Child protection experts have been warning about the dangers smartphones and pornography pose to young people for almost as long as there have been smartphones.
Most professionals working with children who display concerning behaviour believe there is a direct connection between sexual offending and the ease with which they can access extreme pornography on a device that can be all but impossible for parents to supervise.
“It coincides with the smartphone, so the last decade or so,” says Kieran McGrath, a social worker with 30 years’ experience, when asked when he had first started to notice the problem. “To a degree, it coincides with the internet, but really, it took off exponentially with the smartphone.”
[ When do children first get exposed to pornography? When they get a phoneOpens in new window ]
It has only been in more recent years that these fears have filtered through into the legal world, where courts have been dealing with a rash of underage sex offenders who had access to online pornography from young ages.
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This has led to dark warnings from judges and barristers of the connection between unsupervised smartphone use and sexual offending.
Most recently, Judge Catherine Staines expressed her shock when dealing with the case of a 13-year-old boy who stalked a woman walking alone on the streets of Cork before sexually assaulting her.
The hearing at Cork Circuit Criminal Court last week heard the boy had been accessing pornography on his phone since the age of 11.
“It is shocking that this is available to vulnerable, impressionable young people. Clearly companies are making vast sums of money from selling pornographic material. More rigorous restrictions should be placed on them to prevent this harmful material being available to young children,” the judge said.
More than 20 per cent of sexual offences are committed by a male child
In a 2021 case, barrister Brendan Grehan SC called the issue “an epidemic in its own right of young boys accessing pornography and then acting it out in inappropriate ways”.
At the time he was defending a boy who was 12 when he raped his eight-year-old cousin. A probation service report linked the offending to the boy’s exposure to pornography on his mobile phone from an early age.
Exposure to pornography from a young age, almost invariably through a smartphone, has become an almost routine fixture of sexual offence cases involving child offenders when they appear before the courts.
According to figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO), more than 20 per cent of sexual offences are committed by a male child. The link with pornography, according to McGrath, is “irrefutable”.
It’s not just Playboy off the shelf. These are horrible images they are looking at
— Michael White, former head of the Central Criminal Court
Analysis of the Garda Youth Diversion Programme also provides a worrying insight. In 2020, the latest year for which figures were available, there was a 42 per cent increase in children being referred to the programme for “child pornography” offences. This came at a time when almost every other category of youth offending saw large declines due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Few judges have seen more of these cases that Michael White, who was head of the Central Criminal Court from 2018 until his retirement in 2021.
The Central Criminal Court usually deals with adults accused of rape and murder. But children who have committed sexual offences are increasingly prosecuted there due to the seriousness of their crimes.
“It’s not just Playboy off the shelf. These are masochistic, horrible images they are looking at,” he says. What’s more, the courts may be just seeing the “tip of the iceberg”, he adds.
“I would guess, if it’s easily available on smartphones, then young boys are accessing it,” he says. “It seems to start around 12, which is shocking because you’re really talking about sixth class in primary school.”
Judge Paul Kelly, the president of the District Court and a judge in the Children’s Court, said he has noticed a rise in young people being charged with sexual offences but adds that “the base point and overall numbers are very low.”
Smartphones give reasonably free access to pornography to children, he told The Irish Times.
“I think it stands to reason that young adolescents are going to access it. And I think it also goes without saying that what they see is going to influence them to some extent.”
Gareth Noble, a solicitor dealing with child law, has previously said parents of children as young as 11 are coming to him for advice because they are worried their child might have committed a sexual offence.
Access to extreme pornography is at least partly driving this trend as it is giving children “a completely warped view of relationships”.
Noble was speaking in 2019 in the aftermath of the trial of 13-year-old two boys accused of murdering their 14-year-old schoolmate, Ana Kriégel. One of the murderers, who was also convicted of aggravated sexual assault, was found in possession of 12,000 images on his digital device.
[ Ana Kriégel murder: What drove two teenage boys to murder a 14-year-old girl?Opens in new window ]
The majority of these depicted pornography, including images of a man in a balaclava looking at a semi-naked woman and a man choking a woman.
White was one of the preliminary judges who dealt with the case before it went to trial. The Kriégel case, he believes, “opened people’s eyes” about how cruel children can be and the need for parental supervision of young teenagers.
“It’s not about being overprotective but to be aware of the age they are at,” he says.
There is little point in trying to control access to pornography at a legislative or regulatory level, the retired judge believes.
“The genie is out of the bottle. It is so widespread now,” he says. “I think it has to come from the parents and guardians and wider community in relation to the child.”
Meanwhile, there is little sign of the problem plateauing, says McGrath, who wrote an advice pamphlet for parents on the matter after the Kriégel case.
Every teenager who looks at pornography isn’t going to become a sex offender, he says. Far from it. But in Ireland and Spain, where he also works counselling child sex offenders, pornography is a factor “in almost every case that we deal with”.
