Briton on child sex abuse charge in Cambodia orphanage
(Image Source)
The British founder of a Cambodian orphanage is facing prosecution for sexually assaulting a boy in his care.
Nicholas Griffin, 52, was held when police raided his isolated base in countryside near Siem Reap, in the north-west of the country.
Up to 100 children were moved to a safe house in an operation that involved British and local investigators.
Mr Griffin, originally from Wales, left Britain in 2006 before founding the Cambodia Orphan Fund, one year later.
He faces a potential 10-year jail sentence over a claim he sexually assaulted a 15-year-old boy.
Fortress-like building
He was originally held on suspicion of breaking child labour laws and his orphanage licence.
The orphanage manager, a Cambodian man, has been charged with the illegal removal of a child to the orphanage.
Jim Gamble, of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop), said Cambodian police are now examining claims of "institutional abuse" within the orphanage, which occupies an unusual fortress-like building.
Mr Gamble added: "The UK and Cambodia may have different legal systems and law enforcement practices, but we share a clear, joint commitment: to prevent harm to children."
He said the operation demonstrated the value of the organisation's international child protection network.
Briton on child sex abuse charge in Cambodia orphanage
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Briton on child sex abuse charge in Cambodia orphanage
Story Link & Sky News video
Last edited by shizzle on Tue Oct 26, 2010 1:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Andrew Drummond has sent us the CEOP press release.
BRITISH MAN CHARGED IN CAMBODIA AS ORPHANAGE IS INVESTIGATED
UK’S Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre assists Cambodian National Police investigation into alleged orphanage abuse
A 52 year old British man, Nicholas Griffin, has been charged in Cambodia and an orphanage is being investigated following collaboration between the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre, the Cambodian National Police (CNP), renowned NGO APLE (Action Pour Les Enfants) and the local investigating judge.
The charges relate to an indecent act against a minor under 15 years. The development follows intelligence received from members of CEOP’s International Child Protection Network (ICPN). A second man, a Cambodian national, has also been charged with unlawful removal of a minor.
CEOP’s support for the Cambodian police investigation forms part of Operation Relentless Pursuit, a central strand of ICPN activity. The network brings together law enforcement, NGO’s, child protection specialists and industry to deliver long-term benefits to children in the region.
The orphanage in question caters for between 59 and 69 children.
Working with specialist police teams, NGOs and prosecutors in Cambodia, CEOP is supporting both the investigation and the coordination of a safeguarding strategy for the orphanage to support the children’s welfare during the investigation. Officers based in Cambodia have liaised continually with an operational support centre back at CEOP’s headquarters in London to support the CNP activity on the ground.
Alongside operational activity, CEOP’s partnership work in the region has seen the creation of Advisory Panels in Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam and the delivery of child protection training to specialists.
CEOP's Chief Executive Jim Gamble, said:
“This operation clearly demonstrates the value of the CEOP’s International Child Protection Network because this development has come about as a direct consequence of intelligence passed to CEOP through that network.
Working alongside our NGO and child protection partners in Cambodia, CEOP is currently supporting colleagues in the Cambodian National Police with an investigation into allegations of institutional abuse within an orphanage. The operation is ongoing and our focus is on delivering operational support and child protection advice to assist the CNP.
Joint working with the diverse range of local and national NGO, law enforcement and child protection specialists who make up the ICPN enables us to build an intelligence picture of the threat that child sex offenders pose to children from in the region. The UK and Cambodia may have different legal systems and law enforcement practises, but we share a clear, joint commitment: to prevent harm to children.”
An orphanage in Cambodia can also include the provision of facilities for children from a range of backgrounds. An orphanage in Cambodia may, for instance, provide food, education and other welfare facilities to children who also have a home and parents in the traditional sense.
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I can't believe so many people were taken in by this guy. He was sleeping at the run down orphanage in the photo in early 2007 to 'help sort it out'. Anyone doing that is either a complete idiot or.....
Good to see the dodgy Cambodian manager has also been arrested, he's been using naive tourists to buy land for the 'homeless''orphans' for years. He must have a good few hectares of prime Siem Reap real estate by now.
Good to see the dodgy Cambodian manager has also been arrested, he's been using naive tourists to buy land for the 'homeless''orphans' for years. He must have a good few hectares of prime Siem Reap real estate by now.
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It was uploaded to this site two years ago (Oct 2008). At the time that the article was published, this was the only photo of Griffin floating around the net.the_purple_turtle wrote:Any idea how recent that photo is? The older girl on the right doesn't work there, not sure why she's even in it.
I've just edited the image so that none of the kids' faces are shown.
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He only got one year. What's up with the lenient sentences?
Briton jailed for child sex crimes in Cambodia
(AFP) – 2 days ago
PHNOM PENH — A Cambodian court on Friday handed a British orphanage founder a two-year jail sentence for sexually abusing boys at the home, a prosecutor said.
Nicholas Griffin, 53, was arrested in the northwestern tourist hub of Siem Reap last October and charged with committing indecent acts against six boys under the age of 15.
Half the sentence was suspended, meaning Griffin will spend one year behind bars, prosecutor Sok Keo Bondith told AFP.
The Briton was ordered to pay a fine of three million riel ($750), he said.
Griffin, who is believed to have left Britain in 2006, founded the Cambodia Orphan Fund, which housed around 70 children at the time of his arrest.
The orphanage is now under different management, said Samleang Seila, country director of the anti-paedophile group Action Pour Les Enfants.
Cambodia is engaged in a major drive to catch foreign paedophiles as it looks to shed its image as a haven for sex criminals.
On Thursday, a court in the capital Phnom Penh sentenced a 38-year-old British man to seven years in jail for buying sex from two underage girls.
Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... a29d9f.3c1
Briton jailed for child sex crimes in Cambodia
(AFP) – 2 days ago
PHNOM PENH — A Cambodian court on Friday handed a British orphanage founder a two-year jail sentence for sexually abusing boys at the home, a prosecutor said.
Nicholas Griffin, 53, was arrested in the northwestern tourist hub of Siem Reap last October and charged with committing indecent acts against six boys under the age of 15.
Half the sentence was suspended, meaning Griffin will spend one year behind bars, prosecutor Sok Keo Bondith told AFP.
The Briton was ordered to pay a fine of three million riel ($750), he said.
Griffin, who is believed to have left Britain in 2006, founded the Cambodia Orphan Fund, which housed around 70 children at the time of his arrest.
The orphanage is now under different management, said Samleang Seila, country director of the anti-paedophile group Action Pour Les Enfants.
Cambodia is engaged in a major drive to catch foreign paedophiles as it looks to shed its image as a haven for sex criminals.
On Thursday, a court in the capital Phnom Penh sentenced a 38-year-old British man to seven years in jail for buying sex from two underage girls.
Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/ar ... a29d9f.3c1
Romantic Cambodia is dead and gone. It's with McKinley in the grave.
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So what can we learn from this?
If ur going to be a pedophile u want to do it with boys as if ur caught u will spend less time in Jail and u will also be able to be on the recieving end of things during ur time locked up.
If ur going to be a pedophile u want to do it with boys as if ur caught u will spend less time in Jail and u will also be able to be on the recieving end of things during ur time locked up.
"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer." HST
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Linkage
We warned authorities about Nick Griffin, volunteers say
CHARITY volunteers who worked with Nick Griffin in Cambodia told Wales on Sunday of the disturbing behaviour they witnessed. Griffin abused boys under the age of 15 at the orphanage he set up in Siem Reap but was only convicted last week – five years after he founded the institution. Staff who worked alongside Griffin complained about him first in 2008 but the complaints were never proven and it was not until last year that he was arrested.
Sally Sayer, regional director of Volunteer Project Overseas, lives in Siem Reap and said she had become concerned about 53-year-old Griffin and the orphanage more than a year ago.
She said: “I didn’t have much to do with him at the start, but then in January last year I took over as project manager and I had a huge amount more to do with him. It was then that I started to look at things and think things were a bit odd. People were moving in to the orphanage and we did not know who they were. I was worried about the children. We took our worries to Nick and nothing was done about it. It was the whole set-up of the orphanage. I knew something was going on but I could not put my finger on what it was. I decided that we needed to pull out of the organisation."
“We started to ask questions about this man and what he had done before he came here. But we were ignored and accused of causing trouble and wanting to take over. There was one incident which I can remember, where we went for dinner one night and Nick came along. He brought one of the boys from the orphanage with him, he was about 14 years old. There was just something that wasn’t right with the body language between them. One of the volunteers came up to me and said ‘just tell me it’s not what I think it is’.
“The next day I went down to one of the coffee shops and the same boy was behind the counter. I asked why he was not at school and he said that he was spending time with Nick. He had an iPod with him and said Nick had given it to him. I just thought that it was very odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”
The group then severed all ties with Griffin.
Sally said: “Rumours started to circulate about a previous incident with some boys. I went to ask him about them and he told me that he was with some friends one night and they wanted to see some street kids. He said they played with the street kids for a while and then said goodbye. He said the street boys then followed him home and he agreed to let them in for a drink. Then one of the boys opened his drawers and he was worried they would steal something so he asked them to go.”
Sally first met Griffin two years ago, and said he appeared friendly at first but then he began to change.
“When he was first there he did not seem unfriendly but he was very arrogant and he became unfriendly. He had a house with a massive high fence around it. You see things day in and day out and you see small things in people’s body language.”
But she says she is just happy to get a conviction in a country whose attitudes to child abuse have been complicated.
She said: “In Cambodia, a girl’s virginity is considered more important than a boy’s. Boys are thought to be like diamonds, they can be cleaned, but girls are like cotton, and once they are dirty, that’s it. The abuse that Nick did was with boys. If I’m totally honest I’m just grateful for a conviction, it could have gone the other way."
“After Nick was arrested we arranged for a bus to pick up the children and take them in. But then one of the trustees came and is running the orphanage.”
Nick Marsh, a trustee of VPO, added: “I can’t say I’m happy about the sentence but even a week in a Khmer prison will be better than 10 years in one of ours.”
Griffin was arrested during a dawn raid, which involved dozens of officers and as many as 100 youngsters were rescued and moved to a safe house.
He was caught after a joint operation by officers from the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) and the Cambodian National Police.
He had been under investigation for more than two years following suspicions surrounding the orphanage, which looked after children up to age of 18.
According to CEOP, Griffin had run a number of orphanages in a “tourist hotspot”.
The orphanage is now under new management.
In a statement on the Cambodia Orphanage Fund’s website, posted during the investigation, Lidia Linde, of the fund, said she wanted to “guarantee that this nightmare would never happen again.”
She said: “ I will not tolerate any action that will put in risk the life and dignity of the children, especially those who live in conditions of poverty, vulnerability or those who are abandoned.”
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