Looking For Mr Goodbar…Online

The recent case of Vanessa George, and now Aaron Collis, has brought a lot of unsavoury characters out of the woodwork. None more so than Claude Knights:

The conviction of another nursery worker for sexually abusing babies is proof job security checks must be more stringent, a children's charity has warned.

Oh, really?

What happened, then, to prove that the checks weren’t stringent enough?

The case of Aaron Collis, who pleaded guilty to 12 counts of abusing children as young as 18 months, shows why vetting should be tightened, Kidscape said.

'As criminal record bureau checks bring to light only convictions, cautions and reprimands, a sex offender who is active - but has not been found out - passes through the safety net,' director Claude Knights added.

Brilliant!

You mean, someone who has nothing on his or her record to indicate that they may be a danger to children will pass a records check? Eureka! You’re a genius, Clause! You’ve found the hidden flaw in the system!

Now, Claude, what do you expect ‘the authorities’ to do about that? Establish the Precrime Division?

I Googled Claude Knights to see where he’d popped up before, and found this in the ‘Indy’:

I'm sitting in the semi-dark, staring at my computer screen. An email has just pinged into my inbox: "You have a message from Mark!" With a mix of guilt and anticipation, I log onto the internet dating site to find out what Mark has to say.

He's a 42-year-old Londoner who works in the arts. He sounds nice, he looks nice. "I feel we'd really get on," he writes. "How about drinks tomorrow evening?"

Is he kidding? I'm a single parent; I can't just drop everything and go out for the evening. Who would look after my daughter, Ruby? And that's why I'm feeling the guilt, because my child doesn't know what I'm doing and if she did she might not be amused.

Wait, what…?

Since when did the child get to run the mother’s love-life? So what if she’s ‘not amused’? You’re the adult, sweetie. Act like it…

Single parent. Internet dating. These aren't words that go together easily. Single parents have enough on their plates without trying to look for love, or just a night out, through the internet. We're far less likely to own a computer anyway than a two-parent household, and hiring a babysitter is a luxury many can't afford. But with 1.9 million single parents in the UK, there is a big potential lonely hearts market out there.

And there’s a danger lurking in this online jungle, according to…guess who:

I also wondered how many of the men really were single parents. Some, according to their profiles, didn't even have children. Could they be paedophiles using dating sites to target single mothers and get to their children?

According to the charity Kidscape, this does happen. "There are concerns that a predator would groom a person that would give them access to young children," says director Claude Knights. "The internet allows feelings of trust to be built up quickly. Be very careful because someone online can be anyone they want to be, they can reinvent themselves a hundred times. It's very easy to be charmed and seduced online."

Presumably, at some point, you’ve got to meet, though?

After a couple of weeks I was in regular contact with a man who lived with his two young sons. Let's call him Levi. He was 40, 6ft tall, with a muscular build and shoulder-length black hair.

You know what’s coming next, I take it…

Two weeks later I dropped Ruby off at school, feeling I was doing something deceptive. My heart was shaking as I stood in the Regent's Park rose garden to meet Levi. We knew each other so well by now, I thought, this was the beginning of something great.

Then he appeared. He looked 60 not 40. He was slight and shorter than me. And shoulder-length black hair? He was nearly bald. None of these things would have mattered, except for the fact he hadn't been honest. So what else hadn't he been honest about?

Oh, I don’t know, sweetie. Everything?

And how is that any different from picking up a man in a bar, or at a party, and finding out at one o’clock in the morning that his Porsche is a Ford Cortina and his Docklands penthouse is a flat above a kebab shop?

It isn’t. The only difference is that you might waste a lot of time cyberchatting before you meet IRL. That’s what Claude really means when he says ‘The internet allows feelings of trust to be built up quickly’.

That’s not ‘trust’. Not in any meaningful sense of the word.