SOCIETIES that lock up sex offenders and ignore them do so at their peril, an expert on child abuse told the International Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect yesterday.
Mr Ray Wyre, principal adviser to the Faithfull Foundation in the UK, said that even if treatment of offenders was not successful the information gathered from them was invaluable.
"You can ask me if it works and, even if it doesn't, the information we get from them helps us to understand the problem. This entirely justifies the attention we give to offenders," said Mr Wyre, who works on sexual crime in a number of different areas and assists police in investigating these sort of crimes.
The consequences of not undertaking this work were felt by the survivors of the abuse. Without it there would be more victims and no understanding of how the process of the abuse worked and no impetus for change. Nobody, he said, wanted to hear about treatment because they insisted on talking about the "worst cases"
such as Marc Dutroux in Belgium, the "no hopers".
"The more we understand about offenders the more it helps our work with the children. A child does not know how long the father, uncle or friend was interested in them; they only realise when they were on the receiving end, the touching. We will find out all that went before it."
Abusers might also identify other children they had abused who could be helped. If one engaged with abusers in denial they might come around to admitting the abuse and making it easier for the children involved in the courts. "We learn about different patterns of behaviour. We discover how we can reduce the levels of abuse in society."
The authorities should intervene early so that the risk of reoffending is reduced.
"Maybe if we worked with people when they were first caught, such as adolescents, and identified their abusive behaviour and worked with it, maybe this would go a long way toward protecting children and women and making society a safer place," said Mr Wyre, who was formerly involved with the Gracewell Clinic in Birmingham.
In his presentation "Working with Abusers - Why Bother?", he said that abusers had "processed information" which showed how they planned abuse, how they "groomed" their victims, and how they carried out the abuse. Child sex abuse was rarely simply an "incident" but "relationship that corrupts and violates".
The media portrayed child abusers as "evil monsters", which left many parents vulnerable to who abusers really were. "They don't think it is the friendly man who is being so nice to their children."
One alleged abuser was murdered in prison, and afterwards some media said it was the best thing that could have happened. "But what they did not know about was the letter written to the solicitor by the little girl saying, `Because I told, my Daddy is now dead.' If you care about children, what you do with abusers is essential."
It was important that people realised there were different levels of offenders. "A person looking at a child pornography photograph is not a mass murderer," he said.