‘Cold Intimacies’: Community Notification, Satellite Tracking and the Ruined Privacy of Sex Offenders

Abstract

In Britain, in 2000, the murder of an eight-year-old girl called Sarah Payne by a registered sex offender became a ‘signal crime’, triggering intense and sustained debate about the way in which ‘paedophiles’ (and, often by nothing more than implication, ‘sex offenders’ more generally) should be supervised and controlled in the community. Sex offender registers had been introduced in 1997, but now seemed patently insufficient as public protection. With the backing of the murdered child’s parents, a major tabloid newspaper, the News of the World, launched a campaign for a ‘Sarah’s Law’ to empower ordinary citizens (especially parents) with information about the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders. The campaign was inspired by the United States’s post-1996 experience of ‘community notification’ under ‘Megan’s Law’, which the News of the World portrayed as an effective initiative. The Home Office disagreed, fearing that making information about known sex offenders publicly available would decrease their compliance with the authorities, making them harder to find and manage, thereby increasing risks to children. They preferred to strengthen the newly created Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) at the local level, and to quietly introduce a clause into the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000 permitting the GPS satellite tracking of offenders at some point in the future, a form of electronic monitoring technology which had been developing in the United States since 1997, although not exclusively with sex offenders.