Named and shamed: SA’s convicted child sexual offenders exposed in Advertiser’s online database of vile criminals
South Australia’s child sexual criminals have been exposed in The Advertiser’s database, as debate rages over the merits of a publicly accessible sexual offender register.
Police & Courts
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As support continues to mount, around the nation, for a national and publicly-accessible sexual offenders register, The Advertiser today publishes its second-annual database of those found guilty of vile crimes.
Survivor, actor and mother Madeleine West has joined the campaign saying a pedophile register would have stopped her abuser.
While South Australian lawyer and survivors advocate Andrew Carpenter has warned there are no laws stopping 100 pedophiles congregating at a Wiggles concert.
Through both a dedicated topic page, which subscribers can follow, and a regularly updated chart, readers will be able to keep track of the cases covered by our court reporting team.
The list includes the names, ages, suburbs, offences and sentences of convicted offenders, provided all of that information is in the public arena and not suppressed.
It does not include any information that would tend to identify the victim or survivor of an offence, as their privacy is guaranteed under state law.
Offenders will only be added to the database once they have either pleaded or been found guilty by the state’s Supreme, District and Magistrates courts.
Despite the diligence of reporters, the offenders listed represent a mere fraction of the number of child sexual abuse cases in SA’s courts every day.
Statistics compiled by Websters Lawyers show almost 20 per cent of the District Court’s daily caseload is child abuse – some days reaching as high as 31 per cent.
Last year, SA’s elite Joint Anti Child Exploitation Team warned online abuse had “exploded” in the past decade, with its detectives investigating three new cases a week.
In 2023 alone, the combined AFP/SA Police team arrested 88 people for such offending – again, just a fraction of the total number of abuse-related cases before the courts.
In March 2020, The Advertiser and victims’ advocates succeeded in an 18-year campaign to have alleged sexual offenders named once they had faced court for the first time.
While that means alleged offender’s names are publicly available on the courts website, no database exists listing the names of those convicted of crimes.
Establishing such a register was a pre-election promise of the state government that has gone unfulfilled.
No true state nor national register exists but, in WA, the identities of those considered “high-risk offenders” are made publicly available.
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