Failure to protect children ‘damning’

CHILD protection measures need to be radically overhauled in light of the findings of the Ferns Report, support groups claimed yesterday.

The ISPCC said the report, headed by retired Supreme Court Judge Frank Murphy, into decades of child sex abuse by priests in the Co Wexford diocese, was a “damning indictment” of Irish society’s failure to protect children.

The Ombudsman for Children, Emily Logan said the Constitution needed to be amended to include “express rights for children.”

The charity Barnardos said mandatory reporting of child sex abuse and a raft of other measures were now necessary.

In a statement, the ISPCC said the report was a “stark reminder” of how Irish society traditionally failed to deal with the problem of child sex abuse. It declared: “Such a monumental failure of child protection systems must never be allowed to occur again.”

The organisation outlined four key points to boost child protection measures and called on all political parties to support them. It called for the immediate introduction of mandatory reporting of child abuse, as well the introduction of laws obliging employers to ensure any staff member or volunteer working with children be vetted by gardaí.

It said laws allowing for the recording of ‘soft information’, relating to people identified as a risk to children but who have not been convicted of a crime, should be introduced, in addition to constitutional change so that children’s rights are embedded within the Constitution.

“One of the greatest cruelties committed against children in the Diocese of Ferns was the cruelty of silence,” the statement said. “We have seen the evidence of the damage such silence causes and we must ensure that we never again allow such silence to exist.”

Children’s Ombudsman Emily Logan said her office had received a number of calls over the summer relating to the State response to child abuse cases and she would present a report on the issue to the Oireachtas before Christmas.

She has “real concern” that lessons may not have been learned from the Ferns abuses and said the current system “is not child focussed.”

Barnardos also called for the introduction of mandatory reporting guidelines.

The children’s charity gave a broad welcome to a number of the recommendations contained in the report, including that of a new criminal offence where a person “wantonly or recklessly engages in conduct that creates a substantial risk of bodily injury or sexual abuse to a child” or when there is a failure to take reasonable steps.

It welcomed the suggestion of new laws to preventing unsupervised access to children for those suspected, on reasonable grounds, of having abused or having the propensity to abuse children.

“We know that the abuse of children is facilitated by a closed and secretive environment,” Barnardos chief executive Fergus Finlay said. “That secrecy must be replaced by the introduction of obligatory mandatory reporting, underpinned by law. In order to keep children safe, reporting known or suspected abuse should not be a matter of discretion for anyone.

“Mandatory reporting will require an investment. But it is one of a number of measures which have to be introduced to ensure that children in Ireland are adequately protected from abuse,” he added.