A LETTER TO THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

You had them.

You had the CPS telling you Bawan Harwe’s co-defendant Sharam Muhamadi was a flight risk. You granted bail anyway. He disappeared. Seven girls who gave evidence twice, who came back to court when the first trial collapsed and did it all again, are still waiting for his sentencing while he is somewhere in this country, or beyond it, and you are issuing warrants and hoping for the best.

You had Katie Birtles, a registered sex offender, ten-year Sexual Harm Prevention Order, explicit ban on contacting children under 16 online or offline. She breached it twice. She spent two weeks grooming girls online, then got on a train to meet a child she believed was 14. You gave her four years and eight months. The order existed. Nobody was watching until a tip-off told them where to stand.

You had Inam Khan, charged with raping a 14-year-old girl in Suffolk. You gave him bail. He drove to Sussex and abducted a 12-year-old. On bail. For child rape.

You had five nuns who beat children with belts, locked them in cellars, rubbed urine-soaked sheets on their heads, and laughed while children retched. The victims were as young as three. Four of the five women convicted walked out of court with community orders and unpaid work. One survivor said the only word to describe his time at Nazareth House was fear. He said that fifty years later. Four of them walked free.

You told Kairah Kelly that every child in those images was abused by the act of viewing them. Then you handed down a two-year community order and sent her home.

You gave Peter Sugden, a prison officer with five years of category A child abuse images on his phone, a community payback order. He was caught by a volunteer, not a law enforcement operation. No prison.

You gave Paul Harold, a former police officer who sexually assaulted a vulnerable child while in uniform, two years suspended. She carried it for decades. She came forward. She supported the prosecution to conviction. He walked out of court.

You gave Peter Selby 125,000 child abuse images including children as young as three, a previous conviction, and a breach of his Sexual Harm Prevention Order. You gave him another suspended sentence because you were worried about his welfare in custody.

This is not a broken system.

A broken system fails by accident. This system fails by design, by precedent, by deference, by an institutional instinct to protect its own coherence over the people it was built to serve.

The victims do not get suspended sentences. They do not get community orders. They do not get to breach their obligations twice before anyone notices. They carry what was done to them for decades, report it, support a prosecution, give evidence, and then watch the man who abused them walk to his car.

We are told the justice system exists to protect us.

But you gave Alexander Boyd’s colleagues documented concerns about his behaviour with vulnerable looked after children, and the abuse continued.

You gave Adam McManus a school campus position covering two high schools in Airdrie, and twelve months when he was caught grooming a child he believed was one of his own pupils.

You gave the Chair of the Independent Monitoring Board, the body that exists to hold prisons to account, access and authority, and she used it to smuggle drugs and contraband through the gate. Her culpability was high, said the judge. Five years.

The survivors were awake long before the rest of us.

They reported. They gave evidence. They came back when trials collapsed and did it again.

This justice system did not protect them. In too many of these cases, it protected their abusers, with bail decisions, suspended sentences, community orders, and a consistent institutional failure of nerve when it came to naming what these cases actually are.

It is time for that to change.

And if it will not change willingly, then let the record show: we are watching, we are counting, and we are done pretending this is good enough.