SA Introduces Statutes Amendment (Child Sex Offences) Bill 2022
Monday 30 May 2022 @ 11.52 a.m. | Crime | Legal Research
The Statutes Amendment (Child Sex Offences) Bill 2022 (SA) ('the Bill') was introduced into the South Australian Legislative Council on 5 May 2022 by the Attorney-General (the Honorable K.J. Maher).
The Bill proposes amendment of the folowing SA Legislation:
- Child Sex Offenders Registration Act 2006 (SA);
- Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA); and
- Sentencing Act 2017 (SA).
The Attorney-General commented in his second reading speech:
"[That the Bill proposes] significant and much-needed reform aimed at protecting the community from child sex offenders by increasing penalties on a range of child sex offences and ensuring that predators are not entitled to leniency because they were mistaken in their belief that their victim was a child."
Increased Penalties
This Bill proposes substantial increases for maximum penalties for certain child sex offences in the Criminal Consolidation Act 1935 (SA). Some of the offences with proposed increased penalties include child exploitation material offences and child grooming offences.
In addition to the proposed increase in penalties on child exploitation offence, the Bill also seeks to remove the classification of crimes under this offence into basic and aggravated classes. The Bill proposes the removal of the distinction. Instead, these offences will have only one significant maximum penalty.
Changes to Police Procedure
The Attorney-General also comments that:
"The Bill also [proposes a] set of amendments in relation to policing using fictitious children. These amendments have been included to strengthen existing laws around charging online predators where barriers have been experienced by police investigators. In a fictitious child scenario, an offender believes they are speaking to a real child, but in fact they are speaking to an undercover police officer or an artificial intelligence program. In many cases, a person can already be liable for criminal communications with a fictitious child. However, there are various gaps in the current legislation that create the potential for leniency in this scenario, and the bill will address this."
The Bill proposes to address this by making it clear that the following offences can include communications with fictitious children:
- grooming offences under section 63B(3) of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA);
- a registerable child sex offender failing to inform police of reportable contact with a child; and
- dishonest communication with children, better known as Carly's Law.
The Bill also proposes to amend various sentencing provisions to consider the age the defendant believed their victim to be at the time of the offence, if the victim was fictitious about their age.
The Bill has passed the upper house with no amendments, and has yet to pass the lower house.
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Sources:
Statutes Amendment (Child Sex Offences) Bill 2022 (SA) and additional explanatory material available from TimeBase's LawOne Service
