8-year-old's rape leads to review of probation officer guidelines

The Corrections Department is tightening guidelines after a probation officer withheld information which might have prevented the rape of an 8-year-old Christchurch girl.

Guidelines came under review after a July internal Probation Service investigation into the case of a 17-year-old offender who raped a girl in a neighbourhood park after being placed at her school for community work.

The investigation found information about earlier sexual allegations against the offender were left out of a sentence-management report by a probation officer because she did not believe they were relevant.

Had they been included, it was unlikely the offender would have been placed at the school.

It also raised concerns about a second staff member - working in the Reducing Youth Offending Programme (RYOP) - who was alerted by the offender's mother to his past sexual misconduct, but who took five days to pass on the information.

The investigation found the probation officer acted inappropriately because she did not recognise the significance of the information received from Child, Youth and Family Services, and then failed to include it in the report or pass it on to relevant staff.

Probation and Offender Services general manager Katrina Casey yesterday said steps were being taken to ensure all information was made available to staff responsible for a particular offender.

Ms Casey said the department usually used convictions, rather than allegations, as the basis for its decision-making. However, where an offender was being placed near young children, all available background should be taken into account.

Ms Casey said the RYOP staff member's delay in passing on concerns raised by the offender's mother was "not appropriate" and said steps had been taken to ensure such delays did not happen again.

The author of the internal investigation, Nick Pearce, said in his report that the allegations against the offender should have been placed in the additional information section of the offender's sentencing planning indicator (SPI) document.

"The probation officer states that her reasons for not formally including the sexual information in his SPI were that: it was not relevant to the current offending; it did not appear to be directly relevant to [the offender's] sentence management; it did not relate to any of [the offender's] identified offending needs."

The SPI document is used following sentencing to help guide the sentence management process.

Guidelines at present state the additional information section of the report should include "any other relevant information (for example, other barriers to compliance, accommodation, employment, attitude, travel, childcare, etc)".

One of the investigation's recommendations calls for the review of guidelines for what potentially significant information should be included in sentencing-management reports.

The recommendations also call on the department's Christchurch area manager to provide an assurance that appropriate actions have been identified to ensure all staff recognise and immediately act on information revealing a significant threat to public safety.

Corrections Minister Paul Swain has asked for a report into the department's progress on the recommendations early next month.