I’ve never written anything anonymously. But under these circumstances it feels right. The reason? I live next door to a convicted paedophile. 

Since finding out that our 71-year-old neighbour Alan (not his real name) had pleaded guilty to indecent assault of a minor, for which he was given a two-year prison sentence and is now on the Sex Offenders’ Register, my husband and I have been thrown into a moral maze.

Do we tell friends about Alan and risk him being lynched (in December 2008 a 52-year-old convicted paedophile was mutilated and stabbed to death in his London home) or do we keep quiet, risk-assess the situation and handle it ourselves?

David Wilson, professor of criminology at the Centre for Criminal Justice Policy and Research at Birmingham City University, says: ‘Having this information can cause real dilemmas. The key is to work out what to do with it so that you don’t cause mass hysteria.’

In the UK, there are around 31,300 registered sex offenders (it’s estimated that an additional 110,000 are not on the list), and in our borough alone there are about 100, although as a member of the public you can only be told how many there are, not their names and addresses.

The register is for professional use only, not public access, unlike in the US where Megan’s Law allows parents in a number of states to enter their postcode or a convict’s name to check if anyone on the register has moved in nearby.

The UK government is reluctant to give in to campaigns to introduce something similar, for fear that people would take the law into their own hands, as has happened more frequently in the States. Instead, key figures in the community – head teachers, employers, landlords, etc – are often given details of local sex offenders, and ‘controlled disclosure’ gives agencies a right to share information if someone poses a serious risk.

But for most people the only way of finding out if you have a paedophile living next door is if the case is written up in your local paper. In the absence of official guidance, people like us are left to work things out and manage the situation for themselves.

We moved into our house in 2003 and Alan was the first neighbour we met. He seemed pleasant and offered to put our bin bags out on collection day. We saw him as a well-meaning busybody who knew lots about people living nearby, including who had children of what age.

The woman we’d bought the house from had four sons, and Alan would often regale us with the story of how one of them fell off a wall into a spiky bush in his garden and he helped to get the prickles out.

He wore a baseball cap, which is apparently commonplace for child sex offenders – ‘to make them look like a hip granddad’, says Paul Roffey, director of RWA Child Protection Services and an expert in risk assessment.

We joked about Alan and privately called him ‘Peter File’, but never thought that the nickname would turn out to be frighteningly appropriate. 

Then in early 2006, when I was pregnant with my son, he started talking about a 30-something ‘godson’ who had now banned Alan from visiting him and his family of two children.

As the months passed, the story mutated into him being arrested and charged for an offence against the godson, dating back some 20 years to when he was a teenager and Alan was, in clichéd fashion, his Scout leader.

Whenever we got more information from him, chatting over the garden fence a few times a week, I just felt more confused. I remember a conversation in which Alan said, ‘I’ve been accused of doing things but I didn’t do them.’ Then he confessed he would plead guilty – but only because a trial would ‘do him in’.

I was perplexed – why plead guilty if you’re innocent? It was when he said, ‘I’m in court next week,’ that I realised things were serious. By now it was April 2007, and our son was six months old. But my husband and I thought that the trial would come and go without event.

The next week, Alan’s landlord paid us a visit. ‘You know what’s happened, don’t you?’ he said. ‘He’s been sent to prison for two years. I’m telling you because you’ve got a son and he was found guilty of assaulting a boy.’ He also said that after prison Alan would return to his flat: he had a regulated tenancy and couldn’t be evicted, despite his conviction.

In an instant our whole perspective changed. From now on we had to contemplate how Alan’s presence might affect our family life.

That summer, we spent long days in the garden with our son, vaguely relieved that Alan wouldn’t be popping his head over the wall, as he had often done in the past three years.

But before we knew it, it was April again, and there was Alan, haunted-looking from his time in prison, having served only a year.

Part of me freaked out that he was back. The local police were useless when we consulted them on whether or not to tell friends about him: clearly, there’s no strategy in place.

‘I wouldn’t like to advise you one way or another,’ said a WPC. ‘It’s really up to you. I think you have to judge how your friends would handle it.’ We realised then that our journey through this moral maze was to be an unaccompanied one.

Part of me understands where hysteria about paedophiles comes from – if the police and probation service won’t work with the public, they can’t be surprised when they end up thinking the worst and taking action themselves.

I’ve since learnt that if Alan had posed a ‘direct risk’ – for instance, if we were sharing a house with him and he was known to be a predatory paedophile – the police would have paid us a specific visit, reassuring us that everything was being done to ensure that our family was safe, and I wonder if a similar visit would have been helpful to us anyway.

I think Alan benefits from the fact that part of me feels sorry for him. Before he got sent down, he went to rally-driving meets with friends. He told me recently: ‘I don’t go any more. I’m not welcome.’ He also told me that he was put up for adoption as a baby and was himself abused in care.

I see him as a tragically lonely person whose recent history has isolated him further. I am aware that paedophiles tend to be experts in gaining people’s sympathy.

‘“Poor me” is a big part of their character,’ says Paul Roffey. ‘Nevertheless, a high proportion of those who exploit children have suffered a childhood trauma, not just about sex but about rejection, too.’ So I vacillate between pity and concern.

I haven’t told anyone apart from our parents. I’m not even sure other neighbours know about him, including the family with a boy and a girl next door. It amazes me that it’s not common knowledge – I suppose it wasn’t reported in the local press.

Most importantly, I haven’t told the mums who come to my house, mums whose children (mainly boys) are my son’s age.

What about the times when they played in the garden, with Alan, newly released from prison, next door? Might the parents feel that I played russian roulette with their children’s safety? If I were to tell them it probably should have been at the start – it’s too late now.

Alan’s conviction has definitely affected how we live. I wanted to buy a paddling pool last summer, but I’m reluctant because of Alan’s proximity. I won’t let my son run around the garden naked (an innocent pleasure), I stay in the garden with him if Alan is in his, as I don’t want him striking up a conversation ‘unchaperoned’, and we’re going to put up a higher fence.

Yet it has never occurred to us to sell our house, as some people might have done if they’d found out they had an Alan next door. We bought it as our ‘for ever’ house.

My husband points out that as Alan is 71 we’ll probably be around longer than him. If we did sell, and to someone with a young family, I don’t know if we’d feel obliged to say anything.

Professor Wilson says: ‘This is morally difficult. There are no simple solutions. My alarm bells would ring if he were asking to babysit or teach the piano. But he’s 71, his offence was a long time ago and against a teenager, so the risks to your son are not great.’

As the charge was only made quite recently, it has crossed my mind that perhaps Alan is guilty of other crimes, too, perhaps against youngsters who haven’t thought of bringing charges.

I think, ‘My son will be a teenager soon,’ but then reason, ‘at least I know who and where Alan is.’

I believe it’s the paedophiles I don’t know about that are more of a concern. As Professor Wilson says: ‘Your neighbour on the other side could be downloading child porn.’

Alan has just bought a camera and volunteered the information that what he can photograph is restricted by the terms of a Sexual Offences Prevention Order. If it comes near our son and his friends, we’ll report him and I think he knows it.

I’ve talked to him about his conviction, though I haven’t probed too much as I’m scared he’ll put up barriers. ‘The important thing is that you are aware of what he did, and he’s aware that you are aware of what he did,’ says Professor Wilson. ‘That’s a huge deterrent when it comes to reoffending.’

Our interaction with Alan is minimal, but as experts say that social isolation often makes offenders reoffend, I feel it’s important to keep talking to him.

In Canada, a scheme called Circles of Support and Accountability actively includes released sex offenders within the community, and offers support from the public to alter their behaviour. The reoffending rate has been cut by more than 70 per cent (compared to the UK Prison Service’s sex offender treatment programme which, on average, leads to reductions of just ten to 15 per cent).

Working with the statutory services, trained volunteers meet the offender each week and find out how they are, if they’ve spoken to their probation officer and taken their medication, and discuss how they’ve avoided falling back into offending behaviour.

It’s also being implemented in the UK, with local projects linked by a new national charity, Circles UK. Its chief executive Stephen Hanvey says: ‘We are keen to research it more, but we are seeing trends which seem to replicate the Canadian studies.’

Before I lived next door to a sex offender, I would have thought this scheme was crazy, but now I don’t.

I worry most when Alan says he’s lonely, because that’s when I think we’re all at our most vulnerable. My hope is that our informal chats, rather than giving him inroads into our lives, are helping him stay on the straight and narrow.

Paul Roffey says: ‘When you found out about your neighbour you probably thought your risk increased, but it’s lessened because you know. And once a crime has been committed, measures are taken to manage that risk.’

Alan now has visits from the police and probation service, and has to notify them of any changes in circumstance, for example, if he wants to move. But the risk management is also about letting him function in society, something most of the public have a real problem with.

So for the moment, I think I’m going to let Alan keep his anonymity, and we’ll have ours, too.

Others may feel we’re playing God with people’s lives, but I agree with Professor Wilson’s assertion that it’s a case of ‘keeping our enemies close’ – something we’re all likely to benefit from.

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