Not only a fraud, but also a paedophile

It's not just the Catholic Church who combine relatively innocent belief in spiritual mumbo-jumbo with child abuse. Mediums can do it, too.

Convicted child rapist Martin Smith appeared on television three years ago as a guest on the Living satellite channel's popular Most Haunted programme.

Styling himself as a medium, he was invited to go ghost-hunting and investigate paranormal occurrences at Brougham Hall near Penrith in 2007.
But by the end of that year he was on the run soon to be one of the UK's most wanted men, setting off a chain of events which would lead to the tragic deaths of his two young children.

There's nothing funny about this. I have no pithy comments to make, no sweeping generalisations (most of the tragedy of the Catholic child abuse scandals is to do with the willingness of the hierarchy to cover up the crimes of priests).

Not only did Smith use his position to rape a child over a period of more than a decade (and it's a grisly detail that the hypnosis he attempted on her didn't even work), he fled from the police investigators to Spain with his wife and children, clearly unable to face the consequences of his actions.

After he was extradited back to the UK, his wife, who stayed in Spain, allegedly killed their two children.

So we have a victim of sustained sexual abuse; two dead, innocent children; and the traumatised families of all involved. At least Smith's somewhere he deserves to be. Psychically channel your way out of that.