Public understanding of paedophiles has not improved over the past 30 years, according to the founder of the pioneering charity Circles, which offers support to some of society’s most reviled offenders.
While the Rev Harry Nigh says child protection must always be paramount, he stresses the importance of breaking the isolation and shame that often leads people who commit child sexual abuse to reoffend, arguing that “anything that drives people underground even further endangers the community itself”.
The Circles programme provides a local network of volunteers who support and hold accountable their “core member”, a child sexual offender who wants to reintegrate into the community after serving their sentence.
Visiting London from Canada – where he established the first “circle” in 1994 – to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the now international movement, Nigh said: “I don’t think that the public perception has improved an awful lot and while there is a little bit of credibility with this work now it’s a very fragile thing.”
It was 30 years ago that Nigh, a Mennonite minister in Hamilton, Ontario, and a small number of volunteers from his congregation came together to support a child abuser and lifelong recidivist, known as Charlie, when he was released from prison.
Since then the grassroots programme has expanded across Canada and then was introduced to the UK in the 00s by the Quakers, and developed elsewhere in Europe and Australia – with evaluations consistently showing a significant impact on reoffending.
“There’s been no master plan,” said Nigh. “We started with one guy who needed to have some support. It’s an amazing thing to see it spread like that.”
With public funding squeezed in Canada as it is in the UK, Nigh fears the rightward trend in politics makes it tougher for decision-makers to justify supporting these interventions.
“When there’s an impulse that moves to the right, it’s a very easy call for politicians to say ‘lock them up’. There’s a kind of redirection of anger for political purposes.
“But this is one of the most creative ways in which we can invest public funds for community safety. How does withdrawing funding for these initiatives affect the rate of offences against children and vulnerable people in their community? It’s short thinking.”
Over the years the Circles movement has adapted to the changing nature of child sexual abuse and proliferation of online offending. In the UK, the Reboot programme offers structured sessions that focus on developing the offender’s offline hobbies and relationships as well as coping mechanisms for future online challenges.
But the core model of grassroots community support – and accountability – has remained the same for the past three decades: “It’s not just about risk management, it has to be about affirmation,” Nigh said. “Just to reinforce the humanity of the person is really important.
“That’s a very powerful thing for a person to be able to find a new narrative of his life that can lead him forward. But it’s not all hugs and kisses. There can be some very hard conversations in the Circle and confrontations. But the studies show that men with a Circle are 70 to 80% less likely to reoffend than a control group.”
Nigh said he could understand why many members of the public considered these offenders unworthy of help, but takes the position that “it’s better for people to be checking in on a guy who is isolated in a basement apartment somewhere, than for him to have no one”.
He said a “small but significant” number of Circles volunteers had experienced sexual abuse as children themselves.
The grassroots nature of the programme “allows people to get their hands dirty, to have a face-to-face experience of walking with people as they leave prison”.
“The underlying principles of restorative justice are what’s guiding this work, that harm cannot be remedied completely by locking people up. There will be a time when people need to be restrained, of course. But these are people who have finished their prison sentence. And so what do they come out to?”
