More than 10,000 exchanges regarding the sexual abuse of children were found on the phone of Peter O’Malley from Co Mayo, who was jailed for six years today at Castlebar Circuit Criminal Court.
The exchanges took place took place on the Kik application, where O’Malley – a former HSE manager – was an administrator for a group set up specifically to share child abuse images between December 2019 and April 2021.
Judge Eoin Garavan described O’Malley as being a member of a paedophile ring, while the court had heard Detective Garda Paula Griffin of the Mayo Divisional Protective Services Unit describe some images as being of an “extremely graphic nature, depicting extreme depravity and extremely serious sexual abuse”.
Judge Garavan said that as administrator of the group O’Malley decided who could join – and made the provision of images of child abuse the price of entry, thus perpetuating the depravity. This had caused children all over the world to be abused and photographed.
The next part is hard to contemplate, to be honest. My hands are shaking as I write it.
The judge said that some of the victims – children – had been screaming and crying in the videos and photographs provided. “Anybody’s heart would break at seeing these children – I have not seen the photos but accept the description of them – who were very upset or disturbed by being penetrated or indeed being the victim of other sexual activity,” he said.
The children were sexually abused, the judge said said, “in a way that amounts to torture”. They were videoed and photographed experiencing “horrifying levels of abuse”.
The court had heard that the O’Malley fantasised with other users in the sick group about raping children and making them cry. The point, one presumes, was to get some sexual kick from their pain and suffering.
There were 10,000 exchanges between these monsters masquerading as human beings on O’Malley’s phone alone. It’s unclear how many members were in this group of twisted perverts. And there is no telling just how many such groups exist.
O’Malley’s phone contained more than 85,000 images of a pornographic nature. Among these were 249 child abuse image, with 62 defined as ‘Category 1’, featuring “content involving children aged between three and 17 years of age, in which some were being sexually abused by adults”.
In one exchange, he described how he wanted to abuse the two-year-old baby of another group member. He also asked a man if he could have sexual intercourse with his 12-year-old daughter.
It is unbearable to think of those children being used by the people who are meant to love and protect them to such inhumane, evil purpose. And to think of the utterly terrified children, perhaps kidnapped into a living nightmare, being tortured repeatedly before, as I once read, they die from ill use or are killed.
Can there be a greater evil? How do these monsters find each other? That fact that they exist at all, not to mind in such seemingly large numbers is profoundly terrifying.
I believe in the inherent goodness of human beings: that in order for the world to continue a majority of people must have always been decent and kind and moral, must have always rejected the kind of wickedness and depravity that would sexually abuse a child and distort our fundamental humanity. Perhaps the internet has simply allowed the depraved to find each other more easily, to bring others into their debased world.
Peter O’Malley will serve six years. Not long enough, in my opinion. Not long enough to reflect the agony of the children who cried and screamed as they were sexually tortured. I’d lock the door and throw away the key.
Keep your children close and keep them safe. Pray for those who are in the grip of monsters who walk amongst us.