Protecting children from sexual abuse will take more than just punishing offenders, says Western Australia’s Chief Justice Wayne Martin.
Justice Martin said courts had been handing out harsh sentences for sex offenders for a long time but it did not appear to be working.
“We can’t simply punish our way out of this problem,” he said.
“We need a variety of strategies, including, of course, severe punishment.
“We need to prevent, rehabilitate and to try to discourage people from committing these offences in the first place.”
Justice Martin said the courts were probably only seeing one-in-20 of the cases that actually occurred because report rates were very low.
He said it was time to address the matter openly and that Australian society could accept therapy and preventative measures for sex offenders, or those who felt at risk of offending, just as it had done with drug addicts and domestic violence.
“Maybe if these people have a pathological cause of their problem, maybe the best way of doing it is to address that cause,” he said.
“And we know, of course, that many of the offenders were themselves victims.
“I think most people would understand that and really accept it.”
Justice Martin was speaking at a first-of-its-kind Child Sexual Abuse Prevention Symposium in Perth.
The symposium was attended by social workers, police officers, corrective services staff, psychologists and victims of crime.
One of those behind the symposium is psychologist Christabel Chamarette who has spent decades working with child sex offenders.
She said it was important to break the silence about sex offending, which more often than not occurred within families, and provide therapy.
According to Ms Chamarette many offenders are teenage boys and fathers who struggle with impulses that could be caused by a confused sexual development, past abuse and emotional immaturity.
“You then learn that it’s not just about breaking the silence, but you then offer constructive ways of change,” she said.
“You don’t do that by alienating them or splitting up families and destroying people’s lives.
“You actually have to address the problem in ways that suit the needs of the children and the families involved.”
Ms Chamarette said by “locking someone up and throwing away the key” it was not addressing the cause of the offending and victims could continue to feel at risk when offenders were released.
“The earliest intervention you can get is in the mind of somebody who might be at risk of doing something,” she said.
“We need to make a society where people can know how to ask for help and get help before it’s too late, before they’ve actually offended.”
Ms Chamaratte said people who genuinely found children sexually attractive were in the minority.
She told the symposium that from her work in prisons with sex offenders she had learned many of them loathed paedophiles and did not consider themselves attracted to children.
More often than not they had been sexually abused themselves, or had suffered severe trauma as a child, which they had supressed leaving them little ability to cope with situations in adulthood.
She said therapy was a revelatory experience to offenders exposing themselves to parts of their psyche they had locked away or surpressed.
“It’s always been needed and I’ve always had the message,” Ms Chamarette said.
“But people are listening now because they’re actually seeing that we cannot continue with a one-size-fits-all or this pattern of locking people up and throwing away the key.
“It’s not working and it’s not keeping our children safe.”
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