OXFORDSHIRE has hit the headlines time and again for child sex abuse. Last week in a new court case Banbury-born pop singer Gary Glitter was found guilty of sexually abusing three young girls.

A new report just out on Jimmy Savile revealed his depravity in Stoke Mandeville Hospital and beyond. The Bullfinch serious case review recently highlighted grooming and abuse of possibly 370 young children in the county and Operation Reportage resulted in convictions of five men and a youth who abused several young girls in Banbury this week.

Now we learn from a Freedom of Information Request by the Press Association about the numbers of registered sex offenders who have ‘gone missing’. Scotland Yard said they didn’t know where 167 were and the longest time a registered offender went missing was 14 years.

Thames Valley Police reported that the whereabouts of five sex offenders were currently unknown.

But nobody is talking about the success story of a programme to help paedophiles fit into a community without putting children at risk called Circles of Support and Accountability. These groups are composed of four to five trained volunteers who have professional supervision and meet regularly with the sex offender to hold them to account for their actions and equally important to help with their transition back into the community.

The scheme was piloted by the Home Office here in the Thames Valley Police area in 2002 with only 100 trained volunteers aged from 21 to 77, who included teachers, students and even a farmer.

The pilot project was rolled out in 2007 to 14 locations around the UK and has quietly helped sex offenders to reform and produced an 83 per cent reduction in re-offending among the sex offenders it helps.

There are around 11,000 sex offenders in our jails.

This is about 12 per cent of the prison population, but 10 per cent of these are serving sentences for gross indecency with children. The vast majority of them will be released one day.

What happens then?

It’s in everybody’s interests that they don’t offend again.

Child sex offenders are hated by large groups, but this one small group, made up of some mothers and fathers, is befriending paedophiles to keep all our kids safe. The Circles of Support and Accountability groups meet regularly with child sex offenders to try to stop them repeating their crimes against children. I went to visit an Oxford group in one of our market towns.

It was so secret I had to promise not to reveal where this particular group held its meetings.

The programme is not a ‘soft touch’. According to one paedophile he has had to field some very tough questions.

He said: “Without going into details, I can say they asked where do I get my sexual relief from? What do I fantasise about?

How do I maintain appropriate behaviour boundaries? It feels like I am being interrogated, and it is uncomfortable; but that’s par for the course.

“I had to give a very frank and detailed explanation of my behaviour. Part of the pattern that led me onto the course of offending was that I came from a very seriously abused childhood, both sexually and physically.

“I began to repeat the pattern of my own experiences.”

These circles are not just ‘talking shops’, they can have a direct impact on paedophiles. A group stepped in to protect children from the urges that drove one man to want to abuse them sexually.

A volunteer went round to his flat for a cup of coffee and caught him red-handed ‘grooming’ a small girl.

Fortunately he had not abused her yet, but the circle arranged for him to stay in a special hostel where he could be watched closely 24/7.

Even during the pilot stage of this project four paedophiles were recalled to prison because one of the circles found their behaviour was getting risky.

According to Peter Stanford, director of the Longford Trust for prison reform: “There is nothing in their work that seeks to excuse the damage done by sex-offending.

“Neither does it hold out the prospect of a ‘cure’.

“If an adult is sexually attracted to children, that cannot be wiped clean by a Circle of Support and Accountability.

“But what these brave initiatives do show, statistically and unemotionally, is that many sex offenders can manage their impulses and behaviour, see how harmful they are, and learn how to identify and tackle the risk factors and triggers that have led them to offend over and over again.

“Because the rest of us categorise sex offenders as irredeemable, and so isolate them on release (by denying them housing, job opportunities and even running vigilante campaigns to get them moved on), our fear about their reoffending risk become a selffulfilling prophecy.

“How much more effective would it be if we could open our minds to the idea that offenders can be helped to help themselves?”

Does that make sense to you?