The case against Sarah's Law

A few miles from his new home, at Littlehampton, West Sussex, was the cornfield where he was to find Sarah Payne in July 2000, just over two-and-a-half years after his release. Sarah, who was eight years old, had been playing with her brothers and sister but decided to walk back to her grandparents' house alone.

Sixteen days later, her naked body was found in a shallow roadside grave. In December 2001, 18 months on, Whiting was jailed for life for her murder, with a judge's recommendation that he should never be released.

Whiting's conviction, and the revelation that he had already been imprisoned for sexually assaulting children, gave birth to a campaign to give parents the right to know about released paedophiles living in their midst. Sarah's parents, Sara and Michael, were at the forefront of this campaign, which quickly became known as Sarah's Law.

But there was an ugly side to the attempt to expose sex offenders in the community, orchestrated by the News of the World. Baying crowds camped outside the homes of paedophiles "named and shamed" by the newspaper, chanting, jeering and throwing stones in an attempt to drive them out of their estates.

And the mobs were not discriminatory. Innocent people also found themselves under siege, mistakenly accused of being sex offenders. In South Wales, a doctor's family were forced to flee their home by a crowd unable to distinguish between a paedophile and a paediatrician.

BUT the campaign has so far failed to produce the desired results, rejected by ministers on the grounds it could force sex offenders underground, away from the eyes of the police and probation officers. Indeed, in at least one case, a notorious paedophile responsible for offences against young boys vanished shortly before a riot outside his flat. Police, who had hitherto been able to monitor his movements, were appalled.

Instead, the Government sought to explore alternatives to Sarah's Law. One of these alternatives, piloted in County Durham, was to have members of the public on the management boards of the bodies which oversee sex offenders in the community.

The Multiple Agency Public Protection Arrangements (Mappa) bring together police, and probation and prison services, with responsibility for violent offenders and others assessed as a risk to the community, as well as sex criminals.

"The idea was to see if there was a positive impact on the work of public protection by bringing in ordinary people from the community," says Sue Hine, County Durham's assistant chief probation officer. "So often you can get caught up in the agency way of doing things, but this provides an additional perspective, where somebody can come in with new eyes."

Mappa works with offenders to look at ways of stopping them reoffending, from helping them avoid potentially dangerous situations, to imposing curfews or exclusion zones and stopping them taking up certain types of employment.

All offenders are ranked in three categories: level one, where the chance of reoffending is considered low; level two, where they are considered to pose a high risk or harm, and level three, where the risk is considered to be critical. Mappa also decides whether to reveal that an individual is a sex offender, either to a member of the community or to an organisation.

Mappa's first lay member is university administrator Christine Cumming, a 51-year-old mother-of-three and grandmother. Volunteer work with the probation service and a stint as a lay advisor at police stations had given her an interest in the criminal justice system, so when the post of lay member was first advertised two years ago, she applied.

"It was an opportunity for an ordinary member of the public to be in there with the decision makers. I came into it to see why and how those decisions are made, and what happened," she says.

As a Mappa board member, Mrs Cumming takes part in the strategic decision-making, as well as receiving statistics and examples of good and bad practice where they occur, but does not get involved in individual cases.

'IHAVE seen at first hand how the different agencies share information, and how that is effective. It is not just dealing with things that have happened - it can be very effective in preventing people reoffending, and there is a lot of that preventative work going on.

"I see my role as bringing in a view from the community, asking questions and challenging why things are done, and I've been reassured and impressed by the openness. What I see is a genuine effort for everyone to work together to improve all the time."

The perceived success of the pilot scheme means it is now being extended to other areas, and the County Durham Mappa is also looking to recruit an additional lay member to work alongside Mrs Cumming.

For Ms Hine, one of the benefits of a member of the public's presence is to encourage them to examine how they share information with the community, but for Mrs Cumming the experience has brought her down firmly against Sarah's Law. She says over the last 18 months, she has gone from being fairly open-minded to believing it could be counter-productive.

"I can't see what it would achieve. I have seen at first hand how an offender is being managed, and it has been greatly reassuring," she says.

"I can't see what telling a whole street would achieve and how it would be helpful, and it might in fact harm the community. If the offender panics, it is not good for anybody. They might go where the agencies don't know where they are, and that would prevent anyone working with them.

"Having seen that a person is being monitored and is under constant review and has been risk assessed, I have more confidence that it is safer without everyone knowing the details of what is happening."