The news this morning was stuffed with reports on the success of Britain's hi-tech anti-paedophile squad, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre: "Increase in sex offender arrests", said the BBC, while Radio 5 Live even broadcast from Ceop's headquarters this morning.
I've written about Ceop in the past, and a while ago I visited their digs to see what goes on behind the scenes. Clearly it's a highly valuable policing service that aims to safeguard some of the most vulnerable members of society, and we applaud that any scheme which saves children from abuse - 131 children saved in a year is a laudable number, how ever you look at it.
But something struck me as a little fuzzy about the figures: 297 arrests, they said. Well, that's fine - but we all know that arrests are not the same as convictions. So how many people have actually been charged or investigated as a result of Ceop's work?
That information wasn't so forthcoming. When I spoke to Ceop this afternoon, a spokesman said that the organisation didn't actually know how many of those arrests had resulted in legal action. He said that this was because Ceop worked in conjunction with a wide range of local and international forces, and it didn't keep track of how cases had progressed. "These cases by their nature take a long time to come to court," he said.
That's a fair point, of course, because putting together the evidence in a child abuse case is a painstaking process - especially when it involves computer forensics.
But history shows us that it pays to be sceptical here: after all, Operation Ore - the biggest internet paedophile investigation in history - wasn't everything it appeared to be. Lots of people who were investigated as part of Ore were actually victims of fraud, as we reported almost precisely a year ago. Here were people who had their credit card numbers stolen, but were victimised because the thieves used it to buy access to child abuse websites.
Ceop undoubtedly does a lot of good work, and I have a great deal of respect for the investigators who work there. But if we're talking numbers, we need to make sure we're working with the right ones: there's too much at stake.
· This article originally stated 'Lots of people who were convicted as part of Ore were actually victims of fraud, as we reported almost a year ago.' This has been amended following a complaint that we received from the CEOP stating that none of the 2450 people convicted in the UK as a result of Operation Ore have had their convictions overturned on the basis that those convicted were victims of credit card fraud.
