Judges ‘unable to deal with net perverts’

JUDGES and probation officers are ill-equipped to adequately sentence or deal with adults who use the internet to prey on children for sexual pleasure, a youth worker has claimed.

Speaking at a Colloquium at University College Cork yesterday on Victimisation with Child Pornography, Merlyn Horton with SOLOS (Safe Online Outreach Society) said most judges and probation officers do not understand the web and are at a lost technologically, as most adults.

“They are usually old white guys in ties. The lawmakers do not spend five hours every night in chat rooms. They do not understand how the internet works,” Ms Horton said.

Without knowing how someone organises their life around the internet or how it works, it is impossible to legislate for adults who use the internet for sexual exploitation of children, sentence them correctly, or monitor their behaviour when they leave prison.

Ms Horton urged child workers and parents to learn about how the internet works to better protect children from internet predators.

“How can we abandon cyberspace to predators? How have we left our children open to these predators and not provide what they are looking for in real terms? If they are looking for someone to talk to, why can’t it be an adult who doesn’t have a sexual interest in them,” she said.

Opening the Colloquium, UCC psychology department head Professor Max Taylor said there are now more abusive images of children on the internet than five years ago.

The head of UCC’s COPINE project, which tries to identify children from abusive images on the internet and understand the nature of internet offending, said that while the amount of discussion about the topic has increased, there has not been a lot of progress in dealing with the issue. “We need to look at how we are addressing the problem and the focus must be on the victim. Their needs must be dominant,” Mr Taylor said.

Barnardos’ principal policy and practice officer for child sexual exploitation in Britain, Tink Palmer, called for a multi-agency approach involving social workers, therapists and police officers when trying to assess a child who has been victimised through abusive images.

We must never underestimate the impact of the abuse or the image. One victim said to me “it’s not what happened, it’s what it did to me.” That statement would echo the feelings of many abuse victims.”

Ms Palmer also felt the current myths about child abuse need to be exploded. These include:

All abuse happens outside the family.

A mother can recognise someone who would hurt her children.

There is always someone “safe” who looks after the children.

“Recent figures compiled from Childline calls in 2001 to 2002 from 8,000 children who had been sexually abused found that 87% knew their abuser either as a family member or friend.”