Children were suspects in one in five sexual crimes reported to gardaí in 2018

sexual abuse being children at the time of the alleged offence.

Noeline Blackwell, CEO of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, said barriers remained for reporting, but the organisation had noted an increased trend in reporting recent abuse.

“The CSO figures show a clear trend – that more offences happened within a year of reporting, and that about a quarter of all reports related to abuse which took place 10 or more years ago.

“This trend is in line with what we see in Dublin Rape Crisis Centre.

“While serious barriers remain to reporting – people blaming themselves when they shouldn’t, or not wanting to report people they know, sometimes intimately – our own experience is that there is an increasing trend towards reporting recent abuse,” she said.

Ms Blackwell highlighted that just 10 of the country’s 28 Garda divisions have specialist units dealing with crimes of intimate violence.

“There was a commitment that every division would have one by late 2019 or early 2020. It’s essential that this happens.”

Ms Blackwell added that it was “in the wider society’s interest that when crimes happen, they are properly investigated and prosecuted, particularly in an area of crime which is vastly under-reported in comparison to other crime”.

It is the first time there have been statistics provided on suspect offenders, who are identified as a person issued with a sanction such as a charge, summons or caution in relation to an offence.

Sam Scriven, a statistician with the CSO, said the figures “provide detail on the age and gender of both victims and suspected offenders of serious crimes reported to An Garda Síochána”.

CHILDREN were suspects in almost one in five sex crimes that were detected by gardaí in 2018. A new report also shows 98pc of all sexual offences reported in that same period were carried out by males. The figures were released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) as part of its study into victims of serious crime last year, as well as suspected offenders for offences including murder, sex crimes and assaults in 2018. In 2019, the majority of homicide victims were male – 82pc of people killed – while more than four in every five victims of sexual violence was female. Figures for 2018 show a person under the age of 18 was a suspected offender in 84 sexual offences, meaning almost 20pc of suspects for that crime group were children, while just 2pc were female. Of the sex crimes reported last year, 24pc occurred more than 10 years ago, with 833 victims who reported historic ‘Clear trend’: Noeline Blackwell of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre