WHAT MORE PROOF DO WE NEED TO ACT ON PHONES?
As Ministers STILL resist calls for age limits on smartphones, a paedophile RTÉ producer is jailed after trying to groom up to 20 girls...
THE RTÉ producer jailed for online grooming had attempted to lure up to TWENTY children before being caught, it emerged yesterday. In yet another stark illustration of why radical action is needed to protect our young people online, Kieran Creaven admitted using fake Facebook profiles and buying his intended victims credit for their smartphones, as part of a horrifying litany of paedophile grooming. The 55-year-old also tried
to harm children who shunned him by posting false claims about them – including the lie that they had sent him nude images.
A day after ministers again snubbed calls for age limits on smartphones here, Leeds Crown Court heard chilling details of Creaven’s relentless pursuit of young girls on the net.
While the nationalities of his intended grooming victims are not known, a Garda operation into his activities here is in progress. Gardaí have already searched his home and seized his computers for examination.
Creaven is since estranged from his family. His wife, in a letter submitted to the court, said he had been ‘in a dark place’ for a number of years.
The court heard Creaven told police he had an addiction to pornography for the last few years and had watched boys and girls between the ages of eight and 17, but mainly girls.
‘I need professional help,’ he said. ‘I find children attractive.’
The horrifying case comes just a month after Dubliner Matthew Horan, 26, was convicted of grooming a string of primary school girls – six of them Irish – and making them perform sex acts online.
Two nine-year-olds were made to commit graphic acts on Skype, using smartphones they bought with their Holy Communion money. Another 11-year-old said she would kill herself when Horan blackmailed her into graphic sex acts by threatening to publish nude pictures of her. Despite her pleas he refused to relent.
And a ten-year-old girl he groomed said she had thought the internet was a safe place and that she was ‘making a new friend’ when she met him online.
The cases echo the horrifying fears expressed on Thursday by Detective Superintendent Declan Daly, who warned of a litany of crimes online. He was speaking at the Government-organised ‘open debate’ on child internet safety.
Leading cyber-safety expert Dr Mary Aiken boycotted the event, saying it was a ‘talking shop’ set up for show and would not help to protect children.
Main panellists at the event included representatives of Facebook and Google, plus a number of Government-funded or Government-appointed speakers. However, Communications Minister Denis Naughten, who had arranged the event, refused to allow anyone onto the panel who advocated age limits on smartphones as the simplest and most straightforward way of protecting children online.
At one point he also mocked the age limit idea, saying society didn’t ban pens when they were used to write hurtful comments. However, he failed to point out that pens cannot allow children to access hardcore pornography, be groomed by strangers online or be cyber-bullied.
The minister’s resistance to discussing smartphone age limits comes even though polls have repeatedly shown the majority of parents support them. An Irish Daily Mail poll in January revealed that more than two-thirds of people support a smartphone ban for children under the age of 16. According to the Irish Daily Mail/ Ireland Thinks poll, 69% support the ban for under-16s, 30% don’t, and only 1% had no opinion.
This was followed by a survey on TheJournal.ie, revealing that 76% of people are in favour of teenagers under the age of 14 being banned from using smartphones. Only 20% didn’t support such as measure, while 4% were unsure.
A similar poll, released earlier that week by RTÉ’s Claire Byrne Live, indicated that 56% think the Government should ban young people from using smartphones
until they are teenagers. Yesterday’s case will, however, further increase pressure on the minister and the Government to start taking the debate about smartphone ownership more seriously.
The court heard that Creaven was only caught after he flew from Dublin to Leeds to meet up with a 13-year-old girl at a hotel.
The girl turned out to be fake and had been created by a group of so-called paedophile hunters known as Predator Exposure.
Creaven had twice planned to fly over from his home in Dublin to meet the girl he believed he had groomed through Facebook messages.
The RTÉ producer, who the court heard was living in a ‘cyber world of pornography’, had two boxes of condoms, a list of female names and two phones when arrested.
The sting account was set up in the fake name of ‘Keeley Nutton’ by the Facebook Group ‘Predator Exposure’, who cornered him outside the Queens Hotel in Leeds, West Yorkshire, on November 18 last year, where he was expecting to meet the girl.
Their online conversation was described as ‘prolonged’ by the prosecution. It began in July. The ‘girl’ repeatedly told Creaven she was 13, in hundreds of messages exchanged over the four months.
He sent her a picture of his erect penis over Facebook messages and the ‘girl’ told him she had never seen one before.
He also told her he wanted to ‘kiss and cuddle’ her.
He pleaded guilty at a previous hearing to attempting to meet a child following grooming for a sexual purpose and of attempting to cause or incite a child to engage in sexual activity, namely kissing and cuddling. Creaven told police he fully accepted he had messaged the ‘girl’, but said he didn’t mean it in a sexual way.
Kitty Colley prosecuting, said: ‘He said he would talk to children online and at times buy credit for their phones so they could talk to him, but when they blocked him he would do something as revenge, such as put on Facebook that they had sent him naked photos.’
Ms Colley said: ‘At the time of the offences, he was working as a TV producer in Ireland.’ she said: ‘The defendant lives in Dublin and contact started by his contact of a girl’s profile on Facebook.
‘There is no complainant as such in this case.
‘The profile was set up by an online paedophile hunting group called Predator Exposure.’ The prosecutor added: ‘It was very clear from the beginning that she was 13 as she said: “I’m only 13”.
‘Creaven also had a fake profile. He set himself up as a younger man in his 30s, although, in fairness to him, he described himself as that and told her that he was in his late 30s.
‘He set up a profile, including photographs, of someone called “Jimmy Cee”. During the many communications they had, he sent her images of himself.
‘He started the communication by saying she appeared as a recommended friend and said “hi”.
‘She responded referring to herself as being at school and her age. Hundreds of message were sent between Creaven and the profile. He would flatter her, he would say “night night” and refer to her as “baby”.
‘The conversation quickly turned sexual, with him saying he wished he could... “smell your hair, kiss you and we’ll be together in the morning”.’
The court heard that Creaven told the girl: ‘Love your new profile picture, smouldering’, along with a wink emoji.
The prosecutor added: ‘By October 2017, he arranged to travel to take her to a Leeds United match and she was clearly impressed by this, as she had never been to a match before.
‘However, the meeting was cancelled as he said he was ill and she said she had to see her grandma.’
Ms Colley said that Creaven asked the fake teenager to stay with him in the Queens Hotel in Leeds, but she would need ID and he would pretend to be her father.
As he left the hotel, he was confronted by the Predator Exposure group – and filmed live on Facebook. He was arrested and when he was searched, police found he had two boxes of condoms on him.
Ms Colley said: ‘He told police he had an addiction to pornography and it had been that way for a number of years, and technology made him do it.’
He said he had watched videos of male and female children aged between eight and 17.
When asked why he did it, he said: ‘I need professional help and I am attracted to children.’
Creaven’s solicitor Ian Cook said: ‘He was living in almost a cyber world of internet pornography.’
He said that Creaven’s wife, in a submitted letter, said that he had been ‘in a dark place’ for a number of years.
Mr Cook said: ‘He had an interest in internet pornography, but that seemed to have manifested itself into an obsession.
‘Going beyond that, into areas of illegal internet pornography.’
He said that his client was creating personas of himself online and he also went on a dating site.
Mr Cook mentioned his client’s early guilty plea and said that his offending is best managed within the community.
Creaven, who had no previous convictions, sat motionless in the dock throughout, dressed in a black jumper and white collar.
Members of the Predator Exposure group were also in court in the public gallery.
Jailing Creaven, Judge Recorder Simon Phillips QC said: ‘You believed you were dealing with a real person and you believed her to be 13 years of age.
‘You went to considerable lengths in an attempt to meet with her.
‘You have lost your job and your marriage has been shattered.’
Creaven, formerly a sports producer for RTÉ, was then sentenced to 18 months in jail and was made subject to an indefinite sexual harm prevention order.
Members of Predator Exposure shouted ‘animal’ and ‘disgusting b ****** ’ at Creaven as he was sent from the dock.
‘I am attracted to children’
YESTERDAY, disgraced former RTÉ producer Kieran Creaven was sentenced to 18 months in prison at a sentencing hearing in Leeds for grooming a 13-year-old girl – even though she was invented by a vigilante group – with the intent of meeting her for sexual contact.
The case proved how unsafe an environment the online world is for young people: and we can only hope it may make our legislators take this issue more seriously.
On Thursday, the Government held a socalled ‘open’ debate on all aspects of internet safety, which turned out to be anything but. In the main, the panellists were representatives of the big tech companies, or of groups appointed or funded by the Government, all of whom essentially advocated a version of the status quo (give or take the odd tweak).
Some speakers at an event on ‘safety’ even urged that the forum concentrate not only on the dangers of the internet, but on the benefits too.
These people should all read every word of the Creaven case. He did not accidentally strike up conversation with the correspondent he believed to be a young girl. He targeted between 15 and 20 of them and, when arrested, he was carrying two packets of condoms.
To enable his grooming, he even bought phone credit for some of the girls and, had it not been for the vigilantes, he easily might have been the next Matthew Horan, convincing them to share explicit sexual images of themselves.
What his case, and those of Horan and journalist Tom Humphries show, is that no child is safe from such predators, especially since so much grooming has migrated from laptop computers to smartphones.
That’s why we have one message for the condescending doubters who scoff at our calls for sharp, effective and radical action; for the complacent who think there’s little amiss; and for the defeatists who shrug that ‘the horse has bolted’.
The message is simple: Wake up! Kieran Creaven is proof of the problem: and every day our society does nothing puts more children at risk.