Predators in Guernsey was set up on Facebook in November last year to create a list of convicted sex offenders who are in prison locally or who have been released from prison.
Activity on the page has ramped up significantly in recent days, with more than 20 cases, with photographs of the perpetrators, posted on Saturday alone. Some of the cases were from more than 12 years ago. Followers of the page have also risen sharply, up to more than 2,300 as of yesterday.
‘You hear when people get sentenced and then that’s the end of it. The victims are left to suffer and yet the offenders are protected when they come out of prison,’ said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous.
‘If you look anywhere else in the world, they’ve all got public sex offender registers, but we don’t have one. We should have one because the sex offenders are put in protected living, which is fine, but they’re still free to walk the streets.’
The woman said that she was monitoring the pages of UK predator catchers on Facebook, but had struggled to find anything similar in Guernsey. She said she thought it was important to put faces to names.
‘There’s people messaging my private account with their own experiences, and asking me to post certain people,’ she said. She added that she took information relating to the cases profiled primarily from court records.
She said that she was concerned about the future for her young daughters.
‘I just want to know who these people are. I don’t want my girls growing up in a world where they have to worry about it,’ she said.
‘There’s been a few people where I’ve tried to look up their names and can barely find anything out about them, which is really worrying.’
A petition has also been set up to create a public sex offenders register. Support there has been more sluggish but it has now more than 300 signatures.
Home Affairs Committee president Marc Leadbeater said that the committee had not considered the idea of a public sex offenders register in detail.
‘When the States Assembly agreed in 2013 to legislation introducing registration requirements for offenders, commonly referred to as a sex offenders register, it did so on the basis that the information would not be publicly available but would be shared with all agencies that needed to know,’ he said.
‘Public sex offenders registers are not commonplace in other jurisdictions and the committee is advised that the current legal arrangements give criminal justice partners, such as police and probation, the tools needed to effectively manage offenders to safeguard the community.’
The woman behind the account and petition said that the last similar local page was taken down within a couple of weeks.
‘If there was a public sex offenders register then I would delete the page, but until then it’s staying up,’ she said.
‘People who get sentenced for drugs offences get longer in prison than sex offenders. People choose to do drugs, but people do not choose to be sexually abused.’