Sexual abusers exist in every community, says One in Four

Dangerous individuals who can sexually abuse children over time exist in "every community" and now tend to be younger than before, survivors' organisation One in Four has said.

The support group’s annual report, published on Wednesday, said a third of participants in its sex offender treatment programme are now aged between 18 and 25, up from a quarter last year.

Teenagers are becoming sexualised by unrestricted exposure to explicit content online which in some cases leads to sexual abuse of younger family members, according to executive director Maeve Lewis.

“I think it’s a very worrying dynamic and I think it’s one that we really need to take on board as a society. Most of those young men became sex offenders because they were downloading images - starting with porn images and then moving on to images of children being sexually abused,” she said.

“There needs to be huge education programmes in school, but also to parents, as most parents haven’t a clue what their children are looking at. But this is the end result,” said Ms Lewis, whose organisation provided 2,643 hours of therapy last year and offered counselling services to 116 abuse survivors.

‘Adversarial’ courts system

Ms Lewis was critical of social workers and gardaí who fail to deal with complainants in a suitably sensitive manner, and bemoaned the “difficult, traumatising and adversarial” courts system which she says imposes immense stress and anxiety on survivors attempting to pursue convictions.

The report also made mention of three people who took their own lives over the last four years while they were on waiting lists for oversubscribed counselling services, which One in Four said could not accommodate volumes of demand due to a lack of State resourcing.

Also present at the report launch was Louise O’Keeffe, the Cork woman who won a landmark European court ruling last year which held the Irish State liable for abuse she suffered at the hands of her primary school principal teacher in 1973.

She said she had now reached an impasse with Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan over the entitlement of others who endured similar experiences to compensation, and believes child protection is being “put on the backburner”.

Historical cases

Under guidelines issued by the department, complainants in historical cases must establish that an allegation of abuse was made at their school during or prior to their own period of alleged abuse in order for their application for compensation to proceed.

This requirement means that many of the 210 potential claimants identified by the department don’t stand any chance of receiving remuneration, according to Ms O’Keeffe.

“I think there’s an impasse for the fact that the Minister is really defending that narrow view that she and her department are taking.

“Are they really telling us that in my school, for a child who was abused in 1965, that it was their fault others were abused [afterwards] because they didn’t make a complaint? That’s not right,” she said.

“There is no way, because of the narrow view that they’re taking, that there are 210 people who will actually get that settlement - there is just no way that will happen,” she added.