Newcastle royal commission hearing will reveal ugly truths

Newcastle Herald
August 1, 2016

http://www.theherald.com.au/story/4067550/there-will-be-darkness-before-there-is-light/

IT has been a long time coming.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will open its 42^nd case study at Newcastle Courthouse at 10am on Tuesday. For two weeks it is expected to hear evidence about how Newcastle Anglican diocese has dealt with child sex allegations over decades.

More significantly, it will hear evidence from individuals within the diocese, including senior clergy, about what they did, or didn’t do, when allegations were raised by children, and when those children turned to the church for support years later as adults.

There will be shocks, and evidence of cruel and callous treatment by people purporting to be followers of Jesus Christ. There will be grief for victims of child sexual abuse who have not survived to see this day, and grief from survivors for lives they would have lived – but for abuse that darkened their childhoods.

There will be anger. Since the first royal commission public hearing in September 2013, into dreadful systemic failures in Scouts, Hunter Aboriginal Services and the Department of Community Services that allowed Steven Larkins to sexually abuse children for years, there has been anger and outrage, and rightly so.

There have been too many abused children, for too long, and too many ugly secrets, for people not to feel anger when the truth comes to light.

There has also been extraordinary pain. In the letter he left before taking his life in July 2012, Hunter man and child sex victim John Pirona wrote “Too much pain”. His death was the catalyst for the Newcastle Herald “Shine the Light” campaign for a royal commission after more than two decades of reporting on child sexual abuse within churches in the Hunter region.

The royal commission is shining a light. While we should mourn the many victims of abuse who have not lived to see this day, we must acknowledge the royal commission is a painful necessity if we are going to protect children in future.

It is also worth remembering that within churches people are already fighting to change cultures that supported abuse. As Newcastle Anglican Bishop Greg Thompson said on his 500^th day as head of the church in the Hunter – “We can’t have mates looking after mates any more.”

Up to 30 perpetrators over four decades molested children within the Anglican diocese community alone. Now for the days of reckoning.