The growing use of the internet to perpetrate sexual abuse and new ways of involving victims of sex offences in the criminal justice process are among issues being debated at an international conference in Dublin this week.
More than 300 professionals from Ireland and the UK who work with sexually aggressive adults and adolescents are attending the National Organisation for the Treatment of Abusers (Nota) annual conference, which runs until Friday.
The conference will hear that developing a national research agenda and dealing with sexual abuse as a major public health issue is a key component in the prevention of such abuse.
Prof Simon Hackett of Durham Colleges and chair elect of Nota said sexual offending, which included such crimes as rape, paedophilia, sodomy and sexual abuse (including on-line abuse), was "a major public health issue" and that prevention and management was a collaborative process by all professionals.
Sexual abuse was something that touched on the lives of many people across society, he said.
“In some ways, the proportion of people who are referred through to services either because they are abusing or they’ve been victimised is a small proportion of the overall problem.
“I think we’ve spent a lot of time over the past 20 or 30 years trying to improve our professional systems and responses to that small group of people who we know about.
“But actually we owe something to that broader group of people who perhaps don’t come forward, who are living with the consequences and the realities of abuse and whose lives are in some cases affected by that.
‘Breeds on silence’
“We know that sexual abuse breeds on silence and the silencing of people who have experienced it. Having a more engaged debate and a public health debate about the causes and consequences of abuse can help people to come forward too, we hope.”
Prof Hackett also said the professional community had a responsibility to engage with the media to have a balanced debate.
Prof Hackett said there had been an “explosion” in the number of cases involving the use of the internet for sexual offences.
“Of course there’s been an explosion in social media and internet anyway, so in a sense that’s not surprising.
“What we are trying to work out now is what are the best responses to people who are doing things online - and also the tricky question of whether online behaviour predicts things that people will do offline in the real world.
“We are learning that we have different sub-groups of offenders, some of whom are at higher risk of going on to perpetrate contact-offending after online behaviour.
“There are others who are less likely to do that - and therefore we need to improve our risk assessment of those groups as well.”
The conference will also explore the issue of restorative justice, an established practice in other criminal areas, but still in its infancy in its application to working with sex offenders, Prof Hackett said.
“It hasn’t been used in the sex offender field, partly because I think people in the past have been cautious about the dynamics of relationships between victims and offenders and a fear that it would be, in a sense, reabusing the person.
“But what victims have told us over the last 10 years is that they would like to have more of a say in the process themselves.”
Nota is a charity and professional association which aims to protect children by improving practice and policy responses regarding sexual offenders of all ages.