The Links Group Trustee David Martin and Chair Paula Boyden have been working for months on raising awareness of ‘The Link’ between the sexual abuse of children and the sexual abuse of animals in the House of Lords and beyond. To date, they and the wider Animal Crime Related Working Group have been successful in changing the legal definition of animal sexual abuse.
This will become law once the Crime and Policing Bill makes its way through to becoming an Act, but there is still much to done to ensure that this change is reflected in Northern Irish and Scottish legislation, and to provide enhanced abilities to protect children and animals in the future from abuse.
The wider Links Group team are working alongside the Animal Crime Related Working Group to raise awareness of this in the devolved regions, and in Ireland.
Dave and Paula spoke to this in our recent multi-agency LVTI days in Antrim and Edinburgh.
Dave and Andrea raised this topic in our equine sector day in Enniskillen earlier this month, and followed up with in-house training sessions for the NSPCC in NI, and the All-Ireland Network on Sexual Violence Research.
The AINSVR is a collaboration between Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Limerick, aimed at connecting researchers, practitioners and policy makers across the island of Ireland. We are grateful to all those researchers and practitioners who have supported the work of Dave, The Links Group team and the Animal Crime Related Working Group. We’ve still some work to do, so please do get in touch if you are interested in supporting this work, particularly in NI or Scotland
