But Sophie also believes that we need to provide therapy to abusers before they abuse, therapy that might stop them from hurting children like her in the first place. This means trying to see beyond our disgust at such crimes against children and to understand the factors that lead a person to commit them. Her views are echoed by others working in the field. Bill’s story In 2015 it worked with 38 offenders: 11 from Dublin and 27 from the rest of the Republic. Three of these received custodial sentences, seven are awaiting decisions from the Director of Public Prosecutions, two received suspended sentences and one is taking part in the Probation Service’s sex-offender risk assessment and management programme. We teach our kids to say ‘no’ to cigarettes, why not pornography? Is everyone afraid of looking like a prude? Are parents too embarrassed? Not sure what the problem is, but people are increasingly pro porn. It was the same with cigarettes in their day and it took decades before the tide turned. When it did turn it was due to campaigns by smoke-free celebrities and cultural heroes. The same campaign needs to begin with porn. Where are the sexually liberated men and women with social capital who will stand up for living and loving porn-free? May you please step forward! The Garda interviewed him, told him to obtain psychiatric treatment and stay away from the boys,” the intermediary says. “He stopped coaching basketball and says that he kept a low profile because he knew that he could be prosecuted, but he now wishes they had done so in the 1980s.”

This dovetailed with another emerging notion: that of stranger danger. The belief that strange men prowled communities, snatching children, gained traction following the disappearance of Philip Cairns, in 1986. Only a minority of sexual abusers are strangers, but media coverage distorted the reality. Catherine McGuinness, the former Supreme Court judge who led the first major investigation into child abuse in Ireland, says, “Mothers spoke quietly to each other and said, ‘Don’t leave your child with Mr So-and-So, because he begins to feel them up.’ People did know that things happened.” During my teens there was a deep and profound sadness that I couldn’t shake, so I drank a lot and took drugs. I carried self-loathing, humiliation, fear and shame. When I was 18 my mum brought me to a psychiatrist. When I told her what had happened she thought I was confused.He has never tried anything sexual with me and I don’t think he would, but it makes me nervous sharing a room when he’s looking at stuff like this. I’ve stopped undressing in front of him and now change in the bathroom. I don’t want to get him in trouble by telling our mom. What can I do? — Nervous Sister, Toledo, Ohio This week One in Four, an organisation that provides therapeutic support and advocacy for adult survivors of child sexual abuse, said that it saw 178 new and 485 ongoing clients in 2015, of whom 43 per cent were men and 57 per cent women.

As in Sophie’s family, some abusers target vulnerable women with low self-esteem and limited or chequered relationships; it makes their children easier targets. Kenneally did not abuse primarily because he was sexually attracted to the boys, much as a rapist is not overcome with lust. But, perhaps worse, like most sex offenders he was asserting power, control and dominance over people who could not defend themselves. Abusers are around us Child sex abusers are around us; we just don’t know it. Eileen Finnegan is clinical director of One in Four and the manager of Phoenix, a treatment programme for sex offenders that the organisation sees as a core part of child protection.

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But the extent of child sexual abuse began to emerge only in the late 1970s. The case of Noreen Winchester, a Belfast woman who murdered her abusive father – she was jailed but later granted a royal pardon – brought incest to the attention of the media.