A fortnight after the end of the trial, we received a phone call from Ryan at the Sun, who asked if we would be interested in travelling to Downing Street to meet the Conservative MP Claire Perry to speak about our campaign. Claire Perry was a mother-of-three who had been elected to the House of Commons in 2010, after giving up a career in banking to enter politics. Since then, she’d enjoyed a meteoric rise to prominence and was now an adviser to the Prime Minister, David Cameron, with a specific interest in online child protection.
Although the meeting would involve another exhausting trip to London, we immediately agreed to attend. We’d been told that government ministers were due to meet with internet service providers within the next few weeks and we wanted the chance to have our say before then.
As is often the case with MPs, the meeting with Claire Perry was arranged rather hastily for the afternoon of Friday 14 June 2013. The Sun only managed to confirm the details late on the Thursday afternoon, so Coral and I had to hurriedly pack some bags and jump on the 6 p.m. train to Birmingham, where we’d catch our connection to London Euston.
We arrived in London around 10.30 p.m. and took a taxi to our hotel. The traffic was terrible and we were both tired and hungry, but luckily we had a very amiable driver who introduced himself to us as Larry.
‘So, what brings you to London, then?’ he asked us. We’d jumped into the back of the cab and he’d driven off without looking properly at our faces. It was obvious that he assumed we were tourists.
‘We’re going to Downing Street tomorrow,’ I told him. ‘Our daughter was taken away by a paedophile last year and we want to see if there’s anything we can do to stop child porn on the internet.’
I thought Larry might crash into the car in front of him as he spun round to take a good look at us. Thankfully the roads were so congested we were moving at a snail’s pace. Surveying our faces, I saw an expression of awful realisation spread across his face.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, quietly. I sensed genuine pity in his voice. ‘I didn’t recognise you there.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I replied. We were so used to being stopped by strangers that it made a nice change.
‘All the taxi drivers have been talking about this,’ he went on. ‘We think it’s amazing, what you’re doing. We’re right behind you.’
It was 11.30 p.m. when we got to our hotel and I tried to press a handful of notes into Larry’s hand, but he waved them away.
‘Put the fare towards the garden you’ve been building for April,’ he said.
‘What a lovely bloke,’ I said to Coral, as he drove away. It was nice to hear first-hand how much public support we had.
We quickly grabbed some food before heading to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned for a few hours before it was time to get up. Ryan met us shortly before noon and we sat in the hotel lobby discussing what the meeting would involve.
Ryan explained that we wouldn’t be the only family in the meeting. Natalie Sharp, whose twelve-year-old daughter Tia had been murdered two months before April’s disappearance, would also be attending with her boyfriend, David Niles.
Tia was reported missing on 3 August 2012, after apparently vanishing from the home of her grandmother, Christine Bicknell, in New Addington, near Croydon, South London. The previous evening, Christine’s partner Stuart Hazell had been babysitting Tia while Christine worked a night shift at a local care home. Hazell told the police that Tia had gone to buy shoes at a shopping centre five miles away and failed to return.
The police searched for Tia for a week and Hazell, a window cleaner, feigned devastation. He even attended a candlelit vigil wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with her picture and the word ‘missing’ and was supported by relatives as he appeared to break down. But, unbeknown to Tia’s family, Hazell had developed an unhealthy interest in child pornography in the months leading up to her disappearance. He had downloaded countless illegal images, which he kept on a memory card hidden behind a door frame in the kitchen. Most of the children pictured were pre-pubescent girls and Hazell seemed to have a particular interest in girls who, like Tia, wore glasses.
However, on 10 August, police found a body in a bag in Christine’s loft, wrapped in a black sheet. It had already begun to decompose and a post-mortem later confirmed it belonged to Tia. An exact cause of death was never established, but police said she was most likely to have been suffocated.
Hazell was arrested and charged with Tia’s murder the next day. The police later discovered that, while he pretended to be distraught in front of television cameras, Hazell had continued to access illegal incest websites on his phone. He had also taken pictures of Tia’s body, naked and in a sexual pose.
The following May, he went on trial at the Old Bailey in London, just over a week after the case against Mark Bridger began at Mold Crown Court. However, after five days, Hazell changed his plea from not guilty to guilty and was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a minimum term of thirty-eight years. The judge, Mr Justice Nicol, confirmed that Hazell’s semen was found in the room where Tia slept. Tia’s DNA had also been discovered on a sexual device in the bedroom Hazell shared with her grandmother.
Coral and I were both shocked by the parallels between Hazell and Bridger. We were particularly alarmed by how easily Hazell appeared to have accessed illegal images using the browser on his mobile phone. Some of the search terms he used were ‘naked little girlies’, ‘illegal underage incest pics’ and ‘daddy daughter pictures’ – all of which returned results.
Tia had idolised Hazell, even calling him Granddad, and her family had trusted him to look after her. But, fuelled by the filth he was able to access with just a few clicks, he began to descend into depravity. When Tia vanished, no one had any idea that Hazell had been gripped by this dangerous obsession, or that he’d been secretly filming Tia in her underwear whenever she had a sleepover at her grandmother’s. Like Bridger, he was not known to the police for offending against children and outwardly showed no signs of a sexual interest in young girls. The only way anyone could have foretold what these monsters were capable of was by looking at their internet history – but no one ever did.
It was devastating for Coral and me to hear that another family had gone through such similar events but it only increased our determination to do something about it. Would Bridger and Hazell have gone on to do such awful things to April and Tia if they hadn’t been able to get their hands on such sick material? Would the police have investigated them sooner if they’d been alerted to what these men were searching for? Since the trial, we’d begun asking ourselves these questions on an almost hourly basis. We’d never be certain, but we wanted to do everything in our power to make sure other parents didn’t have to go through the nightmare of wondering what might have been.
Ryan had arranged for a taxi to pick us up at the hotel around 12.40 p.m. and we were driven to the back entrance of 10 Downing Street, which was being manned by two armed guards. Natalie and David were waiting for us and we said a polite hello, before being allowed in. I was thankful that the guards used their common sense and didn’t try to search us, as I knew that this would have made Coral anxious and claustrophobic.
I’d often seen the front of 10 Downing Street on television, but I had no idea how grand its interior would be. Everywhere we turned we were greeted by sweeping staircases, crystal chandeliers and marble pillars. It was like entering another world. A year ago, I would have been extremely nervous about being in the home of the Prime Minister. Now our family had been through so much that nothing could faze me.
A photographer then took us to the front entrance, where Coral, Natalie, David and I posed for pictures. Afterwards, we were taken upstairs to a conference room where Claire Perry was waiting.
She rose to greet us and the first thing I noticed was how tall and elegant she was – she must have been at least six feet tall. She was very personable and charismatic, shaking hands with David and me and hugging Natalie and Coral before we sat down to chat.
It soon became obvious that Natalie was a bit more extroverted than us, and she quickly became very animated when she was asked for her opinion on how we could best combat child abuse online.
‘I want to see a change in the law in our innocent angels’ names,’ she told Claire. ‘Those little girls just cannot die in vain. This has happened twice now, to Tia and to April. Not again. Never again.’
She then made the point about how alike the cases were and Coral and I found ourselves nodding in agreement – it was truly frightening.
‘We don’t want there to be a third, fourth and fifth family sitting in here in the same situation because we haven’t moved and done anything,’ I added.
‘Your sacrifices won’t be in vain,’ Claire said, before telling us she would give David Cameron some feedback on our meeting.
Ryan and the photographer then left the four of us alone with Claire, so we could have a private conversation. Natalie became very tearful when she spoke about Tia’s funeral and this seemed to set Coral off. We still hadn’t been able to make preparations for April’s funeral and, until we’d said our final farewell, it seemed like our lives were still on hold.
‘We haven’t even got a body,’ Coral sobbed. ‘Just a few small skull bones.’
I placed my hand over hers, before Claire took her in her arms and gave her a hug. There was a quiet, respectful silence for a few minutes before we continued with our discussion.
‘There needs to be zero tolerance on indecent images,’ I said, once we’d all composed ourselves. ‘We think there should be dedicated policing of the internet to make sure this happens.’
David, who had been fairly silent until now, nodded and said it was unthinkable that another family should go through the pain we’d all experienced.
‘We’re all right behind you,’ Claire said. Although she’d been very sympathetic to us and had said all the right things, I had to force myself to remember that she was still a politician. Words were meaningless – it was action we needed.
‘That’s rare for MPs,’ I replied. ‘Will you be able to keep us up to date with what’s happening?’
Claire agreed and we were taken back downstairs and out through the back of the house. On the way to our taxi, we walked through the garden where David Cameron often made televised speeches. I recognised it instantly, as I’d seen various Prime Ministers address the nation from the same spot over the years. Before April was taken, I might have been excited to see such an iconic place but now it was just yet another painful reminder that we’d never be mixing with such rich and powerful people if we hadn’t lost our daughter.
A few days later, Channel 5 News contacted us to ask if we would give a televised interview on online child protection. The interview would be filmed to coincide with the summit the government had organised with major internet providers on the issue. Now we’d spoken to Claire Perry, Coral and I had privately agreed that we’d like to meet David Cameron, to discuss the issue with him. We would use the interview to appeal to him for a meeting.
One of the presenters, Tessa Chapman, came to the house and asked us a few questions about the campaign. After all the travelling we’d been doing it was nice to do the interview in more comfortable surroundings. Coral and I settled ourselves on the couch and we each fixed a pink bow to our shirts. Tessa was very friendly and sympathetic and made us feel at ease.
‘Do you think that the access Mark Bridger had to these images created the man he was?’ she asked us, once the cameras had started rolling.
‘I do,’ Coral replied. ‘He got all these things up on the computer and, a few hours later, our little one had disappeared.’
‘It certainly fuelled somebody who was in that frame of mind,’ I agreed. ‘Anyone else who is thinking of children in this way, these images will only set them off.’
‘During the summit that is happening today, the government will essentially ask internet providers and search engines to police themselves,’ Tessa said. ‘Do you think they need to be forced to do more?’
‘They need to do a lot more but everybody needs to do something,’ I replied. ‘It’s not just Google and the search engines. If an individual stumbles upon something online, they should report it. Tia Sharp and April’s cases were linked to the internet and they happened within a few months of each other. If these things don’t get sorted out, this is just going to escalate. Mark Bridger downloaded 400 images and nothing was flagged up.’
‘He had all these images and nobody realised,’ Coral said. ‘Not even the police. No one.’
‘They came off several sites,’ I went on. ‘It’s very hard to believe that the big internet companies could let that happen.’
‘It makes me furious,’ Coral said. ‘Words can’t express how mad I am. It’s disgusting what happened and how he got these pictures. The companies that allow them should have a massive fine and the money should be put back into the police so they can carry on flagging people up. The people who do it should be charged and put on the Sex Offenders’ Register.’ She took a deep breath, before continuing. ‘That list should be made public – not their addresses, just their names – so people know who they are and what they’ve done.’
Tessa then asked us a few questions about April. We both found it relatively easy to talk about the campaign, as we’d become so passionate about it, but speaking about what we’d lost and why we were here was when it got tough.
‘April was a fighter in life and this will be her last fight,’ I told Tessa. ‘In death.’ I said the last two words slowly and carefully. It was still so hard to accept April was gone forever. ‘I hope it will be a legacy for her.’
‘April was a fighter from the word go,’ Coral added. ‘And I promised her I would do this for her.’ By now her voice was breaking and she was struggling to contain her emotions. ‘I said I’d help other children so another family doesn’t have to go through this.’
She began to cry, so I took her hand in mine, willing her to go on.
‘It’s not just us,’ she sobbed. ‘It’s their brothers and sisters. It affects them, too. I think the government should put more pressure on these companies because I promised April I would fight. If people see something that isn’t right, they should contact the police so these people can get some help themselves before another child is killed or abused. I’d like to get David Cameron involved as he could be an ambassador for this fight.’
‘So you want to meet David Cameron?’ Tessa asked.
‘Yes, I’d like to meet him and put our points through to him,’ Coral said. ‘Paul and I would like his help. He’s a dad, too. We’d like him to back us and help get the law changed in April’s name.’
At the same time, Tia Sharp’s biological father, Steven Carter, was interviewed in the Channel 5 studio in London by another presenter, Emma Crosby. Although we had never met him in person, we were heartened to hear that he agreed wholeheartedly with our views on online child protection. He, too, believed the government needed to work with the internet companies to find a solution to the problem.
‘We will never get over what happened,’ he said, during his interview. ‘All we can do is prevent this from happening again.’
‘As a bereaved parent, what do you want David Cameron to do?’ Emma asked him.
‘He needs to ban it,’ he replied. ‘There should be no opportunity for these people to set up pages or put these images on the internet. If we’re able to trace IP addresses, why aren’t we tracing these people who are doing this?’
Little did we know how seriously Channel 5 News would take our fight. The following day, a journalist from the programme was covering the G8 Summit in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, where David Cameron was meeting with other world leaders. He was allowed just a few minutes to speak to the Prime Minister and chose to ask him if he’d be willing to meet us. The Prime Minister agreed in principle. A few weeks later, we received a call from the Sun, who had also been pressing for a meeting. One of their reporters had managed to get David Cameron’s office to commit to spending a morning with us on Friday 19 July.
Of course, this presented us with a bit of a dilemma. Both Channel 5 News and the Sun wanted exclusive access to the meeting and our loyalties were divided, as we believed they’d both played an equal part in helping make it happen. We wanted as much coverage of the campaign as possible to raise awareness of what we were trying to achieve, but we knew we needed to keep the various media outlets we’d worked with on our side if we wanted to make as big an impact as we could. There were lots of crossed wires and confusion, which made an already stressful situation more stressful as we didn’t know much about managing the media. Eventually, after a few fraught phone calls, the Sun and Channel 5 News agreed they would both attend. We were glad they were willing to cooperate.
We got to London around 7 p.m. the night before the meeting but it was a blisteringly hot evening and we found it hard to sleep in our hotel room, even with the air conditioning. We got up early and some chaperones from the Sun were waiting for us in the hotel lobby, along with Natalie and David, who would also attend the meeting.
We had a few pictures taken, before being ushered through security and upstairs into the same room where we had met Claire Perry a few weeks previously. The Sun took photographs and Channel 5 News did some filming, before they left us alone with the Prime Minister.
David Cameron spoke very gently to us. He addressed us by name, listened intently to everything we said and made all of the right noises. But, like Claire Perry, he was a true politician, and he never fully committed to anything.
I asked him how likely it was that the government would pass a law which would make internet companies liable for huge fines if they allowed people access to images depicting child abuse.
‘Everyone knows the Tia and April stories,’ I told him. ‘We never want another family sitting here having suffered the same thing.’
‘This is an incredibly difficult thing to get right,’ he said, meeting my gaze. ‘We are looking across the board – nothing is ruled out, including passing laws. There’s not enough being done to find these images and those responsible for putting them there. That should be step one and we are going to do more of that.’
I asked him how they planned to deal with the search engines which were allowing these images to be shared.
‘Targeting firms that let people upload the pictures is crucial,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘But the problem is there are some words that you might put in with an innocent explanation that can lead to horrible images.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Then there are people – including the hideous killers you have come face to face with – who are putting in appalling words to get appalling images.’
‘If a website is reported, its IP address should be blocked,’ I replied, firmly. ‘Why can’t they take this stuff off the internet? Kids are getting killed, raped, abused and messed up for the rest of their lives. What’s their excuse? I think it’s money. They have the technology and they can do this. If we could get a law for Europe, then that would be a good start.’
‘It’s a triangle,’ Natalie added. ‘The people uploading it, the people letting them upload it, and the people looking for it.’
We chatted for around half an hour in total. The Prime Minister promised us he would try and influence the big internet companies using diplomacy. If that didn’t work, he told us, he would consider looking at passing a law.
We’d always known that this meeting wouldn’t provide an instant solution to the problem but when the Prime Minister left – shaking our hands firmly as he exited the room – we were left wondering if he had really taken our concerns on board or whether he was simply paying us lip service. Every day that action was delayed was another day paedophiles were free to trawl the internet for the depraved images like those which led to April and Tia’s deaths. We were desperate to prevent another tragedy but it was like a ticking time bomb.
‘The clock is ticking against him,’ I told James Beal, the Sun reporter who’d accompanied us, once the Prime Minister had gone. ‘Every day it’s delayed there are more people getting fuelled up on this. It would break my heart if someone was in this situation again.’
We then had another brief meeting with Claire Perry. Coral and I told her someone had posted a picture of a child with a huge inflatable penis on one of April’s Facebook sites and that it had taken Jamzin just five minutes to find it. She looked completely taken aback and we could tell she didn’t quite know what to say.
We then got a taxi back to our hotel, where we had a quick debrief with the Sun before heading to catch our train home. As ever, coming home to a house without April in it was heartbreaking. Coral went to visit friends, while I took the dogs for a walk up the hill where I’d tied my ribbons. I couldn’t stop the tears and it was a few hours before I found the strength to go back home again. As I sat crying with my head in my hands, it was hard to believe I’d been sat across from the most powerful man in the country just a few hours earlier. Our lives had become unrecognisable, even to us.
‘Running around is very tiring,’ I wrote that evening. ‘It takes a few days to recover. I’m very emotional and I find myself tearful for a few days but then I tend to be OK(ish). It hurts me to think about what should have been but isn’t because of one cruel man.
‘I love you, April. Dad xxx.’
A few days later, David Cameron made a speech at a conference organised by the children’s charity NSPCC. We didn’t get a chance to hear it in full until a few days later, but we’d got to grips with its main points before Channel 5 News called round to ask for our reaction to it.
In short, the Prime Minister said that major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing would have three months to introduce stricter measures to block child abuse images online. Experts from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre would be given more powers to examine secretive file-sharing networks and there would also be a database of banned images to help police track paedophiles.
‘There are some searches which are so abhorrent, where it’s absolutely obvious the person at the keyboard is looking for revolting child abuse images,’ the Prime Minister had told conference delegates.
‘In these cases, there should be no search results returned at all. Put simply, there needs to be a list of terms, a blacklist, which offer up no direct search returns.
‘So I have a very clear message for Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the rest: you have a duty to act on this, and it is a moral duty. I simply don’t accept the argument that some of these companies have used, to say that these searches should be allowed because of freedom of speech.
‘On Friday I sat with the parents of Tia Sharp and April Jones. They want to feel that everyone involved is doing everything they can to play their full part in helping rid the internet of child abuse images. So I’ve called for a progress report in Downing Street in October with the search engines coming in to update me.’
For me, it was difficult to know how to feel. On the one hand, this seemed like a step in the right direction but, on the other, it felt like so much more could be done. David Cameron had essentially given these companies a stay of execution until October and it was still only July. Was he bowing down to these companies because of how much money they had? Both Coral and I knew how quickly Bridger’s vile obsession had got out of hand. We could only hope that history didn’t repeat itself between now and then.
‘It’s not enough,’ Coral said, emphatically. ‘If we don’t start fining them, this will happen again. He’s being too soft on them.’
On Channel 5 News that evening, Emma Crosby grilled the Prime Minister on his speech, asking him if he was really convinced he’d been tough enough on the internet companies.
‘Will you be able to look Coral and Paul Jones in the eye in eighteen months and say you’ve done everything you can?’ she asked, pointedly.
‘I’ll be able to look them in the eye and say we’ve taken some good steps forward,’ he replied, carefully. ‘I don’t think we will have done everything that some campaigners will want, but I think we will have made lots of really big steps down the road that will help parents, that will help children and that will reduce the amount of child abuse that takes place and is posted online.’
She then asked him how the discussions with the companies involved had been.
‘Of course they’ve been heated, because these are important issues,’ he admitted. ‘I’m not trying to get into a massive great fight with a bunch of businesses. We talked to them about what is possible and we made some really good steps forward.’
Channel 5 News had also asked some of the internet companies for their reaction to what the Prime Minister had said. Perhaps predictably, none of them wanted to give interviews on the subject. We thought their silence was extremely cowardly. What did they have to hide from us?
Coral was very emotional in our own interview and it was hard for me to watch. Once the camera crew had left, she admitted to me that she felt David Cameron had used some of our words and ideas but wasn’t willing to properly take on the might of such big, powerful businesses.
However, we were slowly coming to realise that, in politics, nothing moves quickly. I remembered our meeting with Sara Payne and how long she’d fought for Sarah’s Law. We had a long road ahead of us. In a few short weeks, we’d made some progress but the fight was only just beginning. We’d done as much research as we could and we were trying to keep our heads above water with all of the technical terms and jargon but, no matter how hard it got, we wouldn’t give up.
‘I don’t understand why everything takes so long,’ Coral said, exasperated. ‘If this had happened in an MP’s family I bet they wouldn’t be taking their time over it.’
‘I know,’ I replied. ‘We’ll just have to hope that they do what’s right eventually.’
Before April was taken, we’d have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested we’d one day be sharing a table with some of the country’s most powerful people, speaking about a political campaign. It was never a life we would have chosen for ourselves – we were hundreds of miles from Westminster and the hustle and bustle of parliament in more ways than one. Travelling exhausted us and we weren’t impressed by fancy restaurants and posh hotels. We’d both have chosen a quiet walk along the beach with the children over hobnobbing with politicians any day. But, now, we didn’t feel like we had a choice. This path had been chosen for us.
That evening, I opened April’s bedroom door and felt the tears sting my eyes.
‘This is all for you, April,’ I said softly.