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The Truth Shall Make You
THE PORK PIE PAEDOPHILE AND THE FAILURE OF POLICING
On July 1, a founding member of the forerunner of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) was jailed for a total of 24 years. Douglas Slade’s crimes – sexual assaults against young boys – dated back 50 years.
Amid the chaotic fall-out of Brexit and the meltdown of politics, Slade’s conviction attracted little attention. But for anyone who cares about how well this country protects children from the attentions of paedophiles – and for those few people still interested in the debate about historic sex offences – the case has much to reveal.
In the 1960s Slade had helped found Paedophile Action Liberation (PAL) which later became PIE. He also ran a telephone ‘helpline’ for fellow paedophiles, advising them that ‘If you want to have sex with children don’t bottle it up – do it.’
It was a motto that Slade lived by himself. The court in Bristol this summer heard evidence that between 1976 and 1978 he committed 13 sexual offences against five different victims. The youngest was 10 years old.
In 1985 Slade was exposed by a tabloid newspaper which dubbed him ‘The Vilest Man In Britain’. He fled to the Philippines and became part of an international expat community which sexually abused young children. He became infamous as the ‘pork pie paedophile’.
In 1995 I produced a documentary film for ITV – Defender of The Children – about these paedophiles and their young victims. It featured the tireless work of Father Shay Cullen, a very brave Catholic priest, to expose these men; but it also showed how easily they were able to escape justice. (Clips from it are shown below; the full film can be viewed on the films page of this website.)
Slade was one of them. I filmed him (openly) during a court appearance for sexually abusing young boys – and then covertly as he explained how he planned to buy his way out of trouble. This section of the film can be viewed here:
Slade was never successfully prosecuted in the Philippines for abusing children. The reason was not just his ability to buy off the victims, but the chronic shortage of resources available to the government in Manila. As my film showed (below) it had routinely taken the cheapest option of deporting foreign paedophiles when they were caught with children. We identified several British abusers who had been kicked out in preceding years.
Each of those men posed a very real danger to children both abroad and in the UK. But whilst the USA and many European countries had enacted laws which allowed them to prosecute their citizens for abuse committed in other countries, Britain refused (then) to countenance such legislation. Worse still, although details of all the British paedophiles thrown out of the Philippines had been passed to the then leading police agency – the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) – it did nothing with the evidence. The clip of our film in which the government minister and head of NCIS try to justify this shameful inaction can be viewed here:
Two years after our film was broadcast, the government gave into pressure from campaigners and enacted legislation which gave English courts the power to try British citizens for sexual offences committed abroad. But since then it has been used in only a handful of cases.
In 2014 Slade was extradited from the Philippines to face the historic charges of sexually abusing British children in the 1970s. His conviction and jailing this month – and the comfort this has brought to his victims here – should be sufficient answer to those who argue that historic child abuse prosecutions are somehow immoral or unjust.
But no effort has been made to charge Douglas Slade with the vastly greater number of offences he committed in the Philippines. Shay Cullen and prosecutors in both Manila and Angeles City have ample evidence of his very serious crimes against children there. Perhaps, as the head of NCIS implied in the clip above, the National Crime Agency (successor to NCIS) simply hasn’t asked its Philippine counterparts for the evidence.
That is a continuing disgrace – and one which exposes our historic and continuing indifference to child sexual abuse. The Goddard Enquiry has been given detailed evidence of the failures of British policing in the Slade case (and of many others like him). It needs to summon and demand explanations from those like former Home Office minister (now Tory Peer, Baron Blencathra) David Maclean, who helped block the much needed legislation , and NCIS managers like former Chief Inspector Bryan Drew who ignored the evidence offered to them.
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