Mark Brayne: Tonight is an important occasion. The tragic story of the murders in Soham in 2002 is an emotive one, and a story which captured the imagination of not just the United Kingdom. It attracted a great deal of attention around the world, and raises many questions. How does the coverage reflect on objectivity, accuracy and the media's relationship with local communities? What of the emotional involvement of reporters themselves as they work with the victims, the bereaved and the police?

We have people here at this discussion from journalism, from the caring professions, colleagues from the Metropolitan Police, and journalists not just from London, but from local newspapers as well.

Many of you already know Tim Alban Jones, the Vicar of Soham — and we're particularly grateful you've been able to join us tonight, Tim. You have been a central figure in the Soham story, and you were awarded the MBE in the New Year's Honour's List for your work with the community there.

I have done just a bit of research. Tim is Vicar of St. Andrews, and became very much a focus for the media during the tragedy, during the search for the girls and immediately afterwards, as well as during the trial. I found a couple of comments about you from some of your colleagues in the Church of England. They describe you as ‘exemplifying the very best of Christian love.' And in your appeal at the Ely Cathedral Memorial Service for Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, you expressed the hope that the best and most lasting memorial to the girls should be changes in the way we all behave towards each other — with the message that Good is stronger than Evil. So Tim, over to you to start us off.

Tim Alban Jones: Until August 2002, if you told people that you came from Soham, they would accept that information with a polite mixture of disinterest and incomprehension. Even when you explained that Soham was a small market town halfway between Ely and Newmarket in the East of England, you could see that the information wasn't meaning anything. It wasn't registering. Since the events of that summer that we all know only too well, we residents of Soham find we don't need to explain where our town is any more. If anything we now tend to say we come from Cambridgeshire and hope that it will be left at that.

Sometimes, people ask me what I do, and if I'm being unkind, I'll say I'm in clerical work. And if they manage to work out from that that I'm a parson, I'll say, ‘Yes, I'm a Vicar.' And they say, ‘Where are you the Vicar of?' And I find myself saying, ‘I'm the Vicar of Wicken.' Which is entirely true, but not quite the entire truth, because I have two parishes, Soham and Wicken. If you say you're from Soham, it gets a knee-jerk reaction that we're not too keen on.

Holly and Jessica went missing on a Sunday evening, the fourth of August, and the first I knew of it was in the middle of that night, when one of the Sunday School teachers came and banged on my door, wondering if, perhaps, the girls might have got locked in the Church after Evensong. The next morning I quite expected that they would have been found safe and well. As we all know, events took a very different turn. By the Wednesday of that week it was decided that it would be appropriate to hold a short vigil service for the girls.

That afternoon, my wife and I went into Cambridge to buy some candles for the service, and on our return from the shops I can still vividly recall that there were 27 messages on the answer machine, mostly from the media wanting details about the service. I can remember sitting at my computer typing away furiously and then slaving over a hot photocopier as my wife dealt one after the other with all these messages.

There was nothing in the course of my training that could really have prepared me for what happened. Not due, I think to poor training or inadequate preparation; merely a reflection that what happened was so unusual, so unexpected that nobody could prepare for it. Now, as we face the start of yet another new year, removed from the immediacy of things and with the passage of time, I sometimes feel that what happened that summer has a certain unreal, or even surreal, quality about it. It's sometimes hard to remember that the people of Soham — and I — actually went through all that, and did so in the spotlight of the world's media.

I ought to say that the only reason at all that I got involved with the media was because I hoped that if they — you — were bothering me, then you might be leaving the families alone; and it would be much better for Jessica's and Holly's families to have one less thing to worry about without having people banging on their doors.

The scale of everything took us all quite by surprise. It was quite unprecedented. It caught everybody on the hop — the police, the Civil Protection Unit, I think even (dare I say it) people like you, the broadcasters and journalists. So I shouldn't really have been surprised. But we were, all the same. Comparisons were drawn between what happened in Soham and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The police's electronic Book of Condolence, for example, had 200,000 hits in the first week; significantly more than for that of the Princess, though I suspect that's to do with increased access to the Internet.

There were journalists absolutely everywhere. In a small town of 9,000 we had 500 journalists on the day of the police press conference from the grounds of St Andrews Church, when it was announced that the bodies had been found. Journalists came from all over the world. Quite extraordinary. I was somewhat bemused to be doing live interviews with Radio New Zealand as well as ones recorded for French, Danish, Swiss, Belgian and Portuguese Television, amongst others. I think it was the scale of the thing that was just so difficult.

I was a complete ignoramus when it came to news. And it was an eye-opener to see what happens when the media circus rolls into town. All of us who are on the outside, if you like, have seen the pictures of batteries of cameras and all those sort of things going on. But it's quite another thing — an absolutely other thing — to be on the receiving end of all that if you're not used to it.

I know that many people in Soham would echo my thoughts on this, because they have experienced similar emotions and have told me about it. We felt that we'd been overtaken, taken over by the sheer number of people. I ought to say that I have slightly contradictory thoughts on this here because, by and large on a personal level, broadcast and print journalists were, to me, polite, charming and sensitive; with one or two disagreeable exceptions. But perhaps my dealings with your profession were atypical. Certainly there's pretty much an unbridled animosity towards many of your profession from many of my parishioners.

A few thoughts on what it felt like to be on the receiving end of all that battery of attention. One of the things I found particularly striking was the endless duplication — no, not duplication, not even triplication but sometimes the quadruplication or even quintuplication — of the BBC. It's perhaps easy to kick a man when he's down and I don't want to do that, that's not at all what I'm after. But it did seem to me a certain wastefulness of resources.

The British broadcasting media were infinitely more sensitive than the foreign ones, and for that I'm very grateful. Thank you for that, and thank you for your tact and discretion. I know you're governed by codes of conduct, but it is still appreciated. And broadcasters, of course, have a great handicap in that you're far more visible than the print media. A journalist for a newspaper just needs a pen and notebook and they're away. But when you roll into town with a satellite truck, you can't miss it. And of course people tend to tar all the media with the same brush.

The print journalists were not quite as sensitive or thoughtful or accurate in my experience. Sometimes they can be far more damaging. I had a particularly extraordinary interview with a gentleman from The News of the World. What I said and what was printed bore very little resemblance.

What about now? I'm sure I'm being hopelessly naïve when I say that I hoped we might be left alone once the verdict had been reached. I knew, really, that every time there was another development in the story, people would come back wanting a comment. And that has been the case.

Interesting word, this — “the story”. I know that's what journalists refer to, but when you're on the receiving line of it, when you're actually living it, when it's real life, it doesn't feel like a story to you.

The events this week about Maxine Carr (Ed: applying for early release from jail on a tagging arrangement, and having that turned down) have provoked the most extraordinary flurry of interest, with people wanting me to write things and say things. Why on earth the rest of the British public wants to know what the Vicar of Soham thinks about Maxine Carr's early release or otherwise, I cannot imagine. I've got plenty of things to say about what happened when it was happening in Soham, and I think that's a legitimate thing to do. But why now? Why do people want to hear what I have to say? I can't understand that.

And if I do give a comment, does that change anything? Will it make it better? I think it could certainly make it worse. My role primarily throughout all this has been that of a parish priest caring for a community and two families who've been through the most terrible bereavement. I could quite easily jeopardise that by becoming some sort of quasi celebrity; a role which I have no intention of seeking.

What about our town of Soham? I know that we are at present the last name on a litany of disasters like Dunblane and Lockerbie, Hungerford and possibly Aberfan. The very name Soham conjures up just one image from which I think it may take a whole generation to recover. But I think our tragedy was the first to happen in the world of 24-hour news coverage, and I suspect that is significant. There are lessons to be learnt, surely, from that.

And what about the journalists? Many of the journalists who covered the story told me that they'd never been so involved in a story before. For them, many of them, it was the longest domestic story they'd ever covered. It was a sobering sight to see some of our tough and hardened broadcast journalists standing in my parish church with tears running down their faces as they looked at a picture of two little girls who'd gone missing. And I suspect that a degree of objectivity may have been lost by the personal involvement in the story. Anyone who is a parent felt immediately involved in what was going on. And it doesn't need me to tell you that journalists are people first and journalists second; at least they should be.

Perhaps journalists expect to be professional, detached in a sort of superhuman way all the time. But they — you — need to be aware that sometimes things happen that will get to you. Events like those in Soham can slip through the defences; you need to know what to do, where to go, who to talk to when that happens.

Don't feel you need to bottle it all up or, just as bad, go and drown the problems in a bottle or two of claret. I would strongly recommend that you go and talk to somebody about what's happening. If you feel yourself becoming involved in a way that worries you, I don't think it makes your journalism any worse; in fact it might even improve it. Don't expect too much of yourselves. Don't beat yourselves up by expecting far too much of yourselves.

It is, I think, too soon to say what the lasting legacy of Soham will be to the world of journalism and perhaps to the wider world. I hope that some lessons will be learnt about how to cover dramatic events in small communities like Soham, where the impact of those events has had ramifications far beyond our imagining. That's the end of my prepared talk. I'll be happy to answer questions, or do as I'm told.

Mark Brayne: Thank you very much indeed, Tim. You've raised several challenging and thought-provoking ideas. You've picked up things that we advocate passionately in the context of the Dart Centre agenda, about the well-being of individual journalists. You've also raised questions of the kind of journalism that is done, the way it's written and also the way journalists operate on the ground.

I have to say that your observations about the BBC and its internal coordination aren't the first time I've heard that. But I'm glad you've mentioned others who didn't get everything right either. I want to let this discussion unfold as it needs to, but perhaps Clarence Mitchell, as one of the principal BBC reporters who covered a good deal of the story — your thoughts; and indeed any questions to Tim.

Clarence Mitchell : I'm one of the BBC's news correspondents, and was involved during the two weeks the two girls were missing. I've covered a number of headline-grabbing cases over the years, not least Fred and Rosemary West and Dennis Nilson many years before that, and I have to say that this was one of the most emotionally shocking cases that I've been involved in.

Like most reporters I tend to think that you don't get that affected by this, you're very busy, you're just doing your job. And that is true to a certain extent. You do concentrate on the sheer mechanics involved in turning the stuff round very quickly, producing the piece for the next deadline or the next two-way interview for News 24. As Tim rightly says, this was one of the first major crimes in the era of 24-hour news, certainly in the UK, and that presented a whole set of new pressures for many of us.

But it was disturbing. I was affected at different stages because I'm a father myself. I have two children of seven and five, so there were certain parallels. And one of the most moving moments, as again Tim has rightly pointed out, was in the church. Tim, you had set up a candle-lit area down at one end where people had left some photographs, and there were nightlight candles left in the girls' memory, before we even knew what had happened to them — while the searches were going on.

Tim was very good in that he did allow media access to the church. A number of clergy in his position wouldn't have necessarily let us in, but he was kind enough to do that, and it meant that we were able to satisfy some of the needs of the bulletins through that access in terms of the pictures we got.

But it also brought it home to us in a very personal way, standing in the darkness of the church taking stock for 30, 40 seconds — even a couple of minutes — just what we were actually dealing with. We had the two girls, we had Holly and Jessica looking back at us through candlelight, and it was a shot that was repeated in many, many pieces and — I'm speaking as the journalist — it was a picture that helped tell the story.

But as a father it just brought home to you the awfulness of what the families must have been going through, and the sense of futility. We tried to tell ourselves at different stages that we were there trying to help. And the people in the community that I spoke to during that fortnight were very, very open and very helpful and very friendly towards us. They saw us as part of the way of solving the problem of the girls being missing.

Yes, we weren't the police, and yes, we weren't the social services. But through our medium, through our links vehicles that were getting on people's lawns, through our interminable questions that were annoying people in the local shop, through our countless interviews with Tim, everything else, it was all somehow lending itself towards the whole. And that was to get the girls back safe and sound; to find them.

The posters that were produced in the papers went up in the shop windows; we duly filmed them, those were transmitted. The papers then picked up on the response to the broadcast. It was a circle, almost a virtuous circle, of the media working in tandem with the authorities trying to find out where they were and trying to give everybody that little bit of hope.

I remember people coming up to me in the street and they didn't know me from Adam. But they knew I was a reporter and it was, ‘What's the latest? Have you found them?' I was asked had I found them! No, I had no way of knowing where they were. But they felt that somehow we were a lifeline to the police activities that they weren't privy to.

Many were too polite to approach people like Tim, although in many ways you, Tim, were of course a channel to the families. They felt that you had better things to do than spend time talking to them. So they'd come up to us and ask us for the latest. And even if we were able to say, ‘Well, not much, but the police are doing this', or, ‘There's going to be a news conference later today' — very minor, not actually helping the situation one jot — it made them feel a little bit better and in turn made us feel as if we weren't being the intrusive presence that, again, many people often feel we are.

What I found did affect me, quite apart from the emotions of the story, was on the Saturday that the girls' bodies were found when events moved very rapidly. We were immediately ostracised by the community; we were immediately shut out. We turned, in the space of two minutes, from being the helpers that were there to find Holly and Jessica, to being the vultures that were there, almost somehow, gloating over it. Nothing could have been further from the truth. All of us, even, I would say, some of the tabloid colleagues who were there for their own agendas were still doing their best to find the girls or to help towards that end.

A small example — but one that hurts, actually — was that one of the pubs in the middle of Soham was very friendly towards us. They'd had us in every day, it was virtually free drinks on the house. They said, ‘If you're here you're doing a good job; you're here to help and find the girls'.

The minute we went back to the pub after reporting the discovery of the girls' bodies, there were signs up on the windows saying, ‘No Press, No Media. Go away!' We hadn't changed as people, we were still doing our job. But the perception in the town had very, very much, and very understandably, changed. They didn't want to know us. We had nothing to offer them any more and so we were cast out.

So we then had to have long discussions with our desks back at base and with the BBC. Despite Tim's points — and some of those are very valid about the BBC's coordination and over manning in certain circumstances — we took a conscious decision, along with the other broadcasters as well, to report the story on the Saturday and then we gradually pulled out within the next 24 hours. We took a decision not to intrude any more and we backed off. And I think many of our newspaper colleagues did that in the immediate aftermath.

But that experience was quite hurtful. And one of my abiding, if you like, emotional — not crises — but one of my more traumatic moments in it — I don't want to sound callous — wasn't so much that the girls had been found dead. We always knew that was a possible outcome tragic as it was, and we've all done stories where sadly that has happened. But it was the feeling that one minute we were wanted, if not loved, by the community, and the next minute we were very much persona non grata. And that hurt.

Tim Alban Jones: I can remember talking to Clarence and him pointing out this ‘No Media' sign in the Fountain pub. I think the people of Soham have forgotten that the media were the goodies for almost a fortnight. That's a very fair point, that while there was still hope, albeit a fading hope, that the girls might be found, the media had a job to do, and a positive and a good job to do. It was only once that the girls had been found that that turned. And people in Soham have forgotten that.

Another thing in your defence is that what happened in Soham works on three levels, and people sometimes get them muddled up. The most important then, on the level that I hope I can always concentrate on first, is the personal level. The families have lost a daughter in the most dreadful circumstances; that's what it's all about really. From that most important inner circle, if you like, it spreads out to a second circle, a concentric circle, of the community. Because what happened there has effects on the community, especially given the way that those families are involved in the community of Soham. And then it has a third level that it works on, and that's the national, wider level.

Sometimes people in the inner levels forget that there is a valid and legitimate interest in what happened, and you have a job to do in reporting it. If it had happened somewhere else, we in Soham would have wanted to know what happened. So you have a job to do as well. And I think sometimes people in Soham have forgotten that.

Elizabeth Capewell (Centre for Crisis Management and Education): I was first involved at Hungerford, and have since been involved in other disasters. I think what you're describing is what happens after a community disaster, and it's not just you who tend to be the focus of the anger. It happens to many other people, many other professionals, and if you can see it as part of what happens as a natural pattern. I call it the plum pudding effect. There's this very tight bonding, and then as people begin to get back to normality at very different rates, you get all these differences happening. The rest of life begins to intrude, the exhaustion of the incident and so on. People are all going along at different rates, and then you get this sort of pulling apart and the displacement of anger. It's unfortunate but it's not just the media.

Clarence Mitchell: I'm grateful to you for pointing that out. That is, in a sense, comforting to know — that it's not just us. It was just that in this particular case, it felt so frustrating because, again, we've all been involved in different stories where a child or somebody goes missing, and where — directly through the television or the radio or the newspaper coverage — they're found and they're safe and well. And you've actually done something positive.

Yes, we're there to tell the story. But hopefully by doing that we can actually bring some weight by widening the search, effectively, through our airwaves. In this case it was such an abject failure, and it had such a horrible outcome. It was sad to have the door slammed in your face and told that you made it worse.

I remember driving away from Soham that weekend and thinking, we've all gone wrong here, it's a complete disaster for everybody and, of course, for the people at the centre of it — the families. As Tim rightly says, they are the ones most directly affected, and the ones we should all be thinking of — and we were. It was just this sign on the pub doorway, is what hit me personally, quite hard — underlining that collective failure of everybody, because I didn't actually see anything for real, up close. I wasn't in a battlefield, I wasn't personally experiencing death; but I did see the remains of death on video, and it did imprint on my retina and I couldn't get rid of the pictures in my head.

Also it was very difficult sitting in the Old Bailey every day behind that man. Again, what you said about evil was fascinating, because I just sat there thinking ‘I know what you did to those girls.' And he was just an evil, evil man, and I had a lot of emotional responses during that whole process. So I felt very emotionally involved. But as Clarence was saying, you do have to wear your professional hat, and you do have to think ‘Actually, I've got a job to do, I'm going to do my best to do it.' So you do have these incredibly conflicting feelings.

I think the points Joyce made are very fair; but also what Carolyn said is absolutely accurate. I witnessed the most incredible appetite for this story and I think it's a combination of the fact that it was summer. As you say so, in news terms it was quite soft, there's not much else going on. I think as Tim said it was a sleepy Cambridge town; who would have thought it would happen there? I think it was a combination of this incredibly iconic photograph of the two girls in the Manchester United shirts, which touched a nerve worldwide; everybody recognised the shirts. It was this incredible picture of two beautiful little girls and the loss of innocence. That story had a resonance that continues to this day and I think will continue.

I think that's one of the reasons why that captured everybody's imagination and why the nation, and indeed the world — and it sounds horrible clichéd to say it — did get very caught up in this story and wanted to know and devour every single detail.

Mark Brayne: I'd just like to exercise Chairman's prerogative for a brief moment to respond to Debbie's comments about counselling. Also to acknowledge the intensity of the experience that you've been through, Debbie, and the work that you did; the profound and important work you did in covering this story and also in taking part in the trial.

Also to pick up what Kerensa said about not being there and not being in a war zone. If there's one thing that we at the Dart Centre, and in the work that we're doing with the BBC and other organisations at the moment, want bring to the journalistic fraternity it's an acceptance and an awareness that you don't have to be at the war front. It's not just about war journalism; it's also about this kind of story. If we can give ourselves permission, and give each other permission, to experience normal, human emotions of distress and confusion and despair and nightmares — these are not abnormal.

Not everybody experiences them but if you've been exposed to this kind of material, this kind of tragedy that cuts right through our defences as a human being, we will have responses. And indeed we would be dead if we didn't.

And I profoundly agree with what Andrew said about the journalistic culture that needs to change. This is not about sending everybody to counselling. Although it is very important to have counsellors and professionals and experts in the background. What we need to do is to bring to bear in journalism the expertise that is part of our daily bread and butter in the counselling and psychotherapy community, something we exercise in all of our interviewing and listening. We need to move some of those basic skills into the journalistic environment, so that journalists can look after themselves and not feel so alone with this experience.

And as to counselling, Debbie, it may be helpful for you or it might not. But what matters is that what you experienced is a testament to your being a human being. As Tim said, first we're human beings and second we're journalists. If we can be good human beings, I believe we can be better journalists.

Jake Lynch, you've thought a lot about the nature of journalism generally and what journalists are for, including a powerful treatise on the role of journalists in covering violence and tragedy and trauma, in a political sense as well. You were in Soham, briefly, at a couple of points.

I also want to hear from Joan Sewell and Sue Aldridge from the Metropolitan Police, about the role of family liaison officers. I know that warm things were said by several in the media, about the role of the family liaison officers in Soham. Jake first of all, as a ‘dyed in the wool' hack.

Jake Lynch: Well, I suppose my involvement with this story, unlike that of my BBC colleagues, was sporadic. Purely by chance I found myself the BBC's kind of Point Man on the ground in Soham at the time when the police announced that they had found the bodies of the two girls. That was some time before, I think I'm right in recalling, the media were escorted to the scene, but that was the news angle that morning.

A couple of thoughts. I suppose there's a kind of implicit counter position here between the media's helpful role, ‘good media' — in publicising a case when there's a public interest in doing so — and on the other hand, ‘bad media' when a kind of hunger for a story, a hunger for a new development, gets the better of us. But I suppose I'm going to come in with the rather discouraging suggestion, perhaps, that they are two sides of the same coin and there's something inevitable about it.

For example, the first time I went up to Soham was in the couple of days after the girls had disappeared, and I'll be interested to hear a police spokesperson's reflections on this. One of the textbook ways you run the media operation in an investigation like this is that you spin out the developments day by day to keep our interest. The particular developments on these two days were to do with a sighting of these two girls about 10 miles away on a main road heading south through Cambridgeshire.

All of us were thinking how this could possibly be true. How could this possibly have taken place? Because for it to have taken place would have either entailed them walking 10 miles across the marshes, or somebody picking them up and talking them away in which case, it would strain credulity that they'd been dropped off again.

We were all thinking there were so many holes in this story that none of us really felt able to raise it; and it did strike us at the time and stayed with me afterwards — was this just a line that wasn't really being taken seriously in the context of the investigation but was just being given to the media to keep our interest up, as part of the way that you do these things; as part of the way you run this media operation?

The second point, I suppose on a more general level, is that I was interested in Andrew's remarks about evil. I'd like to suggest we should be quite careful with that, really. I think whenever there's an incidence of violence we cover it. One of the questions we're supposed to address is the why, who, what, where, when and how — so that viewers and audience and readers are supposed to get some kind of explanation from us. With any incidence of violence the explanation will consist of many parts; part of it will be a kind of essentialist explanation that the perpetrators are evil, and part of it could be a sociological explanation, as you put it, that we must take account of structural factors when explaining this.

And if you think about it, the imbalance, if there is one in news, is bound to be in favour of the essentialist. That's what we must be careful of that it doesn't take over, for the simple reason that an event is a news story and a process seldom is.

So therefore, in particular when you extrapolate from this to the more general category of reporting violence, I think we need to be very careful about this concept of evil. We might reflect for instance, how this resonant phrase seems to be so influential in our kind of modelling of world affairs. ‘The Axis of Evil' was arguably a phrase devised in order to be reported; to fit with somebody's assessment of our existing appetites and predilections. I think that should put us very much on our guard with this concept of evil, when we're reporting violence.

John Slater: I retired from the Metropolitan Police, from Scotland Yard, in September 2002 and am now working full time in the Balkans helping them to restructure their policing. Can I preface my remarks by saying that I had no involvement in the Soham case whatsoever? In fact, at the time when this was happening, when the actual murder happened, I was trying to sort out organised crime in Montenegro. So the amount of information I got via the BBC World Service was very, very minimal, and quite contradictory in some instances; so much so I had to phone home to find out what was going on.

Can I just make four general comments? The first is hearing about people who are traumatised by this sort of thing. During my career, I got involved a lot not only with trauma from traumatic events affecting police officers, but with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; you know, when you think you're okay and six months later you completely fall apart.

Many of the incidences of PTSD were not the people who were hands-on in the war zone, and there at the time picking up the bits of the body after the bomb or whatever. They were the people that were on the periphery. I had one Constable from Kings Cross. The Kings Cross fire was '86, in '94 this man completely fell apart. He'd been on parking duty outside the station and his feelings were of guilt and inadequacy because any idiot could have sorted out the parking. He could have been there saving lives if only he'd been allowed to be in there to do it.

So don't just watch the people that work hands-on, watch everyone. There could be someone who's sound crew or a camera engineer or someone that made the tea for the mobile units, and they fall apart, and they say ‘What's the matter with him or her?'

There are three other things concerning this in general. The first one is that some good has actually come out of this, from a personal opinion, and this is a result of responsible reporting and the tenacity of reporters not letting go after the event; to keep on saying ‘What are doing about it? What are you doing about it?' And that is that Humberside Police had information on Huntley, which, had it been kept and had it been made available, could have speeded the whole process significantly and probably produced better evidence towards the trial, I believe.

But because of the way they interpreted the Data Protection Act, that information had been destroyed two years or sometime before. Now as a result of this, and as a result of some pertinent questions being asked responsibly by journalists, the whole issue of the Data Protection Act and how it pertains to relevant intelligence that the police are allowed to hold is being revisited.

I don't know whether it is going to require primary legislation or just a different interpretation by the Data Protection Registrar. But some good has come out of responsible journalism, and on behalf of my colleagues and those I've left behind, thank you very much for that.

A couple of other points; the first is what some detectives would call the Miss Marple syndrome. That is, in a murder investigation, you know very early on who did it — as Miss Marple does; she gets them all in her library and tells them who did it. That's the easy bit. The really hard bit is producing evidence that will convict that person in a court beyond all reasonable doubt.

And there's a big gap between the two. There is huge pressure on the police because if the senior investigating officer, the person who's leading the enquiry, lets slip to a journalist and therefore it's made public, who they think might have done it, then it skews everything. It will skew all the witnesses who've yet to make statements because they'll probably include things they shouldn't because ‘if the police know who it is, all I'm doing is filling in the blanks.'

It will affect all the people involved in the investigation team, because if they think the boss thinks Bloggs did it, they will produce evidence that Bloggs did it, even though there might be much stronger evidence that Smith did it. Do you see what I mean? The objectivity gets washed out of the system. The Yorkshire Ripper is the classic case on that where Oldfield, an Assistant Chief Constable who should have retired, got a tape, a cassette tape, from somebody who claimed to be the murderer and it completely skewed the investigation. It was a hoax, the whole thing but because he'd got in his mind that this was who did it, the investigation went in another direction to that, which, had it carried on in an objective, scientific way, probably could have reduced the number of deaths.

So there's always this problem, that there's pressure from the journalists to find out who did it and tell the world. That's their job, that's understood. But as far as the police are concerned, even if they know, they can't risk saying so until they get to the point where they've got enough evidence. When you've got enough evidence, you're making arrests. And unless the person is at large and they need the cooperation of the press to find the person, then they're not going to be able to tell the details because the sub judice issue comes in.

My other point, is that this was a particularly difficult case for Cambridgeshire, and there are links between Cambridge and the Lockerbie incident in that these were sudden, unpredictable, quite large-scale events for very, very tiny police forces. Dumfries and Galloway is the smallest police force in the country. Had the aircraft crashed about 15 miles north, in Strathclyde, it would have been an awful lot easier. Had the murders we're talking about today not happened in Cambridgeshire, but in West Midlands, in Birmingham, or in London, it would have been much easier, because the resources are much easier to mobilise and organise and so on.

But one of the difficulties — and this is another thing that affects reporting — is that at the very early stages, when all you've got are two girls missing under suspicious circumstances, the people most likely to know where they're likely to have gone and why they're likely to have gone, will be their class mates, aged ten, eleven, etc. The difficulty there is that that age group are very suggestible, and they may hear something from a parent who's seen something on the television or read something in the newspaper, or seen the television themselves. And you're starting to skew possible witnesses to an abduction or a murder, because if they've seen it on the television, it might be sub-conscious that it's gone into their minds, but then part of their mind makes up the bit that's missing. And you've then got a very, very convincing child witness who's very sure of the facts but actually who is wrong.

Mark Brayne: John, thank you very much. We're very near the end but I do want to give Mike Jempson of Mediawise the floor briefly. Sue and Joan from the Metropolitan Police, if there's anything you'd like to say about the family liaison officers. And, Tim, I want to come back to you for a brief, 30-second wrap-up.

Sue Aldridge: Sue Aldridge, Metropolitan Police Family Liaison Officer. We do appreciate the situation that Tim was in, and this is one of the reasons why Family Liaison Officers are deployed to families, so that they don't have to keep answering the same questions from lots of different people. A Family Liaison Officer is a police officer, is an investigator, and they are the primary contact with that family. They pass all of the information of the investigation to the family, and any questions they've got, back.

Also what we do, and part of the reason that Joan and I are here, is that we're a gateway with that family and the investigation into lots of different outside agencies and support groups. We want the media to help the families, we want the media to help the police, and we think that through family liaison officers we can do this. If you understand our roles and responsibilities and we understand yours, we can all get to a good result at the end.

Mike Jempson: I think that my main connection with Soham was that my brother-in-law had just been interviewed for a job with a school nearby, at the time the girls went missing, and got the job. But because of the media coverage, his family and his children said they wouldn't move there, so he turned down the job. Part of the reason was that the young children were affected by the story; they — the family — were just not going to go anywhere near there.

I wanted to make lots of little points, partly connected to the comments about evil. I think it's really dangerous for journalists to start writing about evil, because it means so many different things to different people. And I think that it's that prurience that comes through using those terms that is dangerous where this sort of coverage is concerned.

Roy Hattersley accused the British public of sedentary voyeurism over Soham — and why he did that was because of the type of writing we were doing as journalists.

I'm a journalist. I've covered these kinds of situations, and I know how tempting it is. But listen to this. This is a quote from a popular website.

‘Are you tired of that namby-pamby posed bondage of today, where the bondage is nice and neat and you know the models are only doing it for the money?'

This is the sort of commercialisation of sex and violence which feeds out of the popular press. And I think one of the big problems is that when we go to these scenes, we're all desperate to get an angle, we stay there too long; we actually use the line ‘We're there to help' as a way of gaining people's confidence and although at Mediawise we had no complaints (we help people with complaints about the media) about Soham, we did in Dunblane, where the media said they did so well.

I agree with the point about the police, understanding each other's responsibility. But I don't want the police telling me how to do my job. I do think that where you have a crisis that affects the whole community, somebody — and maybe it's the local authority — has got to take a strong line in managing access to information. And that means being able to check whether we've been fed rubbish, while protecting the local community. I think if that is part of the equation, it's easier for journalists to stand back a bit, too.

One of the difficulties in a lot of these cases is that journalists with very little experience, especially during the summer season, get far too close. They don't know what they're asking about, they don't know what they're really trying to get, but they know what the editorial desk wants in the end, and they begin to feed out stuff, like using words like ‘evil'; using very strange language and imagery to get across an impression. They do themselves and the community and the press a great disservice.

Mark Brayne: Thank you, Mike. Tim, if you could sum up. A lot of quite powerful images have come up today, all of which could be the subject of a whole evening's discussion.

Tim Alban Jones: I'd like to say 'well done' to the Police Family Liaison Officers in the Cambridge case. Both families speak very highly of their FLOs, and what they did in protecting the families from the wider world, even from the vicar, at times!

I'm intrigued by this repeated cropping up of ‘evil' and you're absolutely right. Evil means different things to different people. I can remember the pressure in a newspaper interview with The Times, to use the word evil. I resisted, and consciously resisted, using that word, because when I say evil, as a parson, it means something completely different from when someone in the News of the World or someone in The Times or the man on the Clapham Omnibus, uses the word evil.

There was great pressure to use this word and I firmly believe that what happened was evil at work. I have no difficulty saying that, but when I say that in public, it becomes something completely different, and it can be very, very easily misunderstood and twisted around to mean something that I didn't mean it to mean.

Soham has taught us all quite a lot — which those of us involved will not forget. It'll certainly be with me for the rest of my life, but I think it may well be something that those of us involved in it closely won't get away from for a very long time. And whatever else it has taught us, let's hope it's taught us to be human beings first, and journalists and professionals, second.