About a year ago I watched an interview with an ex-Metropolitan (London, UK) police officer who made the claim that a large number of released child sex offenders, lived on boats/barges in order to evade having to sign the UK’s sex offender registry (a claim that a UK tabloid newspaper picked up on but does not appear to have been reported by any other news agencies) e.g., sex-offenders have 28 days – from time of release – to register. However, if they move to another jurisdiction, within those 28 days the clock starts over. By moving their mooring to different locations within these timeframes, they could “legally” evade having to sign the register and so remain unknown to law enforcement etc. The significance of this is that if a case of CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) was reported, whether they committed it or not, they wouldn’t be on anyone’s radar. Recently, through some research I was doing in a related area on transient/nomadic sex offenders, I was reminded of this interview and looked a bit more into it i.e., I am always interested in whether anecdotal accounts can be backed up by evidence, as such accounts have the ability to create folk devils and moral panics; we all naturally respond to a good/interesting story – which doesn’t mean it isn’t factually based – and the media in all its forms likes to pick up and run with these things.

                The degree to which sex offender registries prevent recidivism/re-offending is inconclusive (Agan, 2011; Napier et al., 2018) and those who actively avoid registering have been noted for doing so for a number of reasons, that are not related with offending e.g., to avoid difficulties with employment and inter-personal relationships (Tewksbury & Lees, 2006) etc. The irony being that someone who wants to lead a “legal”/normal life, without re-offending, may feel a need and believe it is in their best interest to achieve a healthy lifestyle by not registering. Whilst there is a degree of logic for sex offenders to avoid registering by regularly moving locations, via boat/barge etc., there is little actual evidence, in the public domain (research and media) to suggest that this is widespread. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of CSA (Child Sexual Abuse) cases involve people who the victim knows rather than strangers; where location and sex offender registration are going to be far less important than the type of relationship the offender had with their victim(s). According to RAINN – Rape Abuse & Incest National Network - in the U.S. for victims under the age of 18 when/where sexual abuse was reported to law enforcement, 93% of those targeted knew their perpetrator, either as an acquaintance or family member; the figure in the UK, is somewhere around two-thirds of victims that know their abuser (Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse, 2018). This would suggest that whilst there may be those who use boats and barges to avoid registration, it doesn’t necessarily make them a particularly prolific group, when compared to other demographics etc.

                This doesn’t mean that canal boats/barges haven’t been used in cases of CSA offenders avoiding detection e.g., in 2016 the Guardian newspaper reported that Michael Crabb, a convicted child sex offender who had just been released after a nine-year prison sentence was using the UK canal system to move around the country undetected. In 2017 Paul Bishop who lived on a narrowboat on the Grand Union Canal in Warwickshire was convicted of the grooming and sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy, and in the same year in West Berkshire a narrowboat owner admitted to the possession of child abuse images during his trial. However, these are isolated cases, and don’t indicate that the use of Britain’s waterways is a significant factor concerning sexual offending against children in the UK. Whilst this network may not be specifically used by certain offenders, the UK’s extensive canal network does facilitate crime in a number of ways. Whilst a city such as Birmingham – which has more miles of canal than Venice – has a dense network within the city, most canals are in the countryside in rural areas that are sparsely policed. Also, canals cross numerous local authority and police boundaries; this may complicate oversight and increase the potential for “off-the-radar” movement. However, crime incident data do not show that waterways are uniquely predominant for any specific offender type (such as child sex offenders) in the sense of being their major crime-location and offence numbers in canal/river locations are smaller relative to overall crime in other locations, representing one potential environment among many.    

                Whilst canals could offer a potential offender certain benefits - living on a boat can complicate residential registration and supervision protocols if not properly managed - there are laws in place which require sex offenders without a permanent address to register with at a local police station every seven days, if travelling. With canals crossing local authority and police boundaries, historically (in anecdotal accounts) this made consistent monitoring harder than for those offenders living at a fixed address. Whilst these are all plausible reasons for a sex offender using the UK waterways to live and travel on this does not mean waterways are a systemic hiding place for convicted sex offenders etc. So, whilst there are documented individual cases along with anecdotal accounts indicating that some offenders have used boats/canals to complicate supervision and avoid registering themselves as sex offenders, there appears to be no strong evidence of a coordinated or common tactic by child sex offenders to do so on a national level.