Helpline encourages child sex offenders to get help before they act

In 2019, a 34-year-old man walked into a Salmon Arm police station and told officers he’d been viewing child exploitation material online. Police sent him for psychiatric treatment.

A year later, Derek Keegan was sent to prison.

Last month, facing more jail time following another conviction of viewing child exploitation material, prosecutors took a different approach. Instead of jail, they offered to get him help — something the now 40-year-old had been asking for from the beginning.

For psychologist Ainslie Heasman, it was a familiar pattern she has seen working with sexual offenders over the last 20 years. She knew many people attracted to children would seek help before they’d harm if only they had the chance.

“Personally and professionally, I started to think about what more we could do” Heasman told iNFOnews.ca. “Is there a way to prevent the first offence and the onset of offending?”

Through the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Heasman developed Talking for Change, an anonymous helpline for people concerned about their attraction to minors or their online behaviour.

“Often we are the first people they have ever told about their attractions or their online struggles,” Heasman said.

It is not an easy conversation topic for anyone.

“Part of the challenge is we have made this such a difficult thing to talk about,” she said. “But talking about prevention and talking about how to get someone help shouldn’t be a conversation that we shy away from, it should be one that we are actively moving towards because it really is about the protection of children.”

Along with the helpline, the team also developed an intensive psychotherapy available virtually across the country. It’s a self-referral program to cut down time and red tape.

In the last five years, the phone and chat line have received 2,000 calls and 420 referrals for the program.

Five per cent of those who call are under 18, and 10 per cent are people who are concerned about another’s behaviour. But the vast majority are concerned about their own attractions.

It’s about helping people before they cross the line.

Heasman said most child sexual abuse goes unreported to police, and charge and conviction rates are low.

Dealing with conduct that is clearly abhorrent before it happens is key.

“I think societally in some ways we have settled on this belief that child sexual abuse is inevitable, and that we just have to wait for it to happen. And then we’ll respond… through the criminal justice system, through support services for survivors,” Heasman said.

She describes it as a waiting game.

“And I think that premise is fundamentally faulty,” she said.

“Shifting the conversation to talk about the notion of prevention, and talking about how do you actually prevent harm before it occurs? And if we’re not doing everything possible to protect children, then we’re not doing enough,” she said.

Not everyone attracted to children is the same. Pedophilic disorder is a mental health diagnosis and is a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Hebephilia is sexual attraction to pubescent children.

But 40% to 50% of sexual abuse cases against children isn’t perpetrated from those groups, but by individuals who don’t have a sexual attraction to children.

It happens for other reasons, such as impulsivity, substance use, and antisocial tendencies. In youth, it can be curiosity and confusion, poor education around consent and boundaries.

There are also people with pedophilia who understand that sexual contact with a child is abusive and harmful and would never cross that line, she said.

But as a society, we like to distill things down and put them in boxes. 

“We create this narrative that if you have pedophilia, you have sexually abused a child, or if you haven’t yet, you will, and it’s this foregone conclusion. We don’t actually create spaces then for people who are struggling to come forward, because there’s the fear that the assumption is they have already caused harm, or they will cause harm, and there’s no help for them,” Heasman said. “So that stigma actually further perpetuates and creates the conditions for child sexual abuse, because it isolates people.”

Driving people underground and making them afraid to ask for help is exactly the thing we don’t want in order to protect children, Heasman said.

The majority of people who abuse children have been abused themselves, although the vast majority of people who have been abused as children do not go on to abuse children.

Recidivism rates for those convicted of sexual offences sit between five and 15 per cent for men and one to three per cent for women. For those convicted of accessing child exploitation material online, the recidivism rate drops to 6%. Evaluation of the programs Heasman set up hasn’t been done yet.

The entire subject matter is uncomfortable, but Heasman said we have a societal responsibility to allow people to ask questions and get help.

“The only way we’re going to make substantial changes and work to eradicate sexual violence against children and protect children is to have these conversations and talk about things that are uncomfortable because that’s ultimately what our children and the children in this country deserve,” she said.

For more information about the Talking for Change program, go here or call the helpline at 1-833-703-3303.