Heads of Bermuda's various Government Ministries and law enforcement agencies gathered together yesterday in an effort to find solutions in dealing with sexual offenders.

Nearly two dozen people, including Public Safety Minister Paula Cox, Commissioner of Prisons Edward Dyer, Police Commissioner Jean-Jacques Lemay and Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner, met at the Bermuda College to take part in the one day conference.

The purpose of the conference was to communicate ideas and solutions in treating sexual offenders in anticipation of changes to the Criminal Code Act 2000.

The conference was mediated by David D'Amora and Robert Bosco, both experts in the field of understanding sexually deviant behaviour.

Both were invited to Bermuda by Mr. Dyer as he believed there was a need to deal with the problem collectively and not separately.

"It puts in place a mechanism that allows us to manage sex offenders post conviction,'' Mr. Dyer said. "The principle reason is to sort out issues of collaboration. We all have to be saying the same thing.'' Mr. Dyer noted that the conference was a first step to getting the Police, judicial, prison and probationary processes on a level of agreement.

He said their joint effort was crucial in setting up a foundation to assist in the amending of legislation.

"We as stake holders have to collaborate to achieve the objective of legislation and this meeting gets us moving to what we need to do,'' he said.

One of the conference's main focuses was to address the "barriers'' in dealing with sexual offenders.

And Mr. D'Amora pointed out that community involvement and communication between Ministries was key to helping in the understanding.

Mr. D'Amora added: "I've learned that to really manage a sex offender appropriately it requires a cohesive effort. Over the years all the individual groups have gotten very good at responding to issues. But no one department had the complete answer.

Yesterday's gathered group will eventually hand pick senior members from each of the Government departments to form a team which will look to make further decisions to help fine tune the legislation.