Parents Have Every Reason to Be Enraged by the Pell Revelations

By Wendy Tuohy
Morning Herald
March 1, 2019

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/parents-have-every-reason-to-be-enraged-by-the-pell-revelations-20190301-p5116h.html

There is water cooler talk, and then there's water cooler rage, and the emotions expressed by parents following the revelation Cardinal George Pell was convicted of five counts of child sexual abuse are firmly in the second category.

At the school gate, on the sidelines at sport training and around workplace coffee machines, parents have bonded over the shock, pain and fury produced by the knowledge that someone in whom so much faith and trust was invested was found guilty of sexually molesting children.

That is not to say only parents experienced these responses, but for many mothers and fathers to whom I have spoken and listened, the emotional clout of the verdict was unexpectedly sharp.

George Pell at St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney.

The first response is primal: were that my child, and had I discovered this happened, I don't know how I could restrain myself. It can be confronting to discover the extent to which such a base crime plays to your most-base, protective instincts.

Just as powerful is the sense of empathy for, and immense anger on behalf of, the children upon whom a crime with the potential to detonate their safe journey to adulthood has been committed.

As senior public health specialists explained this week, of all the childhood abuses with potential to alter the course of a person's life, sexual abuse is the worst.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Handling of Child Sexual Abuse exposed a vast and horrifying array of sexual crimes by clergy against children as far back as the 1950s, but that Pell was found guilty for crimes that occurred as late as 1996 came as a fresh slap.

The knowledge we have failed these children, communally, while they were in plain sight in contemporary times felt like a punch.

Learning we could not protect kids from trusted authority figures operating in the middle of a busy cathedral in the heart of Australia's second largest city is nigh on overwhelming.

The "village" it takes to raise a child may be more fragmented than it was in the past, but sex offences against children by people presented as moral authorities are still felt as an assault on all of us.

On an individual level, you are forced to face your deeper anxieties around child safety: contemporary parents are so well-informed about the need to safeguard children's mental health, we put ourselves on the line to do so to the point of hyper, even over-vigilance. Events such as the Pell verdict make you realise just how powerless you really are.

Perhaps the greatest rage-generator of all, though, has been the contemptuous language used by both the cardinal, in his previous comments about child sex offences by priests, and by his eminent counsel, Robert Richter, QC this week.

The memory of words used by George Pell on the second day of his evidence to the royal commission, given by video-link from Rome exactly three years ago, is as fresh as if it happened yesterday.

Denying he knew of the activities of Australia's worst paedophile priest, Gerald Ridsdale (Pell's one-time housemate and a man for whom Pell had given character evidence), Pell said once he did hear about it, he considered it "a sad story (which) wasn't of much interest to me".

On Wednesday, his barrister, Mr Richter, described the crimes against children for which Pell had been convicted as "no more than a plain vanilla sexual penetration case" – of year 7-aged choirboys, who were on scholarships at top private Catholic school, St Kevin's College.

(Mr Richter subsequently apologised for those remarks.)

One of those boys suffered what his family now believes to be such severe PTSD after the abuse, he became a drug user.

This week, the family's lawyer said on their behalf: "What they saw was their son go down a spiral of drug abuse from a very young age, soon after the abuse occurred, him struggling with significant psychiatric symptoms and them not really understanding what caused that." And then they lost him.

So, just in case there is any doubt left about why parents are so white-hot with rage about what they have heard this week, there you have your answer.