There has been a consistent increase in the number of male complainants inthe area of sexual offences, Garda statistics show.
Dr Clare Leon of Hibernia College told the conference that the figures showed the number of male complainants had increased from 19 per cent of the total in 1994 to 29 per cent in 2001.
Dr Leon said that different sources of data produced different figures, whether these were police records of complaints, incidents reported to rape crisis centres, or random victimisation surveys. This made it difficult to compare figures.
She said that the number of reported cases that progressed to the courts and eventually led to conviction varied from 9 per cent in the victimisation studies to 3 per cent from rape crisis centres.
Statistics based on Garda recorded crime figures show that approximately 20 per cent ended in conviction, a similar figure to that found in the UK.
The conference also heard that "recovered" memories of abuse can be false. Prof Gisli Gudjonsson of King's College, London, a practising forensic psychiatrist as well as an academic, told the conference that a person can believe that he or she suffered the abuse, and this belief can turn into a memory.
Describing how the process unfolds, he said that it was often prompted by relationship problems and was accompanied by depression or general unhappiness.
The "memory" was usually triggered by something like a film or a conversation with a sibling. It contained vivid imagery and the person usually had a vivid imagination. "It is usually internally generated, to satisfy the need for an explanation of unhappiness."
He said such false memories usually destroyed families, and the person was themselves traumatised by the "memory".
However, he warned: "We can't go so far as to say that all recovered memories are false."