PAEDOPHILES who use their "good character" to lure victims will be banned from using the same good reputation to get lesser sentences in court.

Attorney-General John Rau said it was contradictory that the traits which allowed paedophiles to gain the confidence of children and parents could also be used as a reason to limit sentences.

"Paedophiles should not escape harsh sentences due to the very character traits that enabled them to gain the confidence of children and their parents,'' he said.

"This is something I have been looking at and I will introduce legislation in April to address this."

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The state goes to the polls in March and the Government could be out of office by April, but the Opposition says it will take similar steps.

Opposition education and families spokesman David Pisoni said child sex offenders had "waived the right to plead good character as a mitigating factor in sentencing".

"A Liberal government will change the law to ensure sentencing of child sex offenders reflects this fact," he said.

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The move has been welcomed by child protection experts and Victims of Crime Commissioner Michael O'Connell.

The issue was also raised this week by a university study revealing that paedophiles were commonly allowed to use their community service and high standing as priests, court officials, youth workers, teachers and carers to win reduced sentences in South Australian courts.

UniSA researcher and study author Nicole Stevens said it found that SA should begin by adopting a 2009 NSW law that only allows paedophiles to use examples of their past good character as mitigation if they had not used that good character to fool victims into feeling safe, or to get them away from parents.

She said the law change was a "good start" but that all paedophiles should be discounted as being of "good character" during sentencing.

"Many persons of good character commit child sexual abuse and often use a good character persona to facilitate the offence,'' Ms Stevens said.

"Therefore, the uses of good character within child sexual abuse sentencing has somewhat of a contradiction.''

UniSA children's rights expert Professor Freda Briggs, who helped with the study, said it had exposed a contradiction in the law which defied common sense.

She welcomed the law change, which she said had been the first time an academic study had contributed to an immediate change in the field of child protection.

"So often a principal will come into court and say 'this is the best teacher we have ever had' or 'he volunteers to take sport' or 'he volunteers to go on camps','' Ms Briggs said.

"Well of course he did all that because 'he' was grooming the children with things like alcohol or drugs, or pornography, or was getting them alone or creating opportunities to abuse them.''

Ms Briggs said most paedophiles who abused children outside their own family used their status in the community or good reputations to gain access to their victims.

The change would require an amendment to the Criminal Law Sentencing Act of 1988.

The Act states that the court must consider the defendant's "character, antecedents, age, means and physical or mental condition'' when considering sentencing.

Mr Rau said he would introduce the legislation in April if the government was re-elected.

Victims of Crime Commissioner Michael O'Connell also welcomed the changes.

"To be blunt, if a child sex offender has offended by means of their good character or unblemished reputation, the courts should be forbidden from discounting the offender's sentence,'' he said.

"Offenders who have preyed on children and other vulnerable people are not 'good'.

"Some might have done good deeds, sometimes of enormous benefit to the public, but their claim to be of 'good character' does not exculpate their responsibility for their crimes, nor should it mitigate their punishment.

"Given the courts hold differing views on the relevance of 'good character' in sentencing adult child sex offenders, there should be a clear, unequivocal statement in law that reputation of good character is irrelevant.

"Paedophiles should be left in no doubt that their reputation and deeds of good character are not a safety mask to protect them for exposure to punishment that befits their crimes and the harm done."

Mr O'Connell said the belief that people were of "good character'' had often covered up the discovery of abuse in the past.

"With the benefit of hindsight, it is evident that known sex offenders were once looked upon as role models who were rarely suspected by authorities but once suspected were, too often, not proactively pursued, so they continued offending with impunity," he said.

Ms Steven's study of South Australian court sentencing transcripts between 1997 and 2012 found paedophiles used tactics to cash in on their standing in the community to contribute to the "minimisation, avoidance, and silencing'' of the abuse.

"The use of the mitigating factor good character should be abolished or have a constricted use in the sentencing of child sexual abuse,'' she said.

Ms Stevens said "good character" was supposed to only refer to the past practices of the defendant, but her study of sentencing transcripts showed this was not the case in courts.

"The predominant reference to the defendant's good character (in the transcripts) was in the present tense, in contradiction to explanations of good character within the legal literature, that it is the defendant's 'prior' good character,'' she said.

Ms Briggs said the false construction of paedophile teachers as good characters who had made a mistake was common in child sex cases.

Ms Stevens said lawyers acting for defendants also used other tactics to create a false sense of the good character of pedophiles.

"Through language that avoids naming a defendant as a person who stands before a court to be punished for the sexual abuse of a child, in addition to constructing this person as 'good' and one to be pitied, the victim, a person who has suffered greatly from the sexual abuse, is made invisible and furthermore, it constructs a consensual connotation in some of the cases,'' she said.

"In one case, child sexual abuse or any other term indicating the sexual assault of a child, was absent throughout the entire sentencing submission transcript, including comments by the judge and prosecution.''

Originally published as Rau: There are no 'good paedophiles'