Time to put sexual abuse in perspective in Ireland

It is time for the topic of child sex abuse to be brought into the world of everyday reality. People need to take their heads out of the sand and not rely on the inaccurate information they have been fed in the media. From a reading of headlines in Ireland in the past few years, a visitor from outer space might be excused for assuming that all the child sexual abuse in this country had …

…years increasingly points to the conclusion that treatment does work. A major study of almost 30,000 sex offenders in 1996 found a recidivism rate of 19 per cent for rapists and 13 per cent for child molesters. In fact, recidivism rates for sex offenders appear to be considerably lower than those for the general criminal population. All the studies show that perpetrators of child sex abuse have lower rates of recidivism than rapists and are more amenable to treatment.