Paedophiles should be banned from travelling to Asia, says charity founder Fr Shay Cullen

Paedophiles should be banned from travelling to Asia, says charity founder Fr Shay Cullen

For Father Shay Cullen, Kieran Creaven is just another paedophile. He is just one of hundreds of men from Ireland who have visited the Dublin cleric’s adopted home country of the Philippines with the sole purpose of sexually abusing children, often in conditions of squalor and extreme poverty.

For decades, the priest has made it his business to rescue these children. But the crimes Creaven, a former RTÉ producer, committed in the Philippines weigh heavily on his mind. Because the young girl Creaven was twice filmed sexually abusing, while a baby lay on a bed nearby, has never been identified.

“Those children haven’t been found, they are out there still, most likely still being abused,” said Fr Cullen.

“Why wasn’t more done to compel Kieran Creaven to tell gardaí how he found those children? He didn’t just get off a plane in the Philippines, bump into someone who took him to a house to abuse children. It was well planned,” Fr Cullen said.

“He would have met a pimp online who facilitated his abuse. But we do not know who that person is. We need to know. Enough was not done to extract that information from him. Yes, Creaven is now in prison. But those children are still out there. Saving those children is my concern and should be everyone in Ireland’s concern.”

Fr Cullen set up the People’s Recovery Empowerment Development Assistance Foundation (Preda) in 1974 to help child victims of former President Ferdinand Marcos’s military regime.

His charity has a legal right to rescue children who it can prove are being sexually exploited or abused. Right now, there are 46 girls in Fr Cullen’s Preda Girls’ Home. Many of them were being raped or sexually abused by family members, or being handed over to paedophiles like Creaven to be abused. The youngest girl in his charity’s care is six years old.

Scream therapy has proven very effective for girls and boys. And Fr Cullen wants Creaven to be made to watch videos of these children releasing all the pain and suffering that sexual abuse has had on their lives.

“Scream therapy is what it says on the tin,” he said. “The children are encouraged to just let it out, all their pain and hurt over their abuse. It is done in one-on-one therapy with trained professionals and in group therapy.

“Paedophiles like Creaven, they should be forced to watch these videos. Let them see the damage they have done. They convince themselves somehow that these children they abuse are not left damaged in any way. This would show Creaven the reality of the damage he has done.”

On December 3, Kieran Creaven was jailed for 10 years for a range of sexual crimes against children in three countries.

A garda investigation uncovered a man with an extreme and unrelenting appetite for paedophilia; a predator who hid in plain sight with his high-profile job in RTÉ, targeting almost 100 children on social media. His modus operandi was to try to manipulate youngsters online by boasting that he worked in TV in a bid to impress them. At the same time, he was paying people in the Philippines to sexually assault children so he could watch.

It didn’t end there. He flew to the Philippines in October 2014 to abuse children. He kept two videos of these crimes on a micro SD HD card.

He took this memory card with him to Leeds in November 2017. The police found it when they searched him after the vigilante group Predator Exposure set him up in a sting operation, after he attempted to meet who he thought was an underage girl for sex.

The first video shows Creaven sexually abusing a girl who is aged between 10 and 12 on a bed. An adult, another child and a baby can be seen in the room as the abuse unfolds.

Gardaí shared these videos with police in the Philippines but the children have not been found.

For some of Creaven’s other victims, there was a better outcome. It was established that he was communicating with women online via Skype messenger and sending them money via MoneyGram, PayPal and Western Union.

The payments were for the provision of children for Creaven to sexually exploit. The names and addresses of these women were identified and the information was shared with the Philippines police. They carried out a number of searches and rescued five children.

Creaven’s crimes against children followed a predictable pattern, according to Fr Cullen.

“In many ways, he’s a typical abuser. His behaviour escalated. He found people on the internet, paid them money to watch others sexually abuse children. Over here, the pimps call it a ‘show’. So Creaven would have found people online, who would have offered him a ‘show’ with girls,” he said.

“Then he would have told them what age he wanted, and they can even get him babies if that’s what he wants, which they did. He sends $100 (€88) or something similar over Western Union and he gets these little girls to be his sex slaves and watches them being abused. But that wasn’t enough for him. He couldn’t resist coming over here and physically abusing children himself.”

The 77-year-old south Dublin cleric, who has lived in the Philippines since 1969, would have preferred the Galway native to have been put on trial in the Asian country.

“His 10-year sentence? Of course that is not enough. He abused children here so I believe he should have been tried here. He would have got 30 years to life for his crimes. And he would not have liked the prisons here.”

Australia recently passed a law banning convicted paedophiles from travelling to South East Asia, and Fr Cullen has been campaigning for the rest of the world to follow suit.

“There is only one reason a convicted paedophile comes over here, it is to abuse children. Ireland and other countries say it would be a breach of that person’s human rights, that it is an impossible thing to do. But the pandemic has shown us that it is in fact straightforward to ban travel when they want to.”

More than 1,000 men from Europe travel to the Philippines every year to sexually abuse children, says Fr Cullen.

“Creaven is just the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of men in Ireland have visited the Philippines over the past few years to do exactly the same thing.”

Preda has established five homes for abused children. The children receive counselling and other supports from trained professionals. The charity also initiates legal cases against the children’s abusers, and averages 16 convictions a year, resulting in many life sentences for rape. It currently has 35 legal cases ongoing against child sexual abusers.

“We are always so busy,” said Fr Cullen. “There are so many children out there who still need to be rescued. Unfortunately, there are a lot of Kieran Creavens still out there too.”