Abuse must be punished, but child protection should be the priority

WE love our kids, right? We’d do anything to protect them from harm, and all we want for them is to grow up right. We want them all to get the best possible start in life, don’t we?

All of us who are parents know it’s not easy. Sometimes they let us down. They don’t behave the way we want them to, or they’re not always grateful for the things we do. And sometimes we let them down.

We lose the plot a bit, we shout and roar. Sometimes we might even dish out a slap, though we’re sorry about it afterwards. And sometimes we don’t always provide the best example.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t want the best for them. We’re dead proud of anything they achieve. We get a huge kick out of watching them grow and turn into adults. We’d go to any lengths as parents to get it right.

So how come, when it comes to public policy, we get it wrong so often?

When he was introducing the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act of 2006 to the Dáil, the Minister for Justice said: “When the dust settles and the frenzy is over... it will be seen that my colleagues in Government, myself and the Attorney General have acted competently, honestly, truthfully and with the best interests of children in mind.”

This evening the Minister for Justice will be seeking to rush legislation through the Dáil to close the loophole he inadvertently created with that Act.

When he was rushing that legislation through last June, he was pretty certain that he had thought everything out. I wonder how certain any of us can be that they will have got it right by Tuesday night?

I hope they do. I hope that by the time the next bit of emergency legislation is enacted, we will genuinely have closed all the loopholes. If we have, then we will have enough bits and pieces of legislation to punish any abusers of children who get caught.

But it’s not enough.

It’s not enough for any Government to say that we have a wide range of tough measures in place enabling us to investigate offences against children and to punish child abusers if they are caught. The real challenge — and it’s a lot more difficult — is to put the laws and resources in place to protect children from abuse before it happens, to the maximum extent possible.

The organisation I work for, Barnardos, works with children day in and day out. We know about children at risk — and we know the damage abuse does to children. Even when the perpetrators are caught and punished, the effects of abuse can still last forever. It can still mark a child for the whole of his or her life.

Barnardos has been pointing out for some time that a range of measures is necessary to have a proper child protection regime in place. And even these measures really aren’t enough. The only guarantee of child protection is eternal vigilance, and a way of ensuring that every young person has someone they can talk to.

But there are some key things we can do, and we can easily afford them.

First, we have to strengthen the resources available for vetting of people working with children. About 30 members of the Garda Siochána, based in Thurles, work hard to ensure that every adult working with children is properly vetted. There are thousands of such adults, and as hard as the Unit works, there isn’t the remotest chance in hell that they can cover them all. They need a lot more help if they are to catch up with the backlogs they have, never mind guarantee that every new employee will be secure.

And, whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to change the law relating to vetting. As things stand right now, the only information available to the Gardaí for vetting purposes is whatever relevant convictions are on the file. There may be very good reason, based on suspicion and even arrest and questioning, to believe that an individual should not be allowed to work with children, but unless that individual has been convicted, no prospective employer can be told.

Changes in law are essential in this area to enable what is called “soft information” to be taken into account in forming a judgement about whether a person is safe with children. Of course, the rights of individuals have to be protected — and they must surely have a right to be told, for instance, what soft information is being stored.

We also need to put structures of high integrity and accountability in place to ensure the management of soft information doesn’t become a repository of idle or malicious gossip.

But as long as we rely on convictions alone, we are exposing children to risk.

FOR months, the government has been considering a proposal to make the ‘grooming’ of children a crime. The practice is aimed at making children more vulnerable to abuse and more amenable to those who wish to hide it. Abusers often take months to groom their victims, breaking down their defences, encouraging them to keep secrets from brothers and sisters, and exploiting existing vulnerabilities in children.

New technologies, especially the internet, put some children beyond the protection of their families in ways that were unimaginable even 10 years ago. It’s long past time the government brought forward legislation it has been preparing in this area.

And by the same token, they have been proposing for some time that the government’s own Internet Advisory Board should be put on a statutory basis, and should have monitoring and regulatory functions as well as advisory ones. This hasn’t happened either and, as a consequence, the internet is almost exclusively self-regulating. Given the dangers that can exist on the internet, and the techniques that can be used to break down young people’s defences, surely it’s past time for change in this area, too.

Everyone knows that proper policing of internet risk is a challenging proposition, and can be best done with widespread international co-operation, but we have made little or no headway in Ireland so far.

A good first step might be a major investment in public awareness about the risks that are there — the last public awareness campaign was a brief flurry of advertising in 2003.

Enforcement and punishment are two key ingredients in the framework necessary to protect children from abuse and from abusers. But prevention is critical, too, and it is an area where we are simply not strong enough. I have written here before that we have a long way to go before we can say that Ireland, rich as it is, is the best place in the world to be a child.

Until we tackle poverty, literacy, housing and access to education and health, we won’t be able to say that. But surely it’s not beyond our capacity to make Ireland a safe place to be a child — and a very unwelcome place to be a child abuser.