Today’s sentencing of Ron Brierley to 14 months imprisonment for possessing child sex abuse material has been welcomed by child advocacy group Stop Demand Foundation.

Stop Demand says that a prison sentence was fitting, both as a punishment and as a deterrent to others. It is also an acknowledgement of the impact and life-long harm done to his thousands of girl victims.

The three charges to which Brierley pleaded guilty in April related to over 46,000 sexualised images of girls mostly aged 11 to 12 but as young as four, a two-hour video of young girls in swimwear focused on their breast or genital area and a text file named “The Stepfather” detailing the sexual abuse of girls aged nine and 11. Fourteen other charges, involving thousands more images, were dropped.

Stop Demand’s founder and long-time law reformer on such crimes, barrister Denise Ritchie, says “Offenders like Brierley fuel an abhorrent trade that requires children to be sexually degraded, exploited and violated in front of cameras. His countless girl victims will carry a psychological burden for the rest of their lives. They are never free of the knowledge that predators like Brierley seek out and salivate over their abuse for their own sexual gratification.”

Ritchie says, “Child sex predators like Brierley need to feel the full force of the law. This is a demand-driven global trade. If there were no demand, there would be no supply.”

Ritchie also points out that as unpalatable as it might be to his friends, Brierley fits the classic criteria of a paedophile. It is not a requirement to have physically violated a child, rather it is having a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children, typically under 14 years of age. Brierley had a sustained sexual interest in pre-pubescent girls as evidenced in the thousands of images, video and text material in his possession.

Brierley’s sexual interest in young girls is not recent news. A biography published in 1990 reported that Brierley ‘enjoys encounters’ with teenage prostitutes in Thailand. His offending came to light in 2019 at Sydney airport, as he was about to board a flight to Fiji.

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