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Statement by Joan Katherine Isaacs about royal commission report
The Guardian
February 11, 2015
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/feb/11/statement-by-joan-katherine-isaacs-about-royal-commission-report
A victim reacts to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse report into the Catholic Church response, including Towards Healing
I take this opportunity to thank the royal commission for exposing the true nature of my Towards Healing process. Towards Healing was introduced in 1996 by the bishops and religious institutes of the Catholic Church of Australia under the appearance of bringing healing to those affected by clergy sexual abuse. I entered this program in 1999 having already achieved a conviction against my perpetrator the previous year. The royal commission has shown that the Catholic Church of the archdiocese of Brisbane departed substantially from the undertakings they gave in their Towards Healing document. It is now public knowledge that the Catholic Church invited me into a situation which brought me more pain and suffering.
I am extremely grateful to the royal commission for upholding the finding on “justice and compassion” in my case. The Catholic Church in its protocol, Towards Healing, gave the community an undertaking that victims would be treated with justice and compassion. The church also asked that they be judged on the way that they adhered to their documented principles and procedures. Despite that, “the church parties said that no accepted or objective meaning of either ‘justice’ or ‘compassion’ was proposed or established and it was necessary to establish, ‘by evidence’, what is meant by and required by ‘justice ‘and ‘compassion’ before any adverse finding could be made that there was a failure to meet those standards.”1
The royal commission did not accept this argument. In their report the royal commission stated: “Towards Healing commits to the Catholic Church in Australia, and its various formations, to a ‘just and compassionate’ response to victims of child sexual abuse. It is the ordinary way in which readers of that public commitment will understand it that matters. That is the standard to which the formations of the Catholic Church in Australia and its personnel are accountable.”2
The royal commission has found that the Catholic Church did fail the test of “justice and compassion” in its treatment of me in Towards Healing. In particular, the Catholic Church was not just or compassionate in its silencing of me. The Catholic archdiocese of Brisbane took punitive action against me by silencing me from talking about my abuse or my Towards Healing experiences with family and friends. This was done despite the fact that the Catholic Church, through its Towards Healing protocol decreed that “no complainant shall be required to give an undertaking which imposes upon them an obligation of silence.”3 The commission’s report records Father Spence as saying, “we should not bind a person not to speak about something that has had such a grave effect on her life.”4
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