Give legal force to child protection proposals

COMPLEX issues require thorough analysis, sensitivity and clarity. The Joint Committee on Child Protection produced a carefully balanced report with over 60 recommendations based on 52 submissions, 33 items of correspondence, public and private sessions with legal, justice and medical experts and a comprehensive consultation process with young people.

Are we now returning to the dark days when one statement from the bishops has the Taoiseach reaching for the back pedals?

This report, if implemented, will significantly improve the level of protection available to young people, treat young men and women as equals under the law, remove the defence of honest mistake as to the age of a child under 16, effectively raise the age of consent from 17 to 18 where the sexual activity is with a person in authority and provide for alternatives to prosecution and sentencing in the case of young sexual offenders.

This mere sample of the recommendations highlights the need for this report to be constituted legally.

Setting the legal age of consent at 17 has not stopped young people engaging in sexual activity. Sexual relationships are not all abusive, exploitative, unwanted. Sex is a basic human response and sexual relationships fulfil basic human needs.

While we need legislation to protect people from sexual violence, we also need good quality sex and relationships education and sexual health services so that people are protected and nurtured.

The Sexual Health Centre (SHC) has been providing good quality sex education in schools, the majority of them Catholic, and doing so on a shoestring. The bishops do not have sole custody of morality.

The SHC programmes promote respect, responsibility and encourage delay in starting sexual activity.

Because we respect and listen to young people, these programmes are very positively evaluated by both young people and schools.

More than 90% of respondents in the Irish Study of Sexual Health and Relationships support sex education for young people.

We are funded by the HSE for one staff member to meet ever increasing demand and must charge schools in order to employ another staff member. The recent budget set aside financial improvements for rape crisis and sexual abuse services, but none for sex education. This, in the face of the report on child protection and numerous commentators promoting the importance of sex education.

Young people need access to sexual health services, but one failure of the report on child protection is that it does not clarify the position of professionals working with sexually active under-16s.

In order to protect young people, we need to allow them legal access to professionals who can help them.

Criminalisation of consensual sex among peers is not child protection and is not moral.

Taoiseach, we need leadership. We need to know that we live in a maturing, multicultural Ireland that does not allow statements from one (albeit the largest) church dominate legal, ethical and health debates.

Ireland led the way in resisting public pressure on the workplace smoking ban. Let us now see this report on child protection enacted and adequate services to protect all of our young people put in place.

That is true child protection.

Deirdre Seery

Chief Executive Officer

The Sexual Health Centre

16 Peters Street

Cork