How our campaign changed UK law to prosecute sex offenders who travelled overseas to abuse children



In 1992, Fr Shay Cullen helped us to produce a report on child prostitution and this was launched in the House of Commons at a meeting hosted by the All Party parliamentary Group on Street Children. 

Copies of the report were sent to Scotland Yard, MPs and the media who attended our meeting in Parliament. It was the first time that anyone had called for a change in the law to prosecute British sex tourists who abused children overseas. We wanted child prostitution outlawed, declared a crime against humanity. At the time, no foreign government or western nation had ever arrested any of its citizens who had abused children overseas and there was simply no mechanism in place to prosecute such offenders.

The statistics proved sobering.



Every year, about one million children were lured or forced into prostitution. This figure was documented in a Norwegian government report, confirming that young children were held as bait for a thriving attraction: sex with children.

Globally, as many as ten million children were thought to be enslaved in the sex industry, prostitution and pornography.

Child prostitution tended to be higher in Asia and Latin America although an alarming growth rate had been recorded in Africa, North America and Europe. Eastern Europe and the former Communist states had emerged as a new market in the sexual exploitation of children.

The UN Rapporteur on Child Trafficking had remarked recently that the children being tricked into prostitution were getting younger and younger. ‘These are nine, ten, eleven, twelve year old kids,’ he said.

The experts warned that the trend would increase unless action was taken.



Fr Shay combined eloquence with clarity as he presented the historical context from which to view this crime, ‘Sex tourism and child prostitution is the ultimate in exploitation. Peoples of other nations have exploited the raw materials of poorer countries for centuries. Now they’re coming back to exploit the bodies of our children.’

Our campaign emphasised that the authorities that should have brought men such as Andrew Harvey to justice had failed, and they had used the system to evade capture, thus putting more children at risk.

It was time to cry ‘Enough!’ Action was needed. The law must be changed.

It’s easy to launch a project with flashy publicity material and sound bites but it’s imperative to maintain the pressure.

The government’s initial response wasn’t encouraging.

At a meeting led by MP’s from the APPGSC, the Home Office told us that it was too complex a problem and the law couldn’t be changed to accommodate our demands. It would never happen. Their logic was that such laws would be unworkable in practice because of the difficulties they perceived in gathering sufficient evidence from foreign jurisdictions to facilitate a successful prosecution. This argument was advanced despite the fact that similar laws existed for offences such as murder, suggesting that they would accept evidence for this, but not for crimes against children.

The Home Office insisted that it was not for the British Government to impose its laws abroad. That was that.

To strengthen our efforts we joined Save the Children, Christian Aid, CAFOD and Anti-Slavery International and others in a coalition to combat child prostitution called ECPAT UK (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes).

In 1994, our Parliamentary Officer, Wilfred Wong, a barrister-at-law, drafted a Bill setting out in detail the laws we sought.

Wilfred put a requirement of Double Criminality in the Bill. This meant that the alleged child sex offence had to be considered as a criminal offence both in the foreign land where it occurred and within the UK before the accused could be charged and prosecuted in this country. He explained, ‘I did this because there was no way the British government would agree to imposing its laws on another jurisdiction if the crime in question was not even considered an offence in that foreign jurisdiction.

‘Furthermore, I put in the requirement that nothing in the bill would contravene the legal principle of Double Jeopardy. This meant that if the defendant had already been prosecuted and either convicted or acquitted for the offence while abroad, he could not be prosecuted for the same offence again when he returned to Britain.’

At the time, Parliament was considering the Criminal Justice Bill and ECPAT persuaded Lord Archer of Sandwell, QC, a former Solicitor General in the Labour government, to table our Bill as an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill. Conservative government opposition ensured its failure but Lord Hylton, the Liberal peer, picked it up again in the House of Lords.

On the day before its second reading in Parliament, Glenda Jackson MP delivered Jubilee’s 20,000-strong petition to Downing Street and captured considerable television and radio coverage in its support. Hours later, the Government let it be known that it would oppose the passage of Hylton’s Bill in the Commons. Their compromise was to consider prosecuting sex tour operators instead. Clearly someone had watched the ITV report. In Parliamentary code, this was the Bill’s death knell, but no one was surprised. The Government continued to argue that the Bill was unworkable and predictable form letters sped off Whitehall’s word processors to anyone who enquired. However, that argument was decisively squashed, in June 1995, when a Swedish court successfully prosecuted a 69-year old former civil servant, Bengt Bolin, for sexual intercourse with a 14 year old boy while on holiday in Thailand on 18 February 1993.

The British government was put under further pressure with the increasing media coverage.



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The media backed our campaign and Shay, Wilfred and I were regularly featured in a series of high profile news reports on television, radio and in the newspapers. I worked closely with a veteran reporter from the News of the World and our undercover investigation resulted in a front page splash.

With nearly 5 million people buying copies of the News of the World all across the country, Britain’s top selling newspaper guaranteed that people everywhere were talking about the child sex industry with the question on everyone’s lips: why doesn’t the government do something about this scandal?

It was the question we wanted answered. It was the question that we wouldn’t allow to be buried.

A television documentary about Shay’s work [called ‘Defender of the Children’] was screened nationwide in October 1995, and we previewed the hour-long programme for MPs and supporters in the House of Commons.

A reporter in the film asked UK officials why they hadn’t followed the FBI’s example of investigating suspected offenders that had been exposed. The pathetic response was, ‘The FBI asked for their addresses.’ The implication was that the US had actively followed up suspects but British officials had not. They hadn’t even asked for addresses of offenders.

The reply caused spontaneous uproar at the Parliamentary meeting. Nigel Griffiths MP turned to me and said, ‘If I was the Home Secretary, I would have been furious. I would have picked up the phone and expected a response on my desk the following morning.’

I could understand Nigel’s outrage. He was the MP, with David Alton, who had chaired our first meeting in Parliament in 1992, four years earlier, when we named Britons arrested in the report we published when our campaign was launched. This was the very same list that we had passed on to Scotland Yard, followed up by the TV reporter.


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While the media maintained its public pressure, the government were also monitoring events unfolding behind the scenes in Ireland.

At his request, I flew over to join Fr Shay at a high profile launch of the campaign in Dublin and our lobbying materials and reports were widely used.

Owen Ryan, an active TD, heard one of the interviews and arranged an immediate meeting. Mr Ryan told us that he had drafted a Bill as early as June 1995 but as a member of the Opposition Fianna Fail Party, he didn’t want it to become a victim of political intrigue.

‘Child prostitution is a new form of slavery. It’s outrageous that Irish citizens can be guilty of abusing children but escape punishment,’ he insisted.

Strategic manoeuvres followed. Ironically, in London, one of Jubilee’s supporters, Patricia Toomey, had been invited to the opening of the Irish Centre in Hammersmith to meet the special guest, Ireland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Dick Spring. Not wanting to waste an opportunity, Patricia placed Jubilee Campaign’s report in Mr Spring’s hand. ‘We need your help to change the law,’ she told him. Mr Spring assured her that he would read the report and seriously consider what she had said.

Five days later, Ireland’s Minister of Justice, Nora Owens, telephoned Fr Shay at home in Dublin and told him, ‘We would welcome the Bill even though it was from the Opposition.’

At 7pm on Tuesday, 14 November, the Bill was tabled in the Oireachtas [Irish Parliament] and Ireland joined America, Australia, Germany, Sweden, New Zealand, Belgium, France, Norway and Denmark in endorsing legislation that was now sweeping the west.

One TV journalist from Ireland’s main channel, RTE, told me that perhaps the most extraordinary factor was that the ruling government had accepted a Private Members Bill from the Party in opposition – only the fourth in the history of the State.

Sensibly, the contest for political supremacy was shelved and old adversaries united in the war against child prostitution.

The Irish Bill was introduced amidst predictable political manoeuvres, strategic media coverage and effective lobbying. It was a moment for activists to savour, a personal triumph for Fr Shay, and demonstrative proof that campaigning works.

It was Ireland 1, Britain 0.




Brett Tyler was abandoned as a baby, raised in Barnardo’s Homes, sexually assaulted at four, and met his first ‘real’ friend in prison, Timothy Morss, who had also been abused as a child. Both were serving time for sexual offences and became accomplices and lovers. In a special annexe of Wormwood Scrubbs prison, the group therapy session for sex offenders heard the men discuss the ultimate fantasy, the final taboo. It was to abduct a young blond boy, abuse and murder him.

When they left prison, Tyler flew to the Philippines to pursue his obsession with little boys, meanwhile Morss became the lover of another former inmate, David Guttridge, and moved to Bradley Stoke, near Bristol, where they bought a house together, and a minicab firm, Guy’s Cars, in Camberwell, South London.

When Tyler returned to Britain in April 1994, he teamed up with Morss and revived their secret fantasy.

In October, the men went cruising. In East London, they spotted a young boy trying to fix the chain on his silver BMX bike.

‘We were just looking at the boys, the usual hobby,’ Tyler would recollect later, in his first police interview. ‘We saw a boy riding a bike. He took a side street so we turned round and went back. We pulled over, put a map in the back of the car, asked him to show us where we were and pushed him in.’

The boy was Daniel Handley. He was blond. He was nine years old.

From a deprived background, Daniel earned extra pocket money by collecting trolleys from the local Asda supermarket and helping people with their shopping. Daniel was allowed to ride his bicycle out on his own, as long as he was home by 6pm.

On Sunday, 22 October 1994, he was late.

Tyler and Morss took Daniel back to Camberwell and in the flat above the car hire firm they videotaped themselves abusing the child. Daniel was then driven along the M4 in Morss’s Peugeot estate car, which pulled up in a lay-by close to junction 14. Daniel’s last words were, ‘Are you going to kill me now?’ He was strangled with a knotted rope and buried in a shallow grave in woods adjoining Bradley Stoke, near the house that Morss shared with Guttridge. Two weeks later, both men returned to bury the body deeper in the ground.

Tyler and Morss took off for the Philippines. Tyler followed a similar pattern using a video camera to record his abuse with a dozen video tapes as evidence. In one tape he is seen haggling over the price of sex and reducing it from the equivalent of 75p to 50p.

Tyler and Morss liked the Philippines because they could continue to abuse children and no one would know. They could get away with it.

But eventually they fell out and Morss returned to the UK, where Daniel’s disappearance had triggered a massive police hunt and intensive media coverage. Six months later, in March 1995, foxes disturbed Daniel’s grave and a man walking his dog discovered the body.

In May, a BBC TV Crimewatch gave the hunt for the killers even more publicity and the programme triggered memories from a psychiatrist and prison officer from Wormwood Scrubbs. They rang police the next day with the names of the wanted men.

But old fashioned detective work had also paid off. As the police searched for links between East London and Bristol, they learned of the house in Bradley Stoke owned by Morss and Guttridge. Their names went straight to the top of the list of suspects.

Morss was arrested.

The net was closing on Tyler and his days on the run were at an end. The police were given a clue.

Olongapo City.

I was in the Philippines visiting Fr Shay when the call came through. It was from Supt Kevin MacTavish, a senior policeman attached to the Australian Embassy in Manila. He told Shay that Scotland Yard had sought his advice in helping to trace the wanted man. MacTavish could think of only one person who could track down the fugitive – Shay – and gave him the name of the man Scotland Yard were hunting.

Brett Tyler.

‘I’ll get on the case straight away,’ Shay told the Australian lawman.

He put an experienced investigator on the trail and they located Tyler’s hideout. At the time, some children were thought to be in the house. Tyler had won over the locals by paying for a few kids’ school fees. Tyler also posed as a priest and held church services in an outhouse. Shay asked for the fullest details of Tyler’s house with possible escape routes and the information was passed down the line. Based on Shay’s documentation, two Scotland Yard detectives flew out within days and Tyler was arrested for immigration violations and deported for overstaying his visa. This was considered the only way to capture the sex killer.

Tyler left behind incriminating photographs and letters. In one note, he wrote ‘kill the children for me.’

One year later, as the case came to trial, prosecutor, John Bevan told the jury, ‘You will hear evidence about as depressing an example of the dark side of human nature, man’s inhumanity to man and downright wickedness as you can imagine.’

The tragic story of Daniel Handley caused a sensation. Like everyone else, we were gripped by the tragic case. It provided the most dramatic example yet of how sex tourists could travel with impunity and the ease with which they could conceal their movements.

Even when arrested, Tyler was chased from the Philippines on an immigration offence.

More importantly, Tyler had abused children in Britain and the Philippines but he was hunted for the crime that he had committed in London. His crimes in Olongapo City were ignored and went unpunished.

This disturbing signal told men they could continue to travel abroad, abuse children, and get away with it.

The increasing media coverage, followed by the Irish Bill, and now the Daniel Handley case, had finally hit home. That year, the government did a sudden U-turn and announced that they would introduce extraterritorial laws for sex offences against children and would incorporate this into the 1997 Sex Offenders Act.

Much of the legislation was modelled on the Bill that Jubilee Campaign’s Parliamentary Officer, Wilfred Wong, had drafted two years earlier.

The government also introduced a sex register for offenders. The Home Office intended to impose a three months penalty for not registering but Wilfred recommended that this should be upgraded and consequently this was increased to six months imprisonment and a stiffer fine.

When news broke about the change in the law, many of our supporters – and some journalists – called to share in our celebration. It was an important, even historic, campaign.

I was surprised that it had taken so long, and had been such a struggle, to convince the authorities. What could be more important than protecting our children?

High profile cases such as Sarah Payne and Millie Dowler confirm that abductions and sex crimes against children require further resources for the police and mechanisms for swift action. Crimes against children should be given equal priority as murder and terrorism.

Anyone who harms a child should get this message: You can run but you can’t hide.



[This is an edited version of a chapter from Danny Smith’s book ‘Who says you can’t change the world?’]