23/07/97 - `Sophie is never far away'
Chris Hook
The Daily Telegraph

IT TAKES very little prompting for any parent to remember what happened to Sophie Hook during the last hot weekend of July two years ago. Her name is still fresh in the catalogue of crimes against children, so fresh that even now there must be some adults who cannot bring themselves to allow one of summer's innocent childhood adventures: camping out on the lawn.

Sophie Hook was seven when she was snatched from a tent in her uncle' s garden in Llandudno, north Wales. She was taken down to the sea by a local paedophile, raped and strangled.

Within 24 hours, police arrested a man who was known in the area as "mad Howard", an aggressive misfit who had abused children before but had always escaped conviction.

Howard Hughes was sentenced to life imprisonment last year. As a way of coping with the gaping hole in his family, Sophie's father, Chris, began to channel his anger into campaigning for changes in the law to give children better protection from sexual predators.

At times, he sounds pleased with progress - a paedophile register will be introduced in September - but he has never made the mistake of thinking it would help him personally, and it hasn't.

"You struggle to see a way forward," he says. "I sometimes think I would much rather up sticks, take the family and go off and run a sheep farm where we are not known. But you don't escape that way. Sophie's never far away and I don't know what we would achieve by doing it."

Just before Christmas, his wife, Julie, gave birth to a daughter - "the most positive thing that has happened to us since Sophie's death" - so once more they have four children: Jemma, 11, Joe, seven, Ellie, three, and now Georgia, aged seven months.

But they would consider it crass if anyone interpreted the new arrival as a replacement for Sophie. "It [the birth] doesn't cancel out anything," Mr Hook says firmly. "It just doesn't." He says if anyone inquires how many children he has, he always answers five. "Well, I have. Sophie's very much part of our life; we talk about her a lot."

Mr Hook, 39, is a director of an advertising company in Cheshire, struggling to keep his campaigning, his work and his family life in some sort of balance. "I do find it very difficult," he says in the flat, weary voice of a man who has become used to screening out any show of feeling.

"One minute, I can be on the phone talking to a chief constable about child protection measures and the next, I'm listening to a client's brief or problems with a project. Then I go home and there is all the emotion there. It never leaves you anyway, but it just slaps you in the face when you greet the rest of the children and there's one missing."

On the second anniversary of Sophie's murder, it is clear that Mr Hook has found little to assuage his frustration - and nothing whatever to ease his grief. It sits like a lump of lead on his chest, stifling all distractions. He dreads getting into conversation with strangers on his work trips because he can see where it will lead.

What do you do? Are you married? How many children? "If it's going that way, I just curtail it; I probably come across as being quite rude," he says. "People don't know how to react. You find yourself being brave, being controlled for other people's benefit and it's just exhausting. There are times when I'd rather just walk away than engage in conversation."

He feels it was right to keep his other children at the primary school Sophie had attended. "But it's certainly difficult seeing Sophie's classmates growing up, because they're growing up, and Sophie's not one of them."

He can't turn on the television without being reminded of child abuse in some form, and shuns the newspapers for the same reason. It jars when strangers address him by name because they recognise him as Sophie Hook's father.

Everyday hyperbole - "I could have strangled him" or "She'll kill me" or "It was murder" - makes him want to tell people they don't know what they're saying. But he stops himself. Chris and Julie Hook were diligent, careful parents and they are trying hard not to be over-protective now.

"I would say we are no more protective than we always were," says Mr Hook. "We are very wary, but we can' t inhibit the children too much. Their lives will never be the same; they know that."

What astonishes them is that Sophie was "doing something completely innocent, camping out in the garden, as we had done in our childhood" - yet every day they see urban children, unsupervised and vulnerable, to whom nothing happens. "We think: Sophie was never put in that danger."

The couple hardly ever go out. "We find it difficult to engage in any sort of social activity. It is exhausting enough just carrying on the normal functions of everyday life."

Neighbours in their home village of Great Budworth, Cheshire, have respected their privacy. Both Julie's pregnancy and Georgia's birth were kept secret, yet a tabloid newspaper reporter turned up on their doorstep after the baby' s christening in May.

"It was a very private and intensely emotional occasion," says Mr Hook. "We were very upset at the intrusion." They intend to mark this year's anniversary of Sophie's death as quietly as the last. In the weeks after her murder, they contacted a number of self-help groups offering bereavement counselling.

"They obviously work for some people, but they don't work for us," says Mr Hook. "You have someone on the end of a phone or someone who writes to you, and really what they're doing is off-loading their grief on to you. It's hard enough carrying your own grief without shouldering someone else's as well."

Last year, Mr Hook was offered an unexpectedly positive diversion when the BBC invited him to explore the American way of dealing with paedophiles in a Heart of the Matter programme. He went to Washington state to observe how the police monitor, control and inhibit the activity of sex offenders after their release from prison.

Mr Hook now believes that the national sex offenders' register to be launched in Britain merely scratches the surface. Establishing a database means that the police - but not the public - will be able to track sex offenders when they come out of jail.

It falls far short of a public notification scheme, such as the one in Washington, where high-risk paedophiles are made known to neighbours and the media. But Mr Hook sees grave shortcomings even in that:

"It would deal only with those convicted of child abuse; what it misses is the great swathe of people who abuse on a regular basis and are not reported. They are going undetected. This is the problem police face and it is the concern of every parent. There are an estimated 110,000 people engaged in some form of paedophilia out there."

Only after Sophie's death did the Hooks learn that there was an active paedophile ring in Llandudno. "My sister-in-law and her husband, who lived there, did not know that either," says Mr Hook. "We were told Sophie was unlucky: she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But I dispute this. Sophie should have been safe. People knew Hughes for what he was: that's the hard part. "Paedophiles are not weird, dishevelled, easily identifiable characters. They tend to be intelligent and manipulative, and they manoeuvre themselves into positions of trust with children - scout leaders, music teachers, babysitters. Some are friends of the family."

Mr Hook is now urging the Home Secretary to conduct retrospective reviews of people who work with children as unpaid volunteers. A public notification scheme, he admits, is highly controversial and would need delicate implementation of the kind he witnessed in the US.

Badly handled, it could lead to lynch mobs and vigilantes taking the law into their own hands. "Any parent - from the Lord Chief Justice to Fred Smith - would want to know if there was a high-risk paedophile living in their area," he says.

"But it's one thing knowing, quite another knowing what to do about it." He argues that since recidivism is high among paedophiles, they should not be released into the community without exhaustive checks, if ever. "People who say paedophiles are entitled to their civil liberties and should be rehabilitated are talking hogwash," says Mr Hook.

"The likelihood that they will re-offend is very high. It's like letting a dangerous dog out into the community and saying: `Sorry, folks, we can't muzzle it. You're just going to have to wait till it attacks somebody again and then we'll put it down.' But then it's too late. It's mutilated somebody."

Mr Hook's composure is remarkable. His hands are still, his voice never rises or wavers and he looks you straight in the eye while expressing the most vehement feelings. Sometimes he sounds dog-tired of chasing the arguments back and forth.

Would he like to follow the American example of displaying posters of known paedophiles to alert the public? "I don't know what I'd like," he says abruptly. "I do know what I' d like; I'd like Sophie back. And that will never happen.

Like any parent, I would like to be informed if there is a paedophile living in my area, but how that information should be disseminated I'm not sure any more." Mr Hook has imposed no time limit on his campaign for change but doubts his ability to chase for ever.

He has his wife, his family and his business partners to think of. "You've only got so much drive. I tend to do it in spurts. I can't do too much. I won't be sucked into it." He is exasperated by the conflict of needing a platform for his lobbying yet detesting personal publicity. "We're not the Royal Family," he says.

"We're not here for public consumption. We're an ordinary family - or rather we're not now, we're abnormal - and we want to get on with our lives as best we can."

Kidscape charity is campaigning for tighter controls on paedophiles. For its leaflet Protect Children from Paedophiles, send two stamps and an s.a.e. to Kidscape, 152 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 9TR