Queensland surfing coach to plead guilty to child sex abuse charges
A Queensland surfing coach accused of indecently assaulting children is set to plead guilty to dozens of charges.
Connor John Christopher Lyons, 26, was initially arrested on the Sunshine Coast in December and charged with 12 counts of indecently assaulting children, and three counts of wilful exposure.
Police alleged those incidents involved two boys on the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast over a 14-month period beginning August 2023.
He was then arrested again later that same week and charged with a further 14 offences, including making child exploitation material, grooming and damaging evidence with intent.
Mr Lyons is now facing 29 charges in total, which relate to four alleged child victims. The most serious of the charges carries a maximum 20 years in prison.
Guilty plea to be entered
In the Maroochydore Magistrates Court today, Mr Lyons appeared briefly via audio-visual link from custody. The court heard Mr Lyons intended to represent himself in the case and his solicitor Bradford Hill sought leave to discharge himself, which was granted.
Mr Lyons then said he wanted to plead guilty to the charges.
The accused told the court he had received the police brief of evidence. The case will return to court for a committal hearing later this week.
Exploitation material allegedly deleted
Police earlier alleged that following Mr Lyons's initial arrest in December, he then accessed and deleted child exploitation material from a device at his mother's house on the Sunshine Coast.
Police told the court in December last year Mr Lyons admitted to deleting the child exploitation material, as well as a number of other offences, during a subsequent police interview.
The court also heard allegations from police that Mr Lyons admitted to having accessed child pornography online for more than a decade. Police prosecutor Tegan Smith alleged the accused first indecently dealt with children in 2018.
Sin is progressive!
Ms Smith told the court Mr Lyons h
ad also admitted to abusing children, filming the abuse and then re-watching it.
Police previously urged anyone with any further information on the case to come forward.
Top detective Scott Beard and partner Gloria Masters backing hand signal campaign to help prevent child sex abuse
One of New Zealand’s best-known detectives is joining a fight against an “epidemic” of child sex abuse in New Zealand.
Detective Inspector Scott Beard’s partner, sexual abuse advocate Gloria Masters, who founded the charity Handing the Shame Back in 2022, is launching a campaign to raise awareness about a hand signal for victims of abuse to deploy.
Over his 45-year-career and involvement in high-profile police cases, including the murder of Grace Millane, Beard has become keenly aware of the depth of the problem of child sex abuse in New Zealand.
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In 1989, he first began working on cases involving children and now, he has seen the problem grow so that every police district in New Zealand has a child protection team.
“The children get threatened, they’re very scared and ashamed, and are particularly scared they won’t be believed so they tend to say nothing,” Beard said.
Masters, who herself was a victim, said for the first 16 years of her life she experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her father and other people hired by him.
“My father, with my grandmother’s help, would traffic me to paedophiles and groups of paedophiles around Auckland in exchange for money.”
She said the current digital environment had enabled “much more sexualised content” of children to be available to predators..
“AI has the ability to remove the clothing off a child, get that image, and then someone can trade it,” Masters said.
This is why you should never post photos of your children online.
“I don’t know how many times I’m saying to parents and grandparents please stop posting photos of your children online.”
Beard said part of the increase in sexual abuse cases was because there was more reporting by victims, but it was also reflective of an increasingly online world.

A staggering statistic which Beard cannot forget is that up to 85% of online offenders become contact offenders (with children), which means the police are devoting a lot more time to clamping down on online predators.
Again, Sin is progressive!
He said the case of Malcolm Ross Davidson, who pleaded guilty to nearly 200 charges involving child sex abuse, showed how important it was for members of the public to speak up if they witnessed concerning behaviour.
A police investigation began in Davidson’s case after a father in a shopping mall caught him taking an up-skirt photo of his daughter and reported the incident.
Beard said the father had protected countless other children from that one small action.
Masters said over 90% of child sex abuse offending was carried out by a person who was known to the child.
Adults needed to be wary of looking out for common behavioural signs in children that could mean they were being sexually abused.
“Regression in a child is a sign, if they are clinging to mum and not wanting to leave the house so much anymore,” Masters said.
“Other signs like thumb sucking or wetting the bed as an eight-year-old, when actually they had stopped that behaviour years earlier.”
Beard said other signs could be displaying overly-sexual behaviour or acting sexual at too early of an age.
This could mean the child was replicating sexual acts they had experienced, he said.
How could a hand signal help?
On June 15, Masters and Beard will launch their campaign to raise awareness about the Global Hand Sign for Under 16s.
The hand signal begins with an outstretched palm, the thumb is then tucked inside the hand, and the four fingers wrap around it forming a fist.
It is subtle enough so that a child could perform the hand signal even if their perpetrator was standing beside them.
Masters said a seven-year-old child in Auckland had been saved from further abuse by using the hand signal to alert their teacher and then principal.
“Using a sign like that is much easier for children than finding the words,” Masters said.
“A lot of them have been threatened never to speak about their abuse.”
Beard said the fact the hand signal was “simple and easy to use” made it effective, and he felt that if it had been invented earlier it could have saved more children.
Masters said people needed to believe children the first time that they shared their stories of abuse, instead of voicing doubt or too many questions.
“I call this the silent epidemic because most people turn away because it’s uncomfortable, but the problem with that is the only group that helps is the perpetrators,” she said.
Understanding Namibian child sex offenders
Data key to investigations and effective rehabilitation programmes for offenders
Conducting high-quality research is pivotal to the establishment of evidence-based approaches and policies aimed at addressing this social plague.
Ndeyapo Emma Nafuka, Opinion by Namibian Sun
Sexual abuse of children is a serious concern in Namibia. Mass media is awash with incidences of the plague. The recent cases of the rape and murder of two young girls in Okahandja are such examples. These incidences sparked a staggering wave of dismay, with many Namibians asking, “What kind of a person is capable of committing such a heartless act on a child?” Driven by my inherent curiosity to understand the dark side of human behaviour, my doctorate studies zoomed in on the profile of Namibian adult child sex offenders.
The study examined 183 adult males incarcerated in correctional facilities across Namibia for child sexual abuse. The results of the study revealed that a typical child sex offender in Namibia is characteristically a single, average-aged 30-year-old with a primary education level and no history of criminal conviction.
Although most of the offenders were employed, they had low-income-earning jobs such as farm labourers and casual construction workers. Child sex offenders predominately assaulted female victims who they were not biologically related to but were acquainted with.
Generally, the examination of the criminal behaviour of the offender displayed prior to, during and post-assault, as well as strategies applied to select or gain access to the victim, sheds light on the motivation behind the child sexual abuse.
Types of offenders
Analysis of Namibia child sex offenders’ sexual behaviour showed that offenders predominately engaged in vaginal and anal penetration for female and male children. They also demonstrated little evidence of grooming and obtained access to the children through promises of giving them money or something nice.
These behaviours signal criminality rather than sexual attraction towards children.
This type of offender belongs to a category referred to as 'criminally motivated child sex offenders'. Unlike paedophilic-motivated child sex offenders, criminal-motivated child sexual offenders are not necessarily attracted to children’s physical or psychological characteristics. Their abusive behaviour towards children is mainly due to their inability to adequately deal with challenges of everyday life, such as economic pressure and difficulties maintaining adult relationships.
Such challenges may trigger feelings of hopelessness and despair, resulting in the offender experiencing a temporary departure from attraction to adults.
However, the mere presence of an inability to adequately manage life challenges is not always adequate to stimulate criminal coping. For the sexual assault to occur, other critical conditions must be present, particularly antisocial cognitions and opportunity. It is theorised that antisocial cognitions facilitate sexual abuse behaviour when the opportunities arise. Consequently, sexual abuse of children may be a symbolic displacement of aggression and violence facilitated by the existence of antisocial cognitions.
I am more inclined to believe that rather than antisocial behaviour, it is anti-God behaviour. Anger at God for their circumstances. Raping a prepubescent, innocent child is like striking at God. It's destroying innocence, violating the sacred.
Lethal types
During the course of the study, the researcher came across a case in which the perpetration of sexual abuse of a child escalated to murder.
In another case, the sexual violence occurred after the murder of the child. Both cases were excluded from the study, as these types of child sex offenders presented unique criminal profiles from those who do not murder their victims.
Do they? Is this true in Islam? In Pakistan, where this happens all the time and often involves gang-rape by adult men on little children before the murder.
Child sexual offenders who murder their victims are likely to have maladaptive personality traits such as antisocial, borderline personality, or psychopathy, which may co-exist with other disorders, including paraphilias. Child sex offenders with the co-occurrence of atypical sexual preferences and psychopathy, though quite rare, are the most lethal type of child sex offenders.
That sounds like Islam to me!
It is important to recognise that child sex offenders are a diverse group, and there is a need to understand their criminal profiles.
The gathering of such information has significant implications for the investigation, assessment and development of effective rehabilitation programmes for offenders, as well as guiding the developing of preventative and self-protective programmes for children.
Much like in other cases involving deviance, the development of strategic and sustainable approaches to sexual crimes against children requires collaborative effort from different key players such as policymakers, law enforcement agencies, academics and researchers. Conducting high-quality research is pivotal to the establishment of evidence-based approaches and policies aimed at addressing this social plague.
*Ndeyapo Emma Nafuka holds a PhD in psychology with a specialisation in forensic psychology.
She is the head of the Directorate of Rehabilitation in the Namibian Correctional Service. This article is written in her personal capacity.
Provided by SyndiGate Media Inc. (
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