Royal Commission: Abuse Victim Lays Bare Church's Healing Sham

By Catherine Armitage
The Newcastle Herald
December 9, 2013

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/1961367/royal-commission-abuse-victim-lays-bare-churchs-healing-sham/?cs=391



JOAN Isaacs was 14 years old and near the top of her class at the Sacred Heart Convent Sandgate in Brisbane when Father Francis Derriman got her to join his “cult-like” group of four children. 

She told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse he used the Peanuts comic as a way to bond the group. He called himself and the rest of them Brown after the comic’s main character Charlie Brown. 

To her knowledge three girls in their “Brown” group were sexually abused, including her, aged 14 and 15 in 1967 and 1968. One of the girls fathered a child to Derriman at age 17. 

Her voice sometimes breaking, Mrs Isaacs detailed how the priest told her he was dying of a fatal lung disease.

He told her “If you don’t have sex with me I will kill myself and you will always know that it was your fault”.

He said they would have sex when she turned 16. 

“So I was terrified of being 16, to the point of suicidal,” said Mrs Isaacs, a retired school teacher, now 60. 

Derriman was convicted of two counts of indecent assault of Mrs Isaacs in 1998 and served eight months of a one-year sentence. 

After the conviction she wanted an apology, counselling and compensation through the Towards Healing process, set up by the Catholic Church to deal with abuse victims’ claims.

She said the apology was not just for her abuse but for the Church’s failure to act against the priest even though she and others had reported him while they were still at school and subsequently. 

Mrs Isaacs was told by a Church representative to bring a lawyer to her Towards Healing meeting, though she hadn’t planned to. Because she was only allowed to have one person there with her, her husband could not attend.  

After two years of negotiations, she eventually got $30,000. She bought a sewing machine and $5000 worth of Coles-Myer shares with what was left after her legal and health expenses. 

Just last week Mrs Isaacs got a letter from the Archbishop of Brisbane Mark Coleridge releasing her from a deed she had been required to sign which forbade her from making “disparaging” remarks about Towards Healing. 

The letter was “too little, too late”, she said. 

Mrs Isaacs told the commission she had needed to stand up  “because I needed to be free of these chains before I die”.

When her Towards Healing ordeal was over, she and her husband told their parish priest they could no longer continue their many years of donations to its programs, because of the way they had been treated.

 

 â–  DETECTIVE Chief Inspector Peter Fox will take to the witness stand again this week  for the Special Commission of Inquiry into clergy abuse in the Hunter. 

Mr Fox’s public allegations of interference with investigations by the Church and senior police led Premier Barry O’Farrell to order the inquiry. 

Commissioner Margaret Cunneen SC will hear from Mr Fox tomorrow at a public hearing.