A surge in the number of seizures of child-like sex dolls by border officers has led investigators to identify dozens of previously unknown suspected paedophiles.
The lifelike silicone dolls, which weigh around 25kg (55lb) and can cost thousands of pounds, are being imported to the UK after being sold by traders on sites including Amazon and eBay, the National Crime Agency (NCA) said.
They are a “relatively new phenomenon” in the UK and should be criminalised, said Hazel Stewart, the operations manager at the NCA’s child exploitation and online protection command (Ceop).
Border Force officers have seized 123 such dolls in little more than a year since March 2016; seven people have been charged with importing them, including one man who was jailed last month.
Of the seven men charged, six also faced allegations linked to child abuse images.
Dan Scully, the deputy director for intelligence operations at the Border Force, said this showed that people who ordered the models, which are primarily manufactured in China and Hong Kong, often committed sex crimes.
“What’s critical, I think, for this investigation, [was that] these items were going to individuals, in many cases, who were committing other offences in relation to [the] harm of children,” he said. Scully added that that many were also previously unknown to UK law enforcement as potential paedophiles.
The NCA, Ceop and Border Force launched a joint investigation in March last year, which asked a paediatrician to examine some of the models seized to confirm their belief that the dolls were child-like in appearance and anatomy.
Border Force officers have powers to seize items they believe are indecent or obscene under customs legislation and those who order them can be prosecuted under a specific charge of importing an indecent or obscene article.
While NCA agents do not believe any similar models are being manufactured in the UK, Stewart said there were concerns over a gap in legislation because it is not illegal to own a child sex doll.
She said that identifying the legislation under which offenders could be prosecuted was a “head-scratcher” at first, adding: “Certainly, the work our colleagues at the Border Force brought to us was new.”
Scully admitted it was not possible to search every box going through customs and rely on officers to spot the hallmarks of a child sex doll delivery, which are often labelled as something else. Stewart admitted investigators were “playing catch-up”, adding that many of the investigations into the seizures, which were mostly of a single doll bought by one individual, were at an early stage.
Some cases that were marked “no further action” at the start of the investigation will also be reviewed and further prosecutions expected.
Asked if there should be new laws to combat the rise in child sex dolls, Stewart said: “I think it’s got to be through the full range of this criminality, from manufacturer to sale, to import, to possess – the full range.
“And we need to make sure it’s future-proofed in case there is the introduction of sexbots, sex robots.” Stewart said the dolls were unlike those that people might associate with “stag dos” and were the precursor to more sophisticated child sex robots, which she warned were “just around the corner”.
“They are the weight of a seven-year-old child, they are not something that is the traditional blow-up doll,” she said. “(They are) very, very different – more accurate anatomically.”
Andrew Dobson, 49, of Wistaston, Crewe, was jailed by Chester crown court in June for two years and eight months, in what is thought to be one of the first prosecutions for importing a child sex doll in the UK. And Turner’s case was described as setting an important precedent in how suspects can be prosecuted.
Turner was unable to be sentenced on Monday because a pre-sentence report had not been prepared. The judge, Simon James, said the importation of a child sex doll was an “unusual offence” and that it “adds a degree of complexity”.
Turner was freed on bail to be sentenced on 8 September for the importation charge and for pleading guilty at an earlier hearing to possessing or making more than 34,000 indecent images of children aged around three to 16.
Jon Brown, head of development at the NSPCC, said: “There is no evidence to support the idea that the use of so-called child sex dolls helps stop potential abusers from committing contact offences against real children.”