According to the Home Office this week, Sarah’s Law – by which any parent can find out if any adult in contact with their child has a record of violent or sexual crimes – has ‘already protected more than 60 children from abuse during its pilot’. This fact was widely reported, and was the headline finding. As the Sun said: ‘More than sixty sickening offences were halted by Sarah’s Law during its trial.’
It seems to me that the number of sickening offences prevented by an intervention is a difficult thing to calculate: nobody explained where the number came from, so for my own interest I called the Home Office.
‘It’s not that difficult to work out is it?’ This is the Home Office telling me I’m stupid. ‘It’s the number of disclosures issued, how many were of sex offenders, and how many children would those offenders have had contact with.’ This means telling a parent that someone in contact with their child had a history of abuse equated to preventing an act of abuse? Yes, they said: ‘Protecting that child means ensuring that offender did not have a way of having contact with that child. Therefore that child is being protected.’ This assumes that any such contact is itself abusive, or would definitely result in abuse. That might be correct: I slightly doubt it, but I don’t know for sure.
Then I asked where the number sixty came from. I was sent to an excellent report assessing the programme, written by a team of academics. Neither the number 60 nor the word sixty appears in that document.
So I contacted the lead author, Prof Hazel Kemshall, who said: ‘You are correct that reference to sixty children is not made in the report. As I understand it the Home Office have drawn on police data sources to quote this figure, and therefore I cannot assist you further. As you will see from the report, we were careful to state the limits of the methodology.’
I contacted the Home Office again. ‘The figure is over sixty and it comes from the number of disclosures made where there was a conviction of a sexual offence with a minor or violence against a minor. In total twenty-one disclosures were made specifically about registered sex offenders (RSO), a further eleven disclosures were made, for example relating to convictions for violent offending. These people had access to over sixty children.’
I’m not sure this is self-evident. The academics who wrote the report couldn’t work out where the number sixty came from, and at least two pieces have appeared trying to unpick it, each coming up with different answers from me and the Home Office. The excellently named Conrad Quilty-Harper in the Telegraph and a promising new website called FullFact, both – very reasonably – tried adding various categories of numbers from the academic report, including a figure on social-worker activity which seemed to make up the numbers.
I’m not saying the figure sixty is wrong. While what it represents was probably overstated – by the Home Office and the press reports – the number itself isn’t absurd. But it does seem odd that just finding out where it came from involved so much mucking about, and it seems even odder to ignore the robust figures in a long academic report that you’ve commissioned (the scheme wasn’t cheap compared to, say, social-worker salaries), and instead build your press activity around one opaque figure constructed, ever so slightly, somewhere, it seems, on the back of an envelope.