Home
About MAKO
Services
Contact
Prevention
MAKO/Files
Community Notification
Report
Referral
Profile's
Facts/ Stats
Online Dangers
Child Safety
MAKO Petitions
Research/ Resources
Books
DNA Info
Safety For Women
News/ Articles
Your Comments
Australian Politicians/ Contacts
Join
Sponsors
Donations
Links
|
Governments have moved quickly to crack down on child sex offenders, leaving little room for debate. So why are specialists in the field feeling uneasy about this no-nonsense approach? "Tom" fidgets nervously, eyes downcast, hunched under an invisible weight. Now in his 20s, he comes from an educated but conservative family and once had promising career prospects, but a few years ago he committed a child sex offence and spent a year in jail. Details of his crime can't be revealed because anonymity is a condition of this interview. It's enough to say his punishment was warranted. Tom's lawyer, Paul Galbally, worked hard to keep his client's spirits up while he was doing time. "Don't worry, you'll get through this," he said, "and then you'll be able to move on." But moving on is getting harder for people such as Tom, caught in a widening criminal justice net designed to catch and deter child sex offenders. He will never be able to work or take a voluntary role alongside children, as mandatory police checks are soon to be introduced. More daunting for him, however, is knowing the police will monitor his movements for the next 15 years, as new Victorian laws track all child sex offenders on a register. Yet Galbally, who is deeply critical of the new laws, says independent psychologists thought Tom was a low risk of re-offending. Tom discusses his predicament in rushed, halting speech. "I have to go to the police station once a year and let them know if I've bought a new car, if I'm going interstate or going overseas, if I have kids." People say 'Just move on', but how can you? I can understand why there's this law, because there's some really sick guys out there - I met people like that in prison who said 'I'm going to get out and do it again', and I know if I was a parent I wouldn't want them near my kids." And I know that if I was a parent I wouldn't want anyone like me near my child. I wouldn't care about someone's individual case, just reading in the paper what they've done would be enough. So I can't condemn this law because I think we need it - but then I'm caught in it too." Pedophilia has become a metaphor for innocence lost. Even in the most respectable places we now expect to find something rotten. The most recent jolt, last year's Operation Auxin, Australia's biggest pornography crackdown, led to hundreds of arrests, thousands of charges and public anxiety. It also galvanised governments around the country into passing a flurry of antipedophile measures, including new offences for accessing and downloading child porn on the internet or using a mobile phone camera to distribute home-made material. But a wide net inevitably scoops up small fry along with the big fish. The same laws that nab hard-core recidivists such as "Mr Baldy," Brian Jones - whose imminent release is causing the Victorian Government to rush through measures restricting the movement of dangerous sex offenders - also prosecute teenage lovers furtively bridging the age of consent divide or past offenders, such as Tom, deemed worthy of rejoining the fold. The swift legislative pace has left little time to debate this point, or, perhaps more crucially, whether the increasingly heavyhanded approach actually frustrates the wider fight against child sex abuse. Prominent criminologists, lawyers and even some child advocates think it does. On the other hand, victim groups, who only recently secured a seat at the policy table, think the changes are long overdue. How do you stop the runaway train of populism to check whether it is fuelled by sound policy? "What we've been seeing for about the past five years, particularly with the sex abuse that's come out of the church and so on, is an ongoing moral panic," says Simon Petrie, who develops crime prevention programs in Queensland. "The two things that happen in moral panic are 'zero tolerance' and a lack of rational debate. You can't defend predatory sexual behaviour of any sort but the problem is, whenever a moral panic is on, anyone who wants to enter into a discourse on it is painted as 'soft'." In Victoria, the politics of zero-tolerance have created a headache for the Bracks Government. It ended the career of popular Orbost teacher Andrew Phillips for a sexual assault on a 15-year-old girl when he was 20. The Government initially envisaged a discretionary system, which would allow for individual exceptions, but backed down after an outcry from the Opposition and media. Phillips' fate has added to controversy over proposed laws that would similarly ban anyone convicted of a child sex offence from working with children. The proposals please Parents Victoria and prominent child welfare campaigners such as Joe Tucci of the Australian Childhood Foundation, who argues that setting the bar high is the best way of deterring would-be abusers adept at chilling manipulation. But the outcry over Phillips has cast the dilemma into sharp relief." Any law which provides no discretion for individual circumstances is a bad law," former Law Institute president Bill O'Shea told a community forum recently. He warned that an inflexible system could influence judges against recording convictions for minor cases. The proposed law unfairly penalised people guilty of "a minor sexual offence in the distant past" or "a more serious sexual offence but have been rehabilitated and can therefore be regarded as no more likely to re-offend than any other member of the community". Picking the recidivist is an inexact science, however. One cloudy point of reference is the official American Psychiatric Association definition of a pedophile: a person 16 or older with persistent sexual urges for children at least five years younger, which are either acted upon or cause distress. But, as forensic psychiatrist Bill Glaser puts it, "you don't get pedophiles breeding in pure cultures"." Let's say you're a 12 or 13-year-old girl hanging around with a 17-year-old guy," Glaser says. "It's possible that both parties could well be said to be mutually consenting and the matter would never go to the police. There's probably thousands of such relationships in Victoria." But you've got to remember that most people who prey on kids start off young themselves - in their mid to late teenage years, and also that sex offenders always do much more than they're ever picked up for." I've seen guys take up with 15 or 16- year-olds who I'd call pedophiles because their preferred interest is much younger ... Many of these guys may have convictions in their teenage years that look harmless but they were really just unlucky enough to get caught that time." But criminologists, such as Griffith University's Stephen Smallbone, claim the law-and-order debate is driven by misconceptions about the highly recidivist nature of child sex offenders. A landmark Canadian study of 22,000 child sex offenders from various countries found only 13 per cent re-offend five years after their release - a figure considerably lower than for other violent crimes. Smallbone's research on adolescent offenders, coupled with empirical findings elsewhere, also contradict the popularly held view that most young child sex offenders continue their crimes into adulthood. Forensic psychologist Karen Owen, who runs sex offender treatment programs for Corrections Victoria, echoes Smallbone's concerns: "The current policy isn't reflective of what we know about treatment, that you need an individual approach ... There are a number of adolescents who get caught up in the system whose issues aren't about sex and children, and you really question what they're doing on a register in the first place. It's a huge thing that impacts on people's lives and livelihoods." Owen says profiling is harder still with those convicted of accessing child porn on the net. She recalls a long-time pedophile who was finally apprehended for loitering when he resorted to secretly videotaping children." This sort of individual doesn't have to loiter in public places now because he has access to the internet," Owen says. "But at the moment there is really no direct evidence that the use of internet porn or other porn material actually leads to a hands-on offence." Experts say the true picture instead suggests that small numbers of extremely high-risk offenders - perhaps only 10 per cent of the lot - clock up enough victims on their own to skew the statistics. And yet this is also why letting one such compulsive person slip through the net can have potentially catastrophic consequences - and why deterring them saves potentially hundreds of victims a lifetime of trauma. Working-with-children checks in Queensland and NSW do give people convicted of a child sex offence the chance to plead their case. In Queensland, an employee of an Aboriginal community school last year successfully petitioned the Court of Appeal to keep his job. Police checks revealed an offence committed in 1988, when the man was in his 30s, which involved the "improper touching" of a 13 year-old girl. At the time, he was also dismissed from his job at a youth crisis housing centre after being repeatedly cautioned for acting inappropriately with young girls. The court was swayed by the narrow time frame of his offending behaviour, his willingness to take responsibility and his successful rearing of children and foster children in the years since. Giving a convicted child sex offender the benefit of the doubt sits uneasily with most people, but for increasingly influential victims advocates it sparks understandable rage. "I've never met anyone who really believes these people can be cured," says Noel McNamara, head of the Crime Victims Support Association. He had lobbied the Victorian Government to introduce a compulsory sex offenders register for years, to no avail. Later, on advice from fellow activists in the United States, he threatened to set up and publish one of his own. "We decided we had to do something because we weren't getting anywhere and Robbie Hulls (the state Attorney-General) looked like he was going to be around for a long time. We had to use a lever." The association never followed through, but the South Australian-based Movement Against Kindred Offenders (MAKO) did. Its website, replete with offender aliases and photographs, lists more than 1200 names. MAKO founder Kylie Newman says putting communities on alert and offenders on notice outweighs civil rights considerations." I was a victim myself," she says, "and it never leaves you, let me tell you." A lot of them don't deserve to released Anything they get other than death is a blessing to them." It's a view many share - even if secretly. And yet it's the tendency to tar all offenders with the shame brush - subject them all to the same harsh consequences - that some say impedes the war against child sex abuse. It is a war in which the family remains the largely unconquered battlefield. There's a sobering example in Western Australia. In the recent state elections, child sex abuse survivor and activist Michelle Stubbs unsuccessfully contested a seat for the Liberals. Attacking Labor as soft on crime, the Opposition concentrated on SafeCare, a child protection agency that also offers a radical counselling program for familial child sex offenders. The program, funded by both parties for more than a decade and publicly praised by former federal community services minister Amanda Vanstone, aims to break the generational cycle of child sex abuse. The offender is given "conditional confidentiality" if he or she agrees to leave the family home and undergo treatment. The option is offered only when victims are reluctant to press charges. The Opposition attacked the program for undermining the criminal justice system. SafeCare survived the criticism, but the affair illustrates how the intricacies of child sex abuse can get ironed out in a heated debate that favours one-size- fits-all solutions. Says SafeCare's clinical director, former Greens senator Christabel Chamarette: "I'm glad people are more aware of the problem (of child sex abuse), but we now have to move towards further understanding and away from knee-jerk reactions. It should be self-evident that we also need to look at a healing approach." The experts agree widely on this; pointing to the apparent success of early intervention programs in the US and Britain that encourage people suffering deviant urges to come forward. But they'll be the first to concede that this is a hard sell. Says Owen: "We like to think that if you're a child sex offender you wear a grey raincoat, you're a bit filthy and you hang around in parks. Because these sort of men aren't our fathers, our brothers or the man sitting next to us on the tram- it's a way of distancing ourselves from the problem." The Age (18-4-2005) Julie Szego |
Group Criticises Paedophile Identifying Letter Drop
Prevention in action
2005. All Rights Reserved.
Legal/Disclaimer/
Privacy/
Terms Of Use.
<