Many groups across our nation take a great passion to hunting down the notorious paedophiles that assault or attempt to assault our women, men and children. As a British citizen one of the main questions we should be asking ourselves and most importantly the establishment is: why do we have so many paedophile hunting groups doing the work of our police officers and what do the establishment plan to do, to make sure the police ( and other emergency services) have the right amount of resources to be able to tackle this blatant problem?

I have approached a few paedophile hunting groups online. When i approached “Guardian of the North”, i asked “how many pedophiles in total have you caught that have been convicted and how many that have been caught but not convicted?” They responded with, “We have caught 230 paedophiles and have 111 convictions over a 30 month period”. This is just one of the many groups across our Nation.

I also approached “COP” (Catching Online Predators) and asked them, “Why do we have so many paedophile hunting groups doing the work of our police officers, how many paedophiles this year alone have you caught that have been convicted and how many caught that haven’t been convicted?” Their response was: “Over the last 2 years we have traveled up and around the country to expose predators and so the Police tell us that we are doing a fantastic job in getting these vile men and woman off the streets. This is because the police don’t have the time, resources to put in what we do. Their are over 100 teams now around the UK trying to safeguard our Children because the police can’t keep up with the amount of predators still out to hurt our Children. We have caught 84 that’s including ones we have done to help other teams up and down the country. : we have 100% conviction rate all get taken on by CPS it can take weeks to months before SENTENCED all depends on past, any real victims, evidence and downloading of devices.” Have the police finally excepted that they are relying on a vastly growing group of people to do there jobs, people that should be able to rely on their services to do their job so that they can get on with their own lives?

I approached “Dark light” to ask them the same question, they informed me that they are no longer a paedophile hunting group, “We are now Dark Light Foundation and will soon be a registered charity and we do not associate with any peadophile hunting”. I then asked them what their foundation will be doing now”, they replied with: “We hope to be raising funds to support victims of abuse and to support survivors and to ensure that they access the correct services of a wide variety. We also raise awareness about the dangers and risks there are to children online and to be able to help both parents and children identify the behaviors around this. We feel that not enough is being said about this ongoing situation and we also support survivors to come forward and speak up about their situations. In helping survivors do this, we feel this would help a lot more people to speak up and access the correct services and help that they need.

There are around 100 paedophile hunting groups across our Nation doing this incredible work to get these awful criminals of our streets but where are our police and why are many people having to put their lives on hold to do the work that the system has failed to do. Is it down to Theresa Mays police cuts?

By Alissa Cook-Gray