Recently I was watching Channel 4's coverage of a grooming gang, operating in Cumbria and it struck me that all these cases merited the use of SROs. The pattern of behaviour in Cumbria, Telford, Rochdale and Rotherham is always the same. The police knew what was going on, they sent their evidence to the CPS and the CPS refused to bring charges, because the victims were seen as 'unreliable'.
But for an SRO, you only need to convince the court on the balance of probabilities. You don't need the criminal standard of proof. You also don't need to convince a jury and that matters, because the reason the CPS dont want to go to court, is that they know the defence will portray the girls as liars and the jury will probably believe it.
At the same time, the courts love to hand out SHPOs at every opportunity, even to the lowest risk individuals who have committed no-contact offences on the internet. The risk level of the men suspected of grooming should be far higher and arguably these are exactly what SROs, SHPOs and MAPPA were created for. Then the PPU could put their visiting and monitoring skills to good use for a change and uncover some real evidence of offending, to bring these gangs to justice.
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