Hundreds of Brits arrested abroad for child sex offences could be just the 'tip of the iceberg'

Hundreds of Britons were arrested for child sex offences overseas in the last five years, new figures have shown, amid concerns the numbers are just the ‘tip of the iceberg’.

There were 361 requests from UK nationals for consular assistance after being arrested for child sex offences from 2013 to 2017, according to Foreign Office data.

But Labour’s Sarah Champion said the number of arrests could be far higher.

She told the Press Association that in some parts of the world people would be able to buy their way out of trouble without contacting the consulate if they were caught abusing a child.

‘If you are in a backwater in Indonesia and you get caught raping a child, I would imagine that if you’ve got dollars on you, you could probably get out of it,’ she said.

According to figures, the Foreign Office responded to 124 requests from UK nationals arrested for child sex offences in the US, 40 in Australia and 39 in Spain over the five-year period.

In Indonesia four cases were recorded, while there were five in the Philippines and three in India.

Ms Champion, who has long campaigned against child sexual exploitation, said she thought the variation was due to tougher legislative processes in some countries.

She said she believed people were ‘deliberately’ travelling in order to abuse children.

‘I have no doubt that the sort of perpetrators will know where they are most likely to go and exploit a child and will be deliberately going there.’

Retired English teacher Mark Frost, 70, is one of the few to have been charged with overseas child sexual abuse offences.

The prolific paedophile pleaded guilty to 23 charges of child sex abuse at the Old Bailey in February 2017.

Frost admitted to abusing nine children in the UK and Thailand between 2009 and 2012.

He had skipped bail to avoid prosecution in Thailand but was then extradited from Spain last year after his activities were uncovered by Dutch police.

Ms Champion said it ‘turns my stomach’ that the Government ‘knows that people are intentionally going abroad to abuse children but that we are not doing more, that I’m aware, to prevent it’.

‘I am convinced that this is a tiny, tiny, tip of the iceberg – the figures that we’re seeing – so the actual scale of it is going to be pretty huge I would have thought.’

The figures were published in response to a parliamentary question from Ms Champion, who asked the Foreign Secretary ‘what information his Department holds on the number of UK nationals who have been arrested for child sex offences overseas in the last five years; and in what countries such nationals have been arrested over that period’.

Foreign Office minister Harriett Baldwin replied: ‘From 2013 to 2017 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) responded to 361 requests for consular assistance from UK nationals who had been arrested for child sex offences.

‘The FCO are not routinely notified of the arrest of all UK nationals overseas.’

A breakdown of the figures showed there were 58 cases in 2013, 63 in 2014, 82 in 2015, 80 in 2016 and 78 in 2017.

In 2008, a report from Ecpat (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and the Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) accused the Government of ignoring many similar offenders to Frost who were abusing children in countries that are often unable to police their activities.

It called for tougher laws surrounding paedophiles who wish to travel abroad and a crackdown to avoid ‘the stringent sex offender management mechanisms in the UK’.

And although Britain has laws to prosecute for offences committed abroad, these have only been used in a handful of cases.

Richard Huckle, described as one of the UK’s worst paedophiles, was convicted in 2016 of 71 counts of serious sexual assaults against children while posing as a teacher in Malaysia.

Huckle was prosecuted under Section 72 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which allows British nationals to be tried and convicted in the UK for child sex crimes committed while overseas in an effort to prevent child sex tourism.

A rarely used section of the act, it’s thought Huckle is only the seventh person to be convicted under the measure.

Barry McCloud, who travelled to India to film himself raping a 10-year-old girl, and David Graham, who spent six years on the run in France after sexually assaulting a 14-year-old boy in Cambodia, are two others to have been convicted under the same law.

Bharti Patel, chief executive of children’s rights organisation ECPAT UK, said the figures were likely to be a ‘fraction’ of the total arrests made.

She said: ‘These statistics represent only a minority of abuses against children across the globe, due to a lack of sufficient data monitoring systems and reporting mechanisms.

‘This leaves abuses unreported and unheard and children left unprotected.’

Ms Patel called on the Government to strengthen its ‘data monitoring systems, reporting mechanisms and joint investigative capacities in regions of high incidence of child sexual exploitation’.

‘Our Government must take responsibility for these crimes committed by British nationals and prevent these crimes taking place against vulnerable children abroad.’