Visiting pedophiles beat cops

NEW DELHI: UK citizen Paul Meekin, a Bangalore International School principal, was first caught sending a lewd message to a student in January 2012. After his arrest, police found that he had holidayed in Goa with a child with learning disabilities, abused several students, bought a fake PhD off the internet and was wanted for a similar case of abuse in Thailand.With barely a year behind bars, Meekin was granted bail. In April 2014, a non-bailable warrant was issued against him after he missed several hearings. He has reportedly left India and is teaching in a Kuwait school.
Australian Paul Allen posed a godman and healer in Odisha in the 1980s but fled from police custody when he was being investigated on charges of child sexual abuse. He then started a charity home for children in Andhra Pradesh, where again he abused children. He is reported to have posed as an ophthalmologist and a leprosy consultant at various points of time. In June 2014, he is known to have got a stay from the Odisha High Court against a case filed in Andhra. Today, no one knows where Allen is.
Raymond Varley, part of the international ring of pedophiles who preyed on young children (mainly in an orphanage run by the notorious Freddy Peats) in Goa was arrested in 2012 in Thailand because of an Interpol red corner notice and sent to London. CBI continues to fight an uphill legal battle to extradite him to India.
Varley, Allen and Meekin are part of a growing trend of foreign nationals pretending to be educators and social workers and accessing schools, orphanages and children’s homes where they prey on children. Vidya Reddy, director of NGO ‘Tulir-Centre for the Prevention and Healing of Child Sex Abuse’ who has uncovered several such cases, said the response of authorities was just too slow.
“There are a series of cases where complaints have been lodged but authorities are unable to keep up. These offenders throw away their passports, assume new identities and are out of the country before our police has even informed the embassy to which the national belongs to,’’ she said. Several such cases were surfacing from Goa, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Odisha and Karnataka, she said.
London-based Christine Beddoe, former director of ECPAT UK (End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking), said there was a distinct pattern. “These offenders target institutions, build a reputation as saviours in the local community, ingratiate themselves with the community and victims before they prey on children. It makes it difficult for the parents and the children to complain by which time it is too late,’’ she said.
The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) in a 2010 inquiry found that foreign tourists came to Kerala and blended in with the community by offering services like teaching English. “Children are contacted through local mediators and enticed by gifts,’’ the report said, recommending that police should keep homestays on their radar and undertake scrutiny of extension of foreign visas.