Covering it up
The revelations this week that an Oxford student was convicted on eight counts of downloading child pornography and then summarily returned to continue his studies without informing his college or the University raises fundamental questions about the institution’s ability to call students to account.
As a spokeswoman for the University commented to this newspaper, the nature of our country’s criminal justice system means that criminals are not obliged to declare a conviction (although applicants would have to reveal it on their UCAS form). This means that your college next-door neighbour could have been convicted of violent physical offences, theft, causing death by dangerous driving or indeed, serious sex offences, and then have returned to continue their studies on your doorstep.
Anyone convicted of one of these offences should, in theory, be brought straight before the University’s Disciplinary Court and probably sent down. But if they do not deign to mention their conviction, then unless they come to court in Oxford, it is highly unlikely the University will ever find out. Data protection legislation is a fundemental tenet of our society and has much to recommend it, but it should not be used by convicts as a shield to their criminality.
Take, for example, the case of the recently convicted sex offender, exposed today in The Oxford Student. Surely the hundreds of graduate students who are parents would not only be aggrieved, but distraught to discover that the University has no safeguards in place to ascertain that one of its members has been convicted of possessing child pornography.
While we are not suggesting that downloading child pornography is necessarily connected to paedophilia, the industry of pornographic child abuse is directly supported by the sick demand for such images and this is a situation that the university, and indeed society, should not tolerate.
26th May 2005