We don’t like to think about the sexual abuse of children. In fact, understandably, most of us shrink from it.
The thought of a child suffering in this way is so horrifying that we’ve become averse to reading about it. We avoid the details. It might be because the image of our own children in that terrible situation comes, involuntarily, into our minds, so we shake it out, moving ourselves away from the issue and onto more mundane matters.
This is how human beings protect themselves from trauma. But there are times when evil needs to be looked in the face and called to account.
That doesn’t seem to happen often enough. In fact, sometimes the rationale behind the sentences meted out in the courts in this country and elsewhere is just impossible to fathom.
Yesterday, the Court of Appeal ruled that it was in “society’s interest” that a man who produced ‘child abuse material’ – and was caught with nearly 2,000 such images – would not be sent to jail, because it might impede with his rehabilitation.
As the Echo Live reported:
Robert Traynor (54), with an address in southwest Dublin, left court in March with a suspended sentence after pleading guilty to possession of 1,938 images and 183 videos of child pornography on February 2nd, 2018.
Traynor, a former computer worker at a bank, had also admitted the production of 1,650 computer-generated images on September 22nd, 2014, contrary to the 1998 Child Trafficking Pornography Act.
The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) later appealed the sentence on the grounds that it was unduly lenient. The DPP claimed Judge Pauline Codd had erred by failing to include a period of incarceration in the two-and-a-half-year wholly suspended sentence which she handed down at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court.
The DPP’s appeal was, however, dismissed by the Court – even though they acknowledged that the decision “to wholly suspend the sentence renders the sentence a very lenient one”.
The three-judge court, in a written judgment said “the purpose of this suspension is to further the respondent’s rehabilitation, which is in the interests of society”.
This is deeply, profoundly, wrong, and is, in my opinion, an error of judgment. Here’s why.
The Court said that it was not imposing a custodial sentence even though Traynor’s offences were “morally reprehensible” and “must be marked by a significant censure”
But a sentence handed down wasn’t a significant censure. A suspended sentence for making 1,650 images of child abuse isn’t a significant censure. It doesn’t meet the fundamental tenet that the punishment should be proportionate to the offence.
And, inexplicably, this keeps happening: there’s a pattern of judges handing down sentences which don’t seem to reflect the appalling, corrosive, life-destroying nature of child abuse.
It’s difficult to understand, to be honest, given what we know about the horrific abuse and trafficking of children to satisfy an evil and monstrous desire.
I remember almost two decades ago driving in my car listening to a Garda talking about the reality of what happens to those children. The Garda, bizarrely, was forced to come on the radio to defend the actions of some member of the force who let the media know that Darina Allen’s husband, Tim Allen (who helped her set up the Ballymaloe Cookery School) had been caught with 977 pornographic images of children.
Certain sections of the media had indulged in sympathetic reporting around the case, lamenting that Allen’s disgusting behaviour and proclivities had become public because it brought unwelcome attention to Ballymaloe and the Allens were such media favourites or something.
The Garda, without getting explicit, pulled no punches. He explained that this kind of depraved material often featured children being raped. He said that the children used to produce that kind of pornography were often trafficked or disappeared, and that police trying to track and trap providers of child pornography noticed that a child would appear in material for a time and then vanish.
He said that the children might have been killed, or might have died from ill-use or trauma.
I remember being so horrified, feeling so sick, that I thought I’d crash the car. Like most people, I had tried not to think about these things. I had never been confronted with that reality before, and it has never left me. That could be my child. It’s someone’s child: terrified, abused, living a nightmare.
That’s happening to them because terrible people continue to pay for and download these appalling, sick, depraved images. And anyone, who has any part of it, is culpable for feeding those monsters. (Allen, by the way, also got spared jail, being sentenced to community service and a fine).
But what kind of a message does a suspended sentence send? That this is a minor crime, like shoplifting?
It’s Christmas time, so this article will likely be ignored because we’ll all double down on our reluctance to think about this issue. We can continue to refuse to face the reality of child abuse. But is that reluctance part of the reason why it continues?