Sexual Abuse Victim Re-traumatised by Catholic Church Compensation Process

By Calla Wahlquist
The Guardian
September 8, 2017

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/sep/08/sexual-abuse-victim-re-traumatised-by-catholic-church-compensation-process

A Victorian woman who was sexually abused as a teenager says the process of getting compensation from the Catholic church was “unnecessarily agonising” and sent her to “an absolute state of unwellness”.

The woman’s revelation adds weight to calls for an independent redress scheme, the final framework of which is expected to be released in the coming weeks, following a proposal put forward by the federal government last year.

Therase Lawless (not her real name) was 14 when she was first approached by a teacher at her school in northern Victoria in the 1980s, who conducted a sexually abusive relationship with her from the ages of 15 to 17.

Lawless, now 50, did not acknowledge her experience as being sexual abuse until she was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder at 35.

“I had no idea that there was even such a notion of sexual abuse,” she said. “I was groomed by him to believe that I was a mature woman from the age of 15 … I did know that he was being horribly, horribly manipulative and abusive, and it was absolutely awful at the time, torturously awful at the time, but I believed it was my choice and I’d invited it and I was in an adult world. This was what an adult world was like.”

The man was investigated after being referred to Victoria police on the basis of Lawless’s evidence to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in 2014, but the investigation was shelved without charge. He is still employed as a teacher.

Lawless said she sought redress under the church’s Towards Healing scheme as the last available avenue to seek justice and a formal acknowledgement of her abuse.

After a 13-month investigation, she was granted $110,000 in compensation on the grounds that the church did not accept any fault or acknowledge any wrongdoing.

The process was “soul-destroying”, Lawless said. It involved two psychiatric evaluations, which she said “sent me to an absolute state of unwellness”.

“Every step along the way has been unnecessarily agonising,” Lawless told Guardian Australia. “For me, maybe for a lot of people, but for me, my whole experience was already on the record … and I had to tell my story so many times. I really had to fight so hard with those lawyers to be taken seriously enough to get a payment from the church.”

The scheme began in 1997 in response to investigations into the cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church, which also sparked the Melbourne response.

According to the royal commission, the church made 881 compensation payments totalling $42.5m through the Towards Healing scheme between 1997 and 2014, with an average payout of $48,300. A spokeswoman for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference said that including data released in February, the total number of successful claims was 1,177.

Lawless’s legal representative, Slater and Gordon public liability lawyer Barrie Woollacott, said the process was “extremely difficult” and should give way to a less adversarial independent national redress scheme, as proposed by the royal commission.

“Hopefully [it] will provide a much more streamlined manner in which victims could receive redress and that will be a great step forward, because traditionally it has been, if not directly adversarial, then a little too adversarial,” he told Guardian Australia.

The Catholic church has supported recommendations for a national redress scheme, and a spokeswoman for the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference acknowledged its Towards Healing scheme faced “legitimate criticisms”.

“The church readily accepts that Towards Healing is not a complete, or perfect, solution for what is a complex and very difficult issue, and that it will inevitably have shortcomings from the perspective of some victims,” she said.

“Towards Healing has attracted criticism, including that it can re-traumatise victims, as can any process which attempts to address child sexual abuse. The church accepts this and other criticisms, and has over the past two decades, since Towards Healing was introduced in 1996, undertaken several reviews designed to improve and strengthen the program … Despite the legitimate criticisms of Towards Healing the royal commission has heard, for many people, it has been a source of compassion and support, which has been of real value to them.”

This week the Anglican church announced plans to set up an independent company to handle child sex abuse complaints and compensation.

Its royal commission working group chairman, Garth Blake, told the Australian it had not made a final decision on whether to join the proposed national scheme.