Official Personal Non Governmental Governmental Closed A E I
Access
Restricted B F J Open-archival C G K Open- published D H L(Modified from Scott 1990, p 14)
Authorship refers to the origin of the document, while access addresses the availability of the documents to people other than the author. The authorship of a document can be either of a personal nature, which includes items such as diaries, address-books, calendars, personal correspondence and notes, etc. or of an official nature. Official authorship of documents is subdivided into documents produced by the government and those by non-governmental organisations. Closed documents are only available to a limited number of eligible people and no outsider can normally gain access. In the case of restricted documents, though, documents that are normally closed to the outsider can be accessed by special permission from insiders. In case of the other two categories, open-archival and open-published, documents can be consulted by anybody, the only difference being that open-published ones were produced specifically for public circulation, while the open-archival ones were not (Scott 1990).
As part of the case’s exploration, attempts were made to cover as broad a basis of documents as possible. In order to do so, an extensive search of archives and publications was carried out. The first step was to search for news that covered the events surrounding the case of Sarah Payne in order to arrive at a coherent picture of
the developments and identify key players. This included a detailed examination of the news archives of the News of the World, The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the BBC as well as various online news sources.
At the same time the academic, practitioner and political debate surrounding sex offenders, sex offender registers and community notification, with a special focus on developments from around 1996, was explored. The starting point of the mid-1990s was chosen because it was then that the debate about sex offender registers and therewith the questions about public access to such information and community notification started to become increasingly prominent within Britain. The main sources for this were academic publications, research findings, guidelines and governmental publications on the topic. Examples include consultation papers, legislative texts and debates, guidelines on sex offender legislation and the Houses of Commons’ and Lords’ Hansard, as well as various press releases, briefing notes, internet sites and publicity material published by organisations and charities working in the area of sex offender management and victim protection.
The broader developments and debates regarding sex offender registers and community notification taking place in other Anglophone countries were also examined, looking at the countries’ equivalents of the UK sources. The main focus of this was on America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all of which emerged as having experienced similar cases of ‘predatory paedophiles’ that led to outcries about sex offenders, and similar debates about community notification from the early 1990s onwards.
For the obvious reason that the more private a document is, the more difficult it is for the researcher to access it (Denscombe 1998), the majority of documents that were examined consisted of those openly available. However, it was possible to obtain some personal, non-governmental and governmental documents that fall into the categories ‘closed’ and ‘restricted’. While some of the documents were forwarded with the explicit request to ‘respect the fact that [these documents are] not for circulation or quotation’ and therefore cannot be referred to directly within this study, they provided some important insights and aided the understanding of the events that took place at the time. Simultaneously, however, it has been possible to access a
variety of documents that fall into categories A, B, E, I and J of the above classification, where the supplier(s) of the documents did not ask for such restrictions. These documents include internal memoranda, notes and draft documents, as well as various pieces of correspondence between stakeholders. As a result, all categories of documents, although to various extents, were drawn upon in the research. This inclusion of multiple layers of documents allowed for an intricate examination of the case, since the various records reveal both public and backstage developments.
To illustrate this further, Table 3.6 maps the used documents against the categories outlined in Table 3.5. In order to maintain confidentiality, the precise details of the documents are not included. The nature of the precise classification of a lot of these documents is also open for debate. Consequently, the sub-classification has in this case been simplified and been subdivided into ‘open’ and ‘restricted’ accessibility on the one hand and ‘governmental’ and ‘non-governmental’ authorship on the other.
All the documents were analysed manually. Through an iterative process of in-depth reading and re-reading, themes and sub-themes within the documents were identified and avenues for further investigation singled out. The identified themes were then colour-coded and compiled within a number of categories addressing the research themes and questions.
Given that documents are shaped by the structure, agenda and activities of the organization and individuals producing them, it is important to bear in mind that they are not neutral sources of information. Within documentary research things must also be checked from a variety of angles (Macdonald 2001, p 208) and interviews can aid in revealing both the assumptions and the motives behind the documents (Goddard 1993). The identification of such hidden agendas provides an important data source for this study. Consequently, in order to gain further understanding and to add to the insights gained from the documentary analysis, interviews with some of the key players within the policy network were arranged.