DNA databases harm kids – and victims of crime

Together with about 250 others, my profile is on the National DNA Database (NDNAD) in connection with the rape and murder of my partner forty years ago. The police asked that samples should be volunteered during their 1997 re-investigation. Despite the firm assurance that they would be used in this enquiry "for the purposes of elimination only", these profiles remain on the database.

This can't be right. It was a lie that the samples were for the purpose of elimination only. Now the Child Database is under development, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that the authorities will display any greater scruples about the way in which data is managed and gathered than they have shown with the NDNAD.

If the authorities lie, then why should anyone else choose not to? And why should we trust them with our data? The NDNAD was at one stage promoted with an emotive question, "Ask the family or friends of any victim if they are in favour of the database, and they will invariably answer, 'Yes'." Well, I for one said, 'No'; but my MP didn't listen to my concerns and nor did others whom I approached.

Perhaps I can find some consolation, though: since inventing DNA profiling in the 1980s, Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys has argued consistently - and rightly, as I see it - that the NDNAD will be socially unjust unless everyone is on it; and no-one in government has listened to him either.

Being pragmatic, it's clear that a proportion of those who commit crimes aren't entirely sane. Irrational though it may be, they simply believe they will never get caught. Or, in the heat of the moment, they just don't care about the consequences.

Those who take a more cold-blooded approach will find ways to circumvent DNA tracing. Already, for example, some criminals spread a selection of other people's cigarette ends at the scene of the crime. There are, of course, more effective ways to lay a false trail or hide the evidence.

DNA profiling has, it's true, provided a result in a number of highly publicised cold cases. Future crimes, however, will become more difficult to detect. There is one factor that is by far the most important in solving crime: the co-operation of the general public. Co-operation doesn't mean turning us into a nation of curtain twitchers, snitching at every opportunity, but it does need a certain amount of trust that the system is fair.

If the authorities lie, then why should anyone else choose not to?

Misuse of the NDNAD has without doubt eroded goodwill towards the police; and announcements by a variety of high-flying politicians that they would be happy to be profiled has done little to restore this loss of trust. When it comes to the child database, it is clear that their progeny's data would be "shielded".

The inclusion of profiles of innocent people and children on the NDNAD, many only tangentially associated with any crime; the deceit in keeping samples volunteered "for the purpose of elimination only"; and the lack of response to the unanimous verdict of the European Court of Human Rights, which found that retention of profiles of innocent people infringes their rights - all these cannot but have eroded the public's trust.

"Don't get involved," rather than being the excuse of a few when the police ask for help, may well become the maxim of many. It is now being said of the DNA database that it doesn't provide a silver bullet solution, though that isn't the story we were being told a year or two ago.

The authorities' new one-click crimestop is, it seems, going to be the children's database. RYOGENS, or Reducing Youth Offending Generic National Solution, as part of the system is called, will collect and combine data from a wide variety of sources - schools, medical records, social services, census data, local council, police etc - and predict which children are likely to become offenders, though this part of the system is now promoted more on the basis of identifying those that are "at risk".

It analyses a selection of factors such as where they live; who their friends are; how stable their family is and how much income it has; how often they have been late for medical or dental appointments; their parents' mental and sexual health, and so forth. This is tackling the problem entirely the wrong way round. If the relevant factors in being able to predict a person's criminality are already well known, then by the same token so too are the causes the causes that need to be addressed directly, without having to identify anyone through intrusive recording of personal data on a nationwide scale.

And to address the causes rather than to punish the predictable effects in labelled individuals would not incur the undoubted costs of stigmatisation, loss of freedom, privacy and trust, and errors that will inevitably occur if this computerised overseer is brought into being. Most teachers don't need a database to know which of their pupils has a problem; nor are they short of ideas which would improve education.

Similarly with the police force. It may be over-idealistic to hope that a quiet word or a stern word with a tearaway will instantly reform them; but it makes more sense for the police to be out and about on the street rather than doing computerised paperwork or playing armchair detective. And medical practitioners often have a difficult enough job when dealing with sensitive issues without patients' additional reluctance to explain relevant details for fear that these may be recorded as a damaging database entry that is later used against them.

The argument "if you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to fear" didn't work with the NDNAD and it doesn't work any better here. Nor does the imposition on generally dedicated public servants of a further layer of meddlesome bureaucracy. Three crucial questions must be asked when personal data is stored, especially when children are involved. 1) Is the system secure? 2) Are those who access and manage the data essentially free from corruption? 3) Is it appropriate to collect and collate the data? The government's record speaks for itself in answer to the first question. Incompetence and bungling are words that spring to mind. As to the second, figures suggest that maybe ten percent of the population has a criminal streak, or that seven percent show psychopathic tendencies.

Misuse of the DNA database has without doubt eroded goodwill towards the police

Whatever the proportions may be, there's no obvious reason to think they are very much different in the public sector than overall. And though some criminals may indeed have been caught and excluded, others may be undetected. Any system would need to be as immune to those with access to it as it is to the tangible miscreants in the wider community. Clearly a multi-agency nationwide child database, even with monitored access, would fail that test.

To answer the third question: the problem is not just what use will be made of the child database now, it is what might happen in the future. The potential for misuse is one that would overwhelm the aspirations of even the greatest tyrants in history. And don't children have a right to make a mistake without carrying the burden until they are adult - or, indeed, for the rest of their life?

Though the records will supposedly be jettisoned when they become adult, what guarantee is there that this will actually be done? When DNA profiling was introduced, this was to have been on the basis that records of innocent or acquitted people would be removed from the database. There's no guarantee at all of what future use might be made of the children's data. Currently the UK is spending billions of pounds each year on database systems.

Appalling is too weak a word to describe the government's record on data security and waste in implementation of computer systems. Surely it would be better to spend less on national databases and more on tackling problems at a local level, and where solutions are already obvious. The children's database should be first to go. ·