of the cases.


Of the 12 cases the Sun presents, 5 of them involved actual abuse. Of those, only 3 involved assaults/abuse/rape with children which falls strictly under the definition of paedophilia, and one was a case 20 years old. The other two involved teenagers likely to be pubescent. This of course doesn't downgrade the crime, and this might seem pedantic, but labeling anyone who has sex with girls under the age of consent as a paedophile is lazy at best and at worst is ignoring the facts of the case.

For instance, one of the cases highlighted is of a 20-year-old soldier who invited a 14-year-old girl back to his house and had sex with her. The sex was presumably consensual, as it doesn't state otherwise. The sentence handed down was a 12-month jail term suspended for two years, a course for sex offenders for two years, and placement on the sex offenders register. The Sun doesn't go into the case in full, and the judge is quoted as saying that he took advantage of the girl. It's worth wondering why the case has come to court, as similar cases are often not pursued, which might mean there are other factors involved, but such a sentence for what was presumably consensual sexual activity, especially as the judge describes the man as highly immature seems harsh, and the Sun's exposure of the case is more so. He broke the law, but in the apparent circumstances does his exposure serve any purpose? Does the sentence serve any purpose when the judge concludes that the soldier is not a predatory paedophile?

I can't pretend to answer the questions raised. Most of the sentences passed however seem to me about right - neither too harsh or too lenient. The cases from Belfast and Newcastle are the most troubling; in those I think the sentences are definitely on the lenient side, especially as both had previous. This suggests though that the judges are on the whole getting it right.

The Sun's leader is particularly venomous:

IT’S like turning over a stone and watching the creepy-crawlies rush out from underneath.

And there are two especially frightening things about the paedophiles we uncover today.

First, the sheer number of them. These are just the vermin who happened to appear in court during our 24-hour watch.


12 cases over 3 days all across the country doesn't seem particularly excessive in my mind, but I might be being too relaxed or casual about the whole thing. After all, I'm a young adult male. I'm about the least likely person to be the victim of a sex crime. Is that affecting my judgment or not?

Second, how many of them have normal, responsible jobs — bus driver, soldier, foster carer and even a policeman. They cloak their evil with respectability.

These people are our enemy and they are a silent, secret enemy.

The Sun can’t be in every court in the land, every day, to haul these wretches into the limelight.


Are they our enemy or are they damaged individuals themselves? Are they predatory or have they themselves been preyed upon at some time? Instead of calling them the enemy, shouldn't we be recognising that they are just like everyone else going through the court system? Isn't calling them the enemy giving them a war-like status when they are certainly not soldiers and who can't be merely brushed aside using weapons? Isn't demonising them rather than trying to understand their urges and developing strategies from that part of the very problem?

We need a law that forces the authorities to turn a spotlight on the perverts in our midst.

A law that means the name and address of every paedophile is known to local parents whose children might become their victims.

We need Sarah’s Law. And soon.


Sarah's Law may have helped in only 3 of the cases, and that is by no means certain. The other problems involved with a naming law are the vigilante aspect, and the fact that it may further encourage potential predators to go even more underground, or simply go AWOL. While American states name sex offenders on websites, there is by no means the same moral panic there as there is here, thanks partly to the lack of populist mass-sale country-wide tabloids, and evidence suggests that those convicted who subsequently disappear instead of "signing on" the register are far more numerous to those who go missing here.

If we perhaps needed any more evidence of the potential for vigilantism, we can look at the comments on the Sun article. Of course, such a subject is always go to raise passions, and what people say online is often bravado in situations like this, but it's still an indicator for the type of feeling aroused by articles such as these.

I know what sort of punishment I and many others would dish out to these *******. It would last much longer than 12 months and they certainly could not be around a child again. But we live in a pathetic country whose pathetic laws do nothing but protect the guilty.

i would cut all the bits from them .that way they can never hurt another child fof the rest of there life ,even thats to good for them .bring back the death buy hanging or let them loose wiyh 50 mums debby

How can we expect anything to be done when the so called back bone of this country cannot even given these sick and twisted individuals a sentence worth while! These inhumanly animals should never be allowed to walk the streets! I think hanging should be brought back they do not deserve to breathe the same air as us!!!

Crime now, but let the special interest groups have their way, and child molesters will be a protected class of persons. What was considered anti-social in years past is now front and center as "normal" behaviour. The Sun does well to highlight the plight of the victimized. This abhorant perversion shuold always spark a heartfelt moral outrage among civilized people. Let us not forget that certain sub-cultures practice underage sex on a regular basis. They should not be exempted from child protection laws simply because they fled a barbaric country. If they want to live in a civilized country, then they should adjust to civilized laws, not bring their tribal mumbo jumbo with them.

None of the men featured appear to be from an ethnic minority, and it's perhaps worth mentioning here the efforts of the BNP in trying to suggest that Asian men in Keighley were responsible for the grooming of teenage girls, when the truth was much more complicated.

JUDGES get your act together and punish these amoeba's properly, never mind 6months and 2 yrs sentences, get them down for life! They're ruined countless kids lives!!! And a good dose of bromide in their tea!

Not the greatest justification here for a Sarah's law based on Megan's law:

Here in the usa we have a web site that you can go on, You can put in your address and it will fetch up a page with a local map showing all the addresses of pedo's in you area,You then click on each address and it will show you a picture of the scumbucket along with what his of her actual crime was. Now you would think with this that our kids would be safe but no..These things still get to grab our kids just the same and if they don't register their new addresses as they move around(what they are not supposed to do without police permission by the way)the police have no way of tracking them.Maybe we should start thinking about chipping these things(I cant call them people)or maybe putting those ankle braclets on them for the rest of their life,Better still put them in jail for longer periods,I don't three months, six months, or one year is good enough This is our children were taking about here and has anyone stopped to think of the life sentence these poor little things get to serve for 10min of a pedos fun.

The Sun's website, supposedly dedicated to seeking "justice for you", may well have the opposite effect. Its modus operandi, which seems to be to lock up ever more people for even longer, is the exact thing that is helping to drive re-offending rates up. Its demanding of "Sarah's law" could make children even more vulnerable. It distorts Lord Phillips' nuanced speech into suggesting that he wants killers released early. Oh, and in wonderfully good taste, it celebrates a woman who may well have hounded her husband's "killer" (he caused a pile-up through driving on the wrong side of the road) to death. It appears that Sun justice is in fact no justice.

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3/12/2007 06:09:00 PM | | | links to this post

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