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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq62dp092nzo
Men on secret 1970s pro-paedophile list could still work with children today
In Dark Corners podcast team
BBC Radio 4 and BBC News
Published
8 hours ago
A secret list of more than 300 people who belonged to a network that called publicly for the legalisation of sex with children has been handed to the BBC.
A small number of those named on the list may still have contact with children through paid work or volunteering, the BBC has discovered.
They were all members of a group called the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE).
The Metropolitan Police had the list for about 20 years from the late 1970s, a BBC Radio 4 podcast team has been told.
Spread across several dozen pages, with a pink cover page added by police in the early 1980s, the typed list contains 316 names - all but a handful men, most with addresses alongside.
Most PIE members were based in the UK - but there are also details of people in other parts of western Europe, Australia and the US.
The BBC has established that a small number of the men are still alive and may currently be in contact with, or have care of, children through paid work or volunteering. The BBC has found no evidence any of them has carried out abuse.
The Met told us it was unable to provide specific information about its historical investigations into the Paedophile Information Exchange - but will still investigate crimes if sufficient evidence exists and alleged perpetrators are still alive.
PIE was formed in 1974 - when the country was going through rapid transformative social change. Its leaders sought to further their cause by attempting to align themselves with feminist, anti-racist and gay rights movements. It was not an illegal organisation and cost £4 a year to join, and to receive its members' magazine.
Over a decade, PIE spokesmen gave interviews to the media arguing that adults and children had a human right to have sex with each other. Four years old, they argued, was an age at which most children could give consent.
However, while PIE's leaders may have been happy to speak publicly, the names of rank-and-file members were very much kept secret.
The list - and dozens of other documents relating to PIE members - were given to the BBC team and journalist Alex Renton, who has written extensively about historical institutional child sexual abuse and presents the BBC podcast, In Dark Corners.
We then searched for the names in media archives, crime reports and death register listings from the past 50 years.
They found records or further information for 45% of the people on the list - with a reasonable degree of certainty - and discovered that half of them had been convicted or cautioned (or had been charged and died before trial) for sexual offences against children. Charges included distributing abuse images, kidnap and rape.
In Dark Corners
A mysterious membership list for a defunct pro-paedophile group arrives in journalist Alex Renton's inbox.
Listen now on BBC Sounds - or on BBC Radio 4 at 09:30 on Wednesday 8 January
Listen on Sounds
Of the small number of men who may still be in contact with children professionally, none has any criminal conviction that the BBC has been able to find - meaning they could have passed in-depth background checks when applying for jobs.
Those men are part of a wider group of nearly 70 on the list, who the BBC team has identified as having been in work likely to bring them into contact with minors.
Teachers make up half that group - work addresses are typed alongside some of the names on the list. The rest include social workers, sports coaches, youth workers, doctors, clergy, lay preachers and military officers involved in youth activities.
The podcast team tried to contact all those people still alive and working - most of whom are believed to be living in the UK.
One claimed his name was on the list because of PIE's links in the 1970s with a gay youth support group.
A second admitted he had been a member, but only because he had agreed with PIE that the disparity in the age of consent laws was unjust. Men in England and Wales had to be 21 to have sex with other men prior to 1994 - when the legal age was lowered to 18. Six years later it was reduced to 16, in line with straight sex. The man told the BBC he was not and never had been a paedophile.
A third man, currently teaching children in a private school outside of the UK, refused to speak any further after PIE was mentioned to him.
No-one else has so far responded to approaches by the BBC.