Family man 'living a double life' jailed for 10 years for sexual abuse of young girl over five-year period
David Kearney engaged in a “campaign of grooming” the girl from when she was 11 years old, a court heard
A family man who was living a double life when he groomed and sexually abused a young girl over a five-year period has been jailed for 10 years.
David Kearney, 39, engaged in a “campaign of grooming” the girl from when she was 11 years old and his appreciation for what he has done is “limited”, Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring said as she sentenced him in the Central Criminal Court on Friday.
“It is clear that he was living a double life,” the judge said.
“He was a partner, a father and hard worker on one hand - and a drug user and sexual abuser on the other.”
Kearney, of Cork Road, Waterford, pleaded guilty to 12 counts of sexually abusing the child, including charges of sexual assault, rape, oral rape and anal rape, on dates between April 2019 and October 2023.
He also pleaded guilty to one count of using communication technology to facilitate the sexual exploitation of a child under the age of 17 during a similar time period.
The girl was aged between 11 and 16 years old at the time of the abuse, while Kearney was in his thirties, with a partner and two small children. It occurred in various locations in Waterford and Kilkenny, the court heard.
The young woman wished for Kearney to be named in the reporting of the case, Karl Finnegan SC, prosecuting, told the court.
The abuse came to light when Kearney sent a lewd text message to the teenager and she became upset and confided in her boyfriend at the time. He persuaded her to tell her mother and Gardaí were alerted.
Detective Garda Patricia Lonergan told the court that the abuse began when Kearney touched the girl inappropriately while she was in a mutual acquaintance's home. On other occasions, he pinned her down in a field and against a shed wall and sexually assaulted her.
When she got a phone aged around 12, Kearney started texting her inappropriate messages, and would pressure her to send him explicit photos. He also sent her photos of his genitals.
After the girl turned 13, Kearney started raping her. He would take her for drives before sexually abusing her. He anally raped her on one occasion in his car and also made her give him oral sex while he was driving the car.
He told the girl not to tell anyone, as he would get in trouble if he was found out.
In her victim impact statement, which was read out in court by her mother, the girl (now aged 17) said she is a survivor of sexual abuse.
“I spend all day pretending, smiling, laughing, acting like everything is fine, but the second I'm alone, it all falls apart,” she said.
She said the pain Kearney caused her and her family is “unbearable most days”.
“I was living a double life as a teenager,” she said. “...I was told if I told anyone he would go to jail, which means he knew what he was doing was wrong.”
She said Kearney told her he loved her. “But that wasn't love. I was being abused and I just didn't know it yet.” She said she had been left with “no dignity, no confidence and very insecure”.
The young woman said the sentence hearing marked a new beginning for her. Addressing Kearney directly, she said: “I hope you take the time to reflect about what you did to my life and the lives you destroyed. I'll never make apologies for how I chose to repair what you broke.”
Kearney put his head in his hands for much of the sentence hearing.
Passing down sentence on Friday, Ms Justice Mary Ellen Ring told the young woman that it is David Kearney who has lost his dignity, not her.
“The confidence and bravery required to tell about the abuse and go through this process shows she is stronger than she realised,” she said of the young woman, adding her good wishes for the future.
In relation to Kearney, the judge said he had engaged in “classic grooming” of a child that progressed to rape as he became “emboldened” and that he clearly knew it was wrong.
“Telling her he would get into trouble was transferring responsibility for his wrongdoing on to her in an effort to make her complicit in his offending,” the judge said.
His “lack of understanding and deflection” added to her concern that even at this stage, his appreciation for what he has done is limited, the judge said. “There is nothing to suggest (the abuse) would not still be going on if she hadn't told others.”
In mitigation, she noted Kearney's early guilty plea, his long work history and his lack of similar convictions. She set a headline sentence of 14 years, which she reduced to 11 and a half years.
She suspended the final 18 months of the sentence on a number of conditions, including that Kearney engage in a therapeutic programme for sex offenders and have no contact with the girl during his time in custody and for five years after his release.
She placed him under the supervision of the Probation Service for 18 months post-release.
Aidan Doyle SC, defending, said Kearney's relationship has broken down as a result of his offending. He said that at the time of the abuse, Kearney was abusing cocaine and alcohol and he was intoxicated for much of the period.
He has worked as a plasterer for the duration of his adult life and has two previous convictions for road traffic offences.
Mr Doyle said a Probation Service report before the court was “poor” and displayed that Kearney has shown little to no insight into the pain and damage he has caused to the complainant.
He asked the judge to take into account a letter of apology by Kearney which he handed into court and which he said demonstrated shame and his client's acknowledgement of the profound breach of trust he had committed.
A number of testimonials were also handed into court.
'Talk to your children': Gardaí warn that kids can easily be snared by online abusers
Detective Superintendent Michael Mullen (right) of the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau tells of his experience of the real-world impacts of online child sexual abuse as Det Chief Supt Colm Noonan of the Garda National Protective Services Bureau listens. Picture: Sam Boal/Collins Photos.
Detective Superintendent Michael Mullen has had personal experience of the real-world impacts of online child sexual abuse.
“I previously worked in another jurisdiction. I investigated an incident of sextortion where a young man was engaging with what appeared to be — what he thought was — an attractive young lady, but in fact wasn’t,” the officer with the Garda National Cyber Crime Bureau (GNCCB) says
“He then got blackmailed for a significant amount of money and, unfortunately, as a result of that he came to serious harm.”
That kind of extortion often involves the subject being cajoled to send intimate pictures of themselves which the exploiter can then threaten to publish if their ransom is not paid.
Mr Mullen explains that when the incident he described occurred in 2015, young men were being subject to sextortion, or cyber blackmail, at a rate of four or five a week.
“We’re 10 years on from when that happened. That is still occurring here, and in Northern Ireland, now.”
Given the extent to which technology has evolved over the past 10 years, it’s certain that such crimes will have increased exponentially.
At a briefing outlining the successes of An Garda Síochána in combating online child sexual abuse over the past two years, Det Supt Mullen’s colleague in the Garda National Protective Services Bureau (GNPSB), Detective Chief Superintendent Colm Noonan, said parents need to be fully aware of the world that exists online for young children and teenagers.
According to data released on Friday, 16 child victims of online sexual abuse have been identified and safeguarded in Ireland in the past 15 months.
Some 24 non-Irish child victims of online sexual abuse have been identified.
An additional 52 possible child victims of online sexual abuse have been identified globally. Mr Noonan said:
“We have to be able to speak to our kids to understand what they’re being exposed to. There’s huge potential in technology for online learning and development, but it really must be navigated carefully and with vigilance.”
With regard to how children and their parents can protect themselves online, Det Supt Mullen said there are “key messages” that should be taken on board, the first being that it is “imperative that children do not engage with strangers online”.
He said the message should be: “Don’t ever create or share intimate content, don’t give in to blackmail, and don’t tolerate any behaviour that would not be tolerated in the offline world, in daily physical interactions, just because it occurs online.”
He says the crimes that gardaí are seeing are international in nature, regardless of what is being said to a child online, given that developments in technology such as AI have rendered language barriers redundant.
Handling of instances of online sexual abuse in Ireland is the remit of both the GNCCB and the GNPSB, often working in tandem, with the latter broadly dealing in referrals from within and outside Ireland — from entities such as the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children — and the GNCCB focusing on identifying the children seen in online images and videos that are sent its way.
“Our job is to look at an image or video and say is there anything in that video — a football shirt, a book that’s got a German title, a bottle,” Det Supt Mullen said.
“So we’re looking for very small things in the images and the videos to say, ‘can we identify what country this child is in?’ And then try and narrow it down to the town that person’s in.
“And if we’re able to do that, which we’ve done on 24 occasions this year, we’ll send it to the country to say ‘we think this child is in Paris or in France.”
Working in this environment is taxing, he admits.
“This work is really challenging and difficult,” he said. But he added that “the people that are doing this work are very committed to it”.
He acknowledges that policing online crime since the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is “a race to the bottom”.
“We do recognise the positive value of [AI] as well, and there are significant developments in how law enforcement worldwide is using artificial intelligence to identify and to retrieve evidence and to target offenders online.”
Can the good keep pace with the bad?
“We will not give up. We take every single opportunity to try and protect real people as quickly as possible. So it is not for want of will, it is not for want of expertise,” Mr Noonan said.
“We’re constantly battling, but every law enforcement agency in the world will tell you that we are on the difficult side of this.”
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