Despite the passing of laws in the 1990s to address child sexual exploitation, very few countries can provide evidence of investigations or prosecutions from these laws, according to a report on the sexual exploitation of children in Europe published in Dublin yesterday.
Speaking at the conference in Dublin Castle yesterday to launch the report, Dr Liz Kelly, the co-author of the research, said there was increasing evidence of trafficking in children within Europe, production of child pornography and sexual abuse rings involving family members, professionals, clergy and children's homes. She said many European countries were failing to protect children from sexual abuse or deliver justice for them.
The new report, Rhetorics and Realities, calls for the enforcement of laws to target abusers and for a firm commitment by the European member-states to policies that will ensure more action against child sexual exploitation.
The report was written by the University of North London's Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit in partnership with Dublin Women's Aid and Roks of Sweden, and is based on surveys conducted with justice departments, state agencies and non-government organisations in all of the EU countries. "The major thing we found was that there's wonderful rhetoric but there's hardly anything happening anywhere in Europe," Dr Kelly told The Irish Times.
She said that, unlike some of the other justice departments contacted for the study, the Department of Justice supplied figures on the recorded extent of child sexual exploitation in Ireland, but there were no prosecutions in this State in 1997 or 1998.
Dr Kelly said that a study by the Eastern Health Board, which surveyed groups of professionals, identified 53 children and young people they knew to be involved in child prostitution. "So there are at least 53 children and young people being prostituted in Ireland and nobody is being prosecuted for it," she said.
The conference in Dublin Castle to launch the report was attended by academics, social workers and a number of local and international women's, youth, and family support groups, as well as representatives of Government and the Garda.