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January 17, 2005
Punishment for paedophiles must fit society's outrage
We do not take child abuse seriously, and we are not alone. Trawl through the sentences handed out across the world to child rapists and you will struggle to find many that touch double figures. Video yourself raping a baby? Five years. Rape children as young as three while you are babysitting? Six years. Bugger any number of children under your care over two decades? Seven years.
And those are the harsher decisions: it is not unusual for child abusers to receive suspended sentences or less than two years in jail. Sometimes prosecutors appeal against the leniency of the courts and manage to get a few years tacked on — the video-taping baby rapist had his sentence increased from five to eight years on appeal — and sometimes the convicted abuser manages a successful appeal against a “severe” sentence.
The pattern, though, is indisputable: even in the most serious cases of child rape, our society believes that the rapist should not have to serve a lengthy prison term, and it is a belief shared across much of the world.
It is a bizarre contradiction. No offences cause as much genuine public outrage as the abuse, whether sexual or physical, of children, yet we fail to reflect that outrage in the way we treat the offenders. We will rail against social workers who have failed to intervene quickly enough to prevent abuse; we will lambast the Roman Catholic Church for shielding priests from the law; we will wring our hands about the decline in moral standards that leaves our children vulnerable to predatory paedophiles, yet we will not insist on a rule of law that punishes those who are caught with a severity that ensures they never offend again.
Even more bizarre is that we know they are likely to reoffend. Study upon study of paedophilia has shown that its perpetrators are recidivists — once released from prison they seek to reoffend. They operate in a separate moral universe and often show no remorse for what they have done because they do not believe they have done anything wrong. We can call them sick and try treating them as if they had a curable illness, but the best we can hope for is that some of those treated (and most will refuse treatment) will learn how to control their desire to abuse children.
The only certain ways to limit the danger they pose to society is to lock them away for the rest of their lives or to have a rigorous post-prison regime that monitors them so closely it prevents them from reoffending. Sentencing, therefore, has to be draconian: rape a baby and prepare for 50 years inside, not five.
The message is simple: when dealing with child rapists we should not be concerned with rehabilitation or deterrents, because the evidence is that neither is relevant. We should be interested only in removing a danger. That will not help the past victims of the abuser, but it will at least save his or her future victims.
Yet for all the public anger when a child is abducted, killed or abused, the official follow through is minimal. Child abusers are simply processed through the system and released back to the streets after an inordinately short stay behind bars.
Public policy should not, of course, be dictated by mass hysteria. Ireland is not swarming with predatory paedophiles. The vast majority of child sexual abuse is carried out by family members — parents, uncles, cousins, siblings — and by people known to the family or in a position of trust. Children are more at risk in their own homes than they are on the streets. That we all know, but knowing it neither removes the fear nor mitigates the offence.
Child abuse is horrific — for once the over-used phrase about the most vulnerable people in our society actually does apply — and its perpetrators must face consequences so severe that they are given no opportunity to reoffend.
It is still too early to know whether the abduction and killing of Robert Holohan, the 11-year-old boy from Midleton, Co Cork whose body was discovered on Thursday, was sexually motivated. Mercifully for his family, there was no evidence of sexual abuse — a small mercy, indeed, amid their grief. There are many possibilities, but none of them innocent.
Robert was killed and his body left in a place where it may never have been found. The careful hiding of the body was a conscious, callous act, one that could have deprived his parents of ever knowing what had happened to their son. They were only spared that never-ending ordeal by mobile phone technology and sharp eyes.
His killer, if found and convicted, deserves no mercy from our courts, yet if found sane and competent to stand trial could be released back into society before Robert would have turned 25 and almost certainly before he would reach 30. Life imprisonment in Ireland does not mean life and there are but a handful of convicts, none of them child abusers, who have served more than 20 years. We have long abandoned the death penalty and so are left with imprisonment as our only response to serious crime, yet we no longer have the stomach to punish as we should.
We also lack the stomach and the resources to monitor abusers when they are released from prison. Ireland has a register of sex offenders, but it is far from precise or complete. Convicted child rapists are not even on the register for life, but for a set period following their release, as if the court can predict the point at which they pose no further threat to society.
The register is rendered weaker still by the openness of the European Union, which allows unhindered movement between member states, and by the failure of other jurisdictions to have similar registers. Closer monitoring, though, raises fundamental questions about civil liberty and challenges the very instincts of a truly free and democratic society.
So what are our options? Do we swallow our principles and electronically tag child abusers for life? Do we tag our children instead, using satellite technology in their mobile phones or even under their skin, as we would an expensive car? Who do we demean and deprive of freedom and independence: our children or the men and women who we know pose a threat? It is one thing to dismiss the hysteria, and point to the mercifully few child abductions that we have endured, and quite another to argue that the present system is working. Child abuse is demonstrably a problem in Irish society, regardless of who commits the offence. Our response is one of horror, but we fail to ensure that that horror is reflected in the punishments we mete out. The result is that parents fear for their children’s safety and through their fear restrict their children ’s freedom and their ability to develop independently.
It is in our hands to change the system and it requires the legislators — our politicians — to translate public outrage into decisive action. Sentencing for all offences involving the abuse of children must reflect the seriousness of the crime and the likelihood of repeat offences. That means that those who indulge in child pornography no longer receive community service orders, or suspended sentences, or less than a year in jail: they get instead the few years we currently dole out to child rapists. The rapists, in turn, should know that they could spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
How far do we go? In America every state has a version of Megan’s Law, which requires public notification when a convicted sex offender moves into an area. Do we have a right to know whether a paedophile has moved in next door? Will an Irish tabloid replicate the News of the World’s ill-fated campaign of the late-1990s to name and shame sex offenders, a move that prompted vigilantism and which saw paediatricians mistaken for paedophiles and driven from their homes by intellectually challenged mobs? Striking a balance between the rights of children and the rights of child abusers who have served their time poses a real dilemma for a free society, but it is a balance that we have to find for ourselves, and one that can only come through committed political debate. The first move, though, is to ensure that the time served is lengthy.
Posted by Nealus at January 17, 2005 09:01 PM
