Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee 25 June 2025
That is a very good point. There are multiple ways that that could be answered. I believe that the police service of Scotland is fundamentally committed to the proper investigation and detection of crime and seeking to ensure that our communities are safe. I believe that it responds where it can to the challenges of the digital age. In so far as prosecutors are concerned, we prosecute many very difficult cases that involve the presentation of a vast variety of types of evidence that emanate from digital devices.
One example is a case that I prosecuted many years ago, regarding what was at that time the largest paedophile ring in the United Kingdom. A group of eight men were prosecuted for committing crimes against children. For the very first time in the history of Scotland, we prosecuted those men for conspiring to sexually abuse children because we were able to detect them as a result of tracing their actions through their use of the internet and the sharing of indecent images over their internet sites. Through good policing, we were able to secure evidence from America that related to the contents of their inboxes, to secure evidence from their digital devices and to present all of that in court to secure convictions of all eight accused. Two of the most serious offenders were convicted of committing a sexual act on a baby. The baby was identified through a digital image that we secured from the Hotmail inbox of another accused. We were able to trace that digital image through expert evidence that got the thumbnail of the digital image. We connected it to the metadata embedded in the accused’s own computer and also used very basic policing, through hand identification, to link an image of the accused’s hand to the digital image that we recovered that showed him sexually abusing an infant.
We have for a long time challenged ourselves in the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service to constantly try to revisit how offending is taking place, with what methods and in what areas and also to understand how all that impacts on the children in our society.
We can always think about how we adapt to changes in technology, but we must always fundamentally remember what the basic problem is. The basic problem of violence against women and girls is the deeply misogynistic attitudes that are held within society and societal norms that allow the wide-scale abuse of women and children to happen in plain sight without the appropriate response from society to deal with it. I go back to what I said at the beginning, that societal response is essential to the enormous problems that we are talking about.