Online porn addiction sees surge in teen sex offenders

One of the country’s few agencies for dealing with adolescent sex offenders has said that it is seeing cases “we would not have seen 10 or 15 years ago” due to an addiction to online pornography.

Joan Cherry, director of the Dublin-based Northside Inter-Agency Project (NIAP), said that, in the past two years, it had worked with three girls, whereas in all the previous years since NIAP began work back in 1991, it had dealt with just one.

Ms Cherry, one of the speakers at the National Organisation for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers conference which starts today in Dublin, said that while abuse by young women and girls was “the last taboo”, it was still a very small number.