Sue Black Catches Paedophiles by Looking at the Marks on Their Hands

I feel a bit of a fraud because I was the person sitting in the front row not with a connected device not having been taught anything online not having any social media skills whatsoever so I am the archetypal Luddite and what I'm here to do is to seek help and not help for myself but help for those that we work with I am a scientist but I'm not an ivory tower scientist I'm don't philosophize greatly I'm not really very bright but I work in an area where most people don't want to work and so it makes me a little bit of a social outcast in terms of the field in which I operate but we do operate in some really really difficult and challenging situations I'm a human anatomist which means that on a day job I dissect the dead human and teach about the human body and my other job as a forensic anthropologist is to help to identify those who are deceased but also help to identify those in living conditions where justice requires us to assist so it's not going to be a terribly easy presentation and for that I apologize but it is an extremely important subject and something that I think every single one of us has a social responsibility to try to understand if I can share with you the case that started this all for me and it was in 2006 now normally the kind of cases that I'm involved in my area of expertise is in human dismemberment so if you go home and decide you want to cut your husband or your wife or whoever up into several pieces I'm the person who'll come along and we'll identify what it was you did when you did it and and what implement you used to do it but I also do a lot of work on the identification of the child and I think that's why this case came to me from the Metropolitan Police in 2006 a young teenage girl believed that in well what she did was the a young teenage girl confirmed that throughout the night her father would come into her room and he would interfere with her while she was sleeping she told her mother and her mother didn't believe her so what she did the most incredibly brave young woman was that she turned on her skype camera and she left it running all night and I'm sure you know better than I do that if you leave your skype camera running it goes into near-infrared mode and what's interesting about near infrared mode is that you can identify the superficial vein patterns associated with human anatomy because the infrared light interacts definitely with the deoxygenated blood that sits inside the blood vessels so when you look at the human body through near-infrared the veins stand up like black tram lines so what we were able to do was we were able to trace the vein pattern associated with the father and the vein pattern associated with the offender and there were no differences they matched so we went to court now the court you've you've heard is a very restrained area and this was the first time that evidence of identification had ever been presented in this format in the court so what the judge does is he holds of whadya he says to the jury off you go go and have a cup of tea we need to decide whether this is science or this is witchcraft and we need to decide whether we're going to admit it we're going to allow it into our courtroom and the reason that they permitted it into the courtroom was because we were in atomists and since the 1500s and Vesalius and before we've known about the extent of human variation we've exploited it more recently in terms of our biometrics industries but we've known it as a Natomas for a very very long time so we're permitted first time in the UK ever to give evidence on superficial vein patterning as a means of identifying or attempting to identify a perpetrator and a suspect of child sexual abuse the jury came back and find the father and not guilty I have to ask at half-past four who else was in their house at that time that had a superficial vein pattern that matched that of the offender and we asked the court because we were devastated we asked the court what happened what did we do wrong do you think they just didn't understand the science and what came back from the courtroom was the most disturbing thing that I've ever heard what they said is no the jury probably were okay with the science I suspect they just didn't believe the girl because she didn't cry enough she wasn't sufficiently upset so where are we injustice when at the end of the day science that is based on a good solid foundation can't persuade our public can't persuade our jury that allows us to protect our children so what we did was we realized that this was an area clearly that required a lot of research and we set about collecting the databases doing the research writing the papers all the things that academics have to do so that the court decides that you are not witchcraft and to give you some idea of how these look these are my hands and if you look at the one on the top right then those dotted blue lines are my superficial vein patterns on the back of my right hand and the cladogram to the right allows me to look at the variation within it and we have not been able to find any two hands that have the same superficial vein pattern if you doubt me thank you for bringing your own chemistry and biology experiment with you you've got two of them have a look look at the back of your right hand I guarantee you the pattern of veins is different to the one on your left if your hands are fat look inside your wrists and you'll see the veins there they're different between your right and left hands they're different in identical twins they're different in any two individuals when you take that in accordance of all the other features so the little blue ovals are all my freckles so I have a redheaded gene which means I have got freckles up the wazoo and the pattern of those are independent so that they are totally unique to you whether they're freckles or their their Nev eye or their birthmarks or their moles or the fact that you're a little bit older and their liver spots they will be different on any two the little white squares are my scars I'm not a very careful anatomist so when you give me a sharp scalpel then there's where the scars end up but it tells you something certainly about my occupation and if you look at the skin creases on your knuckles of every single finger the pattern of skin is different across every single finger across both of your hands and they formed when you were a fetus inside your mum and they've not changed since then what you can also see when you look at the infrared one which is the bottom right just what the effect of freckles looks like it's not pretty but you can see the amount of human information that's in there for us to be able to use and even things like jewelry that when that wedding ring comes off the ball and chain does not disappear ladies and gentlemen then we can see the implants of jewelry that you use habitually and the relationship that has of an interaction with environment so when we take all of that together and we look at those then what we're able to do is we're able to use that information to assist in investigations for example mr. Rakesh mr. Rakesh videoed himself sexually abusing and raping a young child repeatedly and child sexual abuse is one of those really rare crimes where the perpetrator films themselves committing the act and the reason they do that is twofold first of all it's to be able to relive the experience and to also know that it is a part of their Anatomy that is interacting with the child and those images that they create they will put online and they will put them online because it allows them to have a greater profile within their community so that are gold stars depending upon what level of depravity you are as a child sexual abuser and it's also a currency you can sell these images in terms of gaining allowing other people to gain access to them so that we know in terms of the crimes and the volume of the crimes that we can do just a little to help you can see from mr. attaches right thumb were able to compare what is the offender image on the left were the suspect image on the right and in terms of mr. Akash he also had a clinical condition he had something called melanin each year and you can see that there's a dark stripe of pigmentation up the fingernail which you can see on the offender image which is on the bottom and the suspect image which is on the top when all of that information in our report is put in front of mr. Akash who has been no comment up on to that point he changes his plea and he changes his plea to guilty he's given a 15 year sentence and the judge requested to see the videos which is very rare and the reason she did is she wanted to try to understand the enormity of the effect on this young child and she wanted to be able to witness the depravity of mr. Akash so that he could be appropriately sentenced he will serve 15 years in prison and when he's released he will be deported these are the kinds of cases that we do on a daily basis the accolade given to mr. Huckle was that he was the UK's most prolific pedophile there were 91 charges of rape and molestation against him for children as young as six months and between six months and 12 years over an 8-year period here again as there frequently are was no comment no comment no comment throughout the entirety of the police interrogation until the reports landed on the desk that compared the anatomy of the suspect and the anatomy of the offender they decided that they would go forward with 22 of those charges and he was given 20 to life sentences he will spend a minimum of 25 years in prison but it's likely that in fact he will spend longer these cases are just the tip of an iceberg we can probably only take on about 50 cases a year because what we do is so labor-intensive the images that we have are often very poor quality the videos are fairly poor quality sometimes the police photographs are even worse quality than in fact the offender ones which is an entirely different set of challenges for us but our team is very small and we're the only team that does this within the UK and we do a lot of case work over Europe as well 82% result in a change of plea that's an enormous result because that means that we free up a lot of time in the courtroom but it also means that these victims don't have to go into court to give evidence they're not giving evidence against their father their mother's boyfriend or their next-door neighbor we've been able to secure 28 as now 30 to life sentences and over 300 years of incarceration but there's a huge problem here and that absolutely gargantuan problem which is why we need your assistance if the work that we're doing if you put it into an equivalent of the size of the scale of the problem then we are probably the hair on the leg of a flea that are sitting on the top of an iceberg because the enormity of child sexual abuse and the sharing of images of abuse is extensive the statistics we cannot ignore one in every 20 children in the UK have experienced child sexual abuse one in every three children we know don't tell and so we have really no idea but the statistic says that probably one in every six people have experienced unwanted sexual advances and when you look at how many people are in this room you know who you are and you know what the effect is that that has on you over ninety percent of child sexual abuse is from people that we know so we think our children are safe they're looked after by people we know they are the ones who are most likely to transgress and to abuse our children and really worryingly those who are most vulnerable disabled children are three times more likely to be abused than any other child over 45,000 cases a year reported in the UK that's a hundred and twenty-four cases day every single week that's the size of a middle-sized school of the children in the UK being sexual abuse it's absolutely an utterly unacceptable of us in terms of our society and we know of at least 40,000 who are registered as sex abusers within the UK now we've got technology available to us surely there is something within technology that can assist us and we know that we can design AI it's crime we know that in 2015 we were talking about the lowest level of car theft ever recorded because technology had become so clever that we've been able to put all of these devices into our cars so it wasn't worthwhile for the criminal to steal them if we can generate that amount of excitement about protecting a vehicle a piece of metal then we surely must be able to have some excitement about being able to protect our children but the one thing we know about criminals as they love a challenge and when you've got to a point of of designing out the crime they find a way to overcome your technology and so we never have one solution we have to keep having repeated solutions what is the technology that's involved in child sexual abuse it's very simple it's all those things that you put your hands up to a few moments ago of being connected the paedophile uses what is available to all of us mobile phones the laptops the desktops the iPads the hard disks the cameras those are the means by which they record themselves committing their own crime if we can design out crime and cars surely at the end of the day as a society it's not too much to ask you with your incredibly huge brains and ingenuity to help us design out a way in which we can prevent people from taking these images of children are not only taking them but uploading them and not just uploading them but sharing them I cannot believe that there is not a simple solution to this but I am the Luddite who doesn't have a single device that connects to anything anywhere I can't solve this problem but I do believe that somebody can and that would be the most tremendous step forward when you are a victim of child sexual abuse you're not a victim for one day you're a victim for the rest of your life and the opportunities that are lost in that childhood is something that we all need to vehemently rally against it is a global challenge and it's a global challenge that I set to you today on wired live in the presence of Google let's do it let's protect our children let's stop protecting our cars and start protecting our children thank you very much indeed what's you [Applause]

Channel: WIRED UK

Views: 3,970,240

Rating: 4.9018645 out of 5

Keywords: wired video, wired magazine, wired uk, wired, wiredlive, sue black, wired live, forensics, crime, investigations, science

Id: Qjqa8oTikP8

Length: 16min 59sec (1019 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/gaugeMageRay]

To be honest, even if she did cry enough, she’d be accused of faking emotion for money. I.E R Kelly fans.

[u/BadMan125ty]

That's why I said even if there was footage of Mike abusing boys, fans would have any excuse to deny it.