When the Criminal Records Bureau says you’re a violent criminal, it’s not easy to put the record straight. Recently, I decided to volunteer with The Samaritans. It won’t surprise you to hear I found out a good deal about myself in the process. What might surprise you is that what I found out was that I was a violent criminal.
The revelation came after I’d sent off my details for what is know as an ‘enhanced disclosure’ check by the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). Anyone who applies to work with children or vulnerable adults is usually checked, so I wasn’t anxious about it at all. In fact, by the time the results came back, I’d already passed the selection process, completed the training and done a few shifts taking calls from vulnerable people. Then the CRB came back. The enhanced disclosure for me contained the following conviction details. ‘Threatening abusive behaviour to cause harassment/alarm/distress on -Public Order Act 1986 S.4A(1)’. This -conviction was recorded, according to the CRB, in Criminal Court Number 1 in Alicante, Spain on 1 October 1990. In the field marked ‘Disposal’ are the words: ‘Imprisonment 1Yr.’
This was a shock. I have never been convicted of any crime and never been in prison, in Britain, Spain or any other country. And a number of distinctly peculiar facts surrounded the whole affair. First, I had already had a CRB check relatively recently, carried out for Kingston Council when I volunteered for a child mentoring scheme, but no one spotted my ‘conviction’ then. What if I had been a violent convict with a genuine record? How did I ever get to be left alone with vulnerable children? And if the conviction had appeared afterwards, how come it had been backdated to 1990?
Another odd fact is that I have been to Spain several times since 1990.
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