Extreme pornography now a routine factor in child sex offender cases

• Published date: 27 May 2023
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Most professionals working with children who display concerning behaviour believe there is a direct connection between sexual offending and the ease with which they can access extreme pornography on a device that can be all but impossible for parents to supervise

"It coincides with the smartphone, so the last decade or so," says Kieran McGrath, a social worker with 30 years' experience, when asked when he had first started to notice the problem. "To a degree, it coincides with the internet, but really, it took off exponentially with the smartphone."

It has only been in more recent years that these fears have filtered through into the legal world, where courts have been dealing with a rash of underage sex offenders who had access to online pornography from young ages.

This has led to warnings from judges and barristers of the connection between unsupervised smartphone use and sexual offending.

Most recently, Judge Catherine Staines expressed her shock when dealing with the case of a 13-year-old boy who stalked a woman walking alone on the streets of Cork before sexually assaulting her.

The hearing at Cork Circuit Criminal Court last week heard the boy had been accessing pornography on his phone since the age of 11.

"It is shocking that this is available to vulnerable, impressionable young people. Clearly companies are making vast sums of money from selling pornographic material. More rigorous restrictions should be placed on them to prevent this harmful material being available to young children," the judge said.

In a 2021 case, barrister Brendan Grehan SC called the issue "an epidemic in its own right of young boys accessing pornography and then acting it out in inappropriate ways".

At the time he was defending a boy who was aged 13 when he raped his eight-year-old cousin. A probation service report linked the offending to the boy's exposure to pornography on his mobile phone from an early age.

Exposure to pornography from a young age, almost invariably through a smartphone, has become an almost routine fixture of sexual offence cases involving child offenders when they appear before the courts.

According to figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), more than 20 per cent of sexual offences are committed by a male child. The link with pornography, according to McGrath, is "irrefutable".

Analysis of the Garda Youth Diversion Programme also provides a worrying insight. In 2020, the latest year for which figures were available, there was a 42 per cent...