Autistic teen ‘unable to speak of trauma’

An autistic teenager who was sexually exploited in a toilet was unable to speak about the trauma, but his mother has told how she found hundreds of drawings of men that her son had labelled “paedo”.

The boy’s mother said during victim impact evidence at Cork Circuit Criminal Court that she and her husband found that their son had started to self-harm since the sexual abuse. He is not inclined to discuss what happened in the shopping centre toilet. However, she found hundreds of drawings under his bed. All of them depicted men labelled with the word ‘paedo’.

Judge Seán Ó Donnabháin imposed a five-year jail term with half of it suspended in the case against 56-year-old Dahesh Patel of Dillon’s Court, Dillon’s Cross, Cork.