Norman Walker: A link between UK children’s homes and the Amsterdam sex trade

Daily Star, 1st August 1983

Daily Star, 2nd August 1983

Community Care, 1st September 1983

The Why Not club that Norman Walker owned is mentioned in a Nick Davies article:

By 1990, these two clubs on Spuistraat – together with Boys for Men, De Boys, the Blue Boy and the Why Not – had become the busiest watering hole in the international paedophile jungle. Dutch police at the time estimated there were 250 paedophiles involved in the production of child pornography in Amsterdam with an unknown floating population of child sex tourists from all over the world. A Swiss businessman, for example, was caught in the city with handcuffs, a gag and a large suitcase with airholes in the side; police found a video of him abusing two young girls with electrodes. A wealthy New York attorney was caught ferrying child pornography from Asia. But it was the British who formed the hard core of the new industry: Stephen Smith, who had helped to found the Paedophile Information Exchange, fled there to avoid imprisonment in England; Russell Tricker, now aged 58, a former private school teacher who was convicted of child-sex offences in the UK, moved to Amsterdam, where he used his job as a coach-driver to ferry suitable boys from London; Tricker’s friend, John Broomhall, opened a porn shop on Spuistraat and was caught with more than a thousand copies of videos of under-aged boys; Mark Enfield, now aged 41, sold a video of himself abusing a drugged boy; Andrew Prichodsky, now aged 50, jumped bail in England on the eve of his third trial for child sex offences. Full article

Notorious British paedophile Warwick Spinks later ran the Why Not club:

Spinks was convicted in 1995 of abducting the 14-year-old. He drugged the lad, who had run away from a children’s home, and sold him as a rent boy in Holland. British and Dutch police launched an investigation after the boy fled to the British Embassy. Spinks got seven years, cut to five years on appeal. Officers from Scotland Yard’s Paedophile Squad were furious when he got parole in 1997 after 30 months. He ignored conditions that he be supervised by probation officers and sign the Sex Offenders Register and fled – sending cops a taunting postcard from Holland.

International businessmen, lawyers and politicians were among Spinks’s clients when he ran the notorious Why Not boy brothel in Amsterdam before his arrest. Cops in Amsterdam secretly taped Spinks offering to supply a video in which a 10-year-old boy was killed. He also said an associate had seen a boy die in the making of a film. Full article

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Co-operative that speaks from experience (27.5.91)

The Independent, 27th May 1991
by DEAN NELSON

THE National Association of Young People in Care (Naypic) is one of Britain’s most unorthodox childcare groups. It is a co-operative run exclusively by people aged under 25 who have been in care themselves.

The organisation was formed in 1979 to give children in care their own independent voice. Its first success was the abolition of local authority clothing books.

Children complained they were humiliated by shop staff because they had to pay for clothes with special vouchers for children in care.

Some childcare workers have questioned the group’s confrontational style – its volunteers have been known to rescue child abuse victims from children’s homes – but few doubt its commitment and success in spotlighting abuse in children’s homes.

It claims success in highlighting several major child abuse cases including the Melanie Klein House scandal in Greenwich, south-east London.

Naypic also claims credit for forcing the Staffordshire “pindown” inquiry into restraint techniques after the local authority declared the home to be safe. Other successes include winning £22,000 compensation for three victims of sexual abuse in the Green Lanes children’s home.

Today the organisation faces a financial struggle to expand its organisation and establish a national structure with regional offices to investigate abuse throughout Britain.

Naypic has recently asked the Department of Health for a £158,000 grant to help the organisation establish regional offices and become more efficient in voicing the concerns of children in care, and exposing abuse in children’s homes. However, it has been offered only £38,000, although that may be doubled next year.

Naypic said the decision was a serious setback to its plans to establish regional offices to investigate abuse in homes throughout Britain.

Mary Moss, the Naypic spokeswoman, said: ”We want to give a voice to young people in care.
“We are at the sharp end of society, but if we don’t listen to these young people we will never know what is going on in our society.”

When in doubt, blame the children (24.3.93)

The Independent, March 24th 1993
by Beatrix Campbell

BRITAIN hates itself. The repertoire of hate figures is everywhere, haunting parents, the police, the streets, the best and worst schools, and even the mortuaries. Dangerous children, killer children – they have become the enemy within.

Childhood has become a metaphor for a country that is out of control. Children are victimised and demonised. As the director of a child centre said this week: ”Children are the pit bull terriers of this political season.”
Britain cannot cope. It hides its shame and self-hatred by regarding its young victims as culprits.

Less than 10 years has passed since Tyra Henry, 21 months, and Jasmine Beckford, four, died at the hands of their deadly fathers, their killings opening an epoch of discovery of the dangerousness of childhood. It is as if we have become obsessed with the threats from children, rather than the threats to them.

The latest vigilante is Virginia Bottomley. The Health Secretary has signalled adults’ impatience with children’s pain, joining a posse of the most powerful men in the country, including the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary, for whom condemnation of children is a mantra. None of the politicians who have called for a crusade against children’s crimes has complained about crimes against children.

In a speech to children’s charities reported last week, Mrs Bottomley stated her support for the ”concern among the wider public that we may have gone too far in stressing the rights of children at the expense of upholding the responsibilities of parents and those who care for them children ”. Her statement marked the end of era when the state promised to take the side of children.

Mrs Bottomley embodies the backlash against children. Soon she is expected to publish government guidance on the control of troubled children in care. Her homes will officially rehabilitate the use of physical force to control children or stop them running away.

This is the response to the constraints imposed on carers by the Children Act 1989 and the scandal surrounding pindown. Restoration of restraint by brute force has been pressed on the Government by institutions whose raison d’etre is power and control.

We know the most dangerous and difficult of the children we lock up – those too young to go to jail for their grave offences – have already endured an excess of control before they ever get into trouble. According to research commissioned by the Prince’s Trust, at least 50 per cent already have been physically or sexually abused, and ”the suspected figure may actually be as high as 90 per cent”. The research points to a connection between abuse and children’s crimes. These children are the enemy within, the subject of political panic.

Mrs Bottomley’s statement on children’s rights and her rehabilitation of physical restraint as a means of control of children in care will be a defining moment in the decline of children’s rights. It is a retreat from the lessons of the pindown scandal.

Public institutions have been found guilty in the great children’s scandals of the Nineties. The inquiry into the children’s mutiny at Ty Mawr community home for boys in Gwent, Wales, in 1991 revealed a butch regime of low-flying brutality.

In the same year, the Social Services Inspectorate criticised the management of children’s homes in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. These homes had been controlled for years by senior professionals and councillors of all parties. Councillors claimed that they had been too lax, but the inspectorate’s investigation revealed the use of undue force and violence as well as low levels of care and high levels of absconding. In 1990, the Melanie Klein home for girls at Greenwich, south-east London, was criticised for inadequate care, undue force and alleged sexual misconduct by staff.

Mrs Bottomley’s attitude is a symptom of the public’s retreat from its awareness of children’s pain. Her vaunted vocation as a social worker ended when the new age began.

Her message, indeed Britain’s message, is simple: when children don’t oblige by being innocent victims, when they are demanding and difficult, when they are awkward accusers, and when they don’t care whom they hurt, including themselves, then adults are absolved. No longer ashamed, we blame the victim.

Bottomley bottoms out (1993)

Extract from ‘Shame and scandal in the family’, Scallywag, c. 1993

by Simon Regan