“Many teenagers are unaware they are breaking the law because they are disseminating child pornography,” says Judge O’Connor, who has just completed a PhD on the sentencing of underage sexual offenders. Sexting, involving young people sharing sexually explicit images of each other, can take place within consensual relationships but can also be associated with bullying and exploitation. “Many young people do not even realise they are offending by, for example, sexting,” he says. Judge John O’Connor, a juvenile justice specialist who sits on the Circuit Court, believes the real number of offences – mostly covering allegations of sexual assault, rape and possession of child pornography – is likely to be higher. One in five of the 11,000 sexual abuse cases recorded on the Garda Pulse system between January 2018 and December 2020 involved young offenders. The Kriégel case, thankfully, was a rarity, but sexual offending by children and adolescents is now a real problem in the State. The murder of 14-year-old Ana Kriégel in Dublin in May 2018 by two 13-year-old boys, coupled with extreme sexual violence by one of them, fed public fears of young and dangerous sexual offenders.
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