The Panic Button of U.K.'s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit (CEOP)

LONDON—The social networking site Facebook has been accused of failing to protect young British users from the threat posed by pedophiles.

The U.S.-owned site, which has 23 million users in the U.K., has so far refused to display a “panic button” through which young people can report abuse directly to officials.

In so doing, the site has become a safe haven for predatory pedophiles, senior police officials and politicians said on Tuesday.

The criticism comes after the jailing on Monday of Peter Chapman for the rape and murder of 17-year-old Ashleigh Hall. Chapman, a 33-year-old convicted double rapist, had groomed Ashleigh through Facebook by posing as a teenage boy. The pair swapped mobile phone numbers and agreed to meet.

On the night she died last October, Ashleigh was picked up by the man she thought was Pete’s father. She was raped and suffocated, and her body was dumped in a field near Sedgefield in County Durham last October.

Chapman was jailed for life on Monday. Speaking outside Teeside Crown Court, Ashleigh’s mother, Andrea Hall, made a tearful plea for other teenagers to be wary of strangers on social networking sites.

“The message is for people just to be careful,” she said. “Make sure you please do tell somebody if you are going to meet a person. That is the message; don’t go on your own.”

Two other social networking sites—Bebo and MSN—both have included on their sites an official “panic button,” which files a report to the U.K.’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit (CEOP). The information is then used to file intelligence reports on suspects and can spark police investigations into pedophiles, rapists, and violent individuals.

Jim Gamble, the former senior police officer in charge of CEOP, said that the organization had received 267 reports last year about suspected abuse on Facebook—43 percent of which involved “grooming.” Grooming is the term for an adult manipulating a child into a trusting relationship, so that the predator can arrange to meet and sexually abuse the minor.

Gamble said that CEOP had only received one or two reports of abuse directly from Facebook itself.

“The vast majority are coming from people who, ironically, are having to go to other sites that have our button and send the report to us. That is just not good enough,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Tuesday.

“Their argument for not putting our button into their environment, in my opinion, doesn’t hold water. When we look at the cases that are coming to us, of the grooming cases, less than 3 percent of the cases are coming from Facebook to us. The rest are from members of the public who are, in a particularly difficult moment in the online environment, having to go elsewhere.”

“Their argument for not putting our [panic] button into their environment, in my opinion, doesn’t hold water.”—Jim Gamble, former head of U.K.’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Unit

Gamble said that the inclusion of the CEOP button on social networking sites acted as a deterrent to abusers. Last year, CEOP intelligence reports led to the arrest of 334 people.

A spokeswoman for Facebook said that the company already had a highly efficient abuse-reporting mechanism, with a dedicated team to investigate all cases.
She added that she had yet to see any more than “anecdotal” evidence that the CEOP panic button plays a crucial role.

“Facebook is a safe environment—one of the safest on the worldwide Web,” she said.
“We have reporting lines all over the site. We use technology to report different mechanisms. We want to see the evidence that this button is better than other reporting mechanisms we have seen.”

However, Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said the absence of the CEOP button on Facebook was a “glaring failure.”

Merseyside Police, who should have been monitoring Chapman, has referred itself to the Independent Police Complaints Commission after it emerged that it had waited nine months before issuing a nation-wide alert for Chapman.

The U.K.’s Home Secretary Alan Johnson said that there were lessons to be learned from the tragedy. He told the BBC Breakfast Show that officials were looking at a way convicted sex offenders could be identified as soon as they log online.

“What our people in the child protection and online protection agency do is actually go online themselves to actually try and lure in these people,” he said. “Whether we could get the technology to flag up when they are online is something we need to look at.”