The criminal justice system and the ancillary services involved can't cope with the current levels of sex offending. What the historical cases are showing, at least to the victims, is that although they may feel empowered to speak out once they see another case being taken seriously, that "justice" long denied will be drawn out even longer.
Fine. Why? Do you have particularly low sentences for nonces across the Irish Sea?
It's the endless - and understandable - cry: we want to show our outrage by making the sentences as draconian as possible.
But there's a drawback. Several, in fact.
First, as is probably becoming fairly obvious by now, most abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the victim - quite possibly someone the victim cares about, or part of the victim's (extended) family. Really draconian sentences increase the pressure on the victim - or those around the victim - not to disclose, as the perceived punishment may
seem to them to be out of all proportion to the crime: there is a real risk that, as the severity of punishment goes up, so the likelihood of disclosure goes down.
Secondly, as the severity of the sentence goes up, so the differential between the sentence for child sexual offences and, say, murder narrows. There is a real risk that very heavy sentences actually create the potential for far more harm to be done to victims than otherwise.
Thirdly, as will be evident from the statements of so many victims in recent court cases, most people who have been sexually abused are not looking for revenge, or the harshest punishments to be inflicted on their abusers. What they tend to focus on is, firstly, being believed and taken seriously, and secondly, making sure that the abuser is not able to abuse others.
Taken together, those reasons - and I am sure there are others - seem to me to present a good argument for not just going for the tough knee-jerk response, but taking a little more care about things. I would far rather, for example, see sex offenders serve sentences that involved some assertive work on getting them to see the consequences of what they have done, and on helping them to find ways of controlling and managing their behaviours than simply warehousing them indefinitely.
There will be those whom you cannot release - the Sidney Cookes of this world, for example. It may be that Savile would have been a similarly incorrigible offender whose behaviour would not have been changed by any amount of rehabilitation work, and I am not suggesting that NOBODY convicted of sex offences against children should serve a long sentence.
It just seems to me a bit sad that the response, so often, to these things is simply to go for the gut desire to avenge ourselves on these people - it might feel good, but it doesn't do much good.
