Child sex offenders start out online

There has been a rise in young male sexual offenders who began offending by downloading images of child abuse from the internet.

This is according to the annual report of sexual abuse charity, One in Four, which was launched yesterday.

“A growing age group of the sex offenders is the young men, the 18-29-year-olds. For the first time, we have two treatment groups running [for offenders],” said Maeve Lewis, executive director of One in Four.

“These are young men who again began their journey into offending through downloading images of child abuse on the internet, often at around puberty, becoming sexualised to those images and then going on to contact abuse.

“I think this is an area that is like a big train coming down the tracks as a society,” she added.

One in Four, which provides advocacy and psychotherapy for people who have experienced sexual abuse, also works in prevention and it does this through the Phoenix Programme. In 2015, there were 38 offenders in this programme, 24% of whom were in the youngest age bracket. “Over 20% were with us because often they had been caught by the gardaí downloading images of child sexual abuse.

“We don’t use the term child pornography because that implies some sort of validity to it. It is downloading images to watch children being sexually abused.

“The reality is if they are watching these images a real child somewhere is being abused and also most of our offenders will tell us that when they were caught the next step for them would have been to commit a contact offence,” said Ms Lewis.

An Tánaiste and Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald also spoke at the launch of the report yesterday.

“We do need to be conscious of the dangers of the internet, it’s fantastic in that it opens all sorts of possibilities for people, but clearly some will misuse it and it can as you say be an impetus towards abuse. But of course we did have abuse ever before the internet so let’s not say the internet only is responsible, this is a crime that predates the internet.”

She also spoke about the prospective legal changes that will come about if the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Bill 2015 is passed in the Dáil this term. “The changes, for example in relation to disability, means the law will not presume that the existence of a disability implies a lack of capacity to consent, it criminalises the purchase of sexual services.

“I’m convinced that these provisions are necessary to tackle the exploitation that’s associated with prostitution,” she said.

Other figures from the report showed 85% of sexual abuse survivors knew the offender and 45% of the charity’s clients were male. One in Four said that this challenges the idea that boys are not sexually abused.

Key figures

• In 2015, One in Four provided counselling to 116 adult survivors of sexual abuse.
• 45% of these were male.
• Almost 40% of the survivors had been sexually abused in their own home, 11% were abused in their communities, 22% had been abused in the Catholic Church, and 15% by strangers.
• In 2015, One in Four worked with 38 sex offenders and 19 wives and partners of these offenders.