AUSTRALIA
Telegraph
MIRANDA DEVINE THE DAILY TELEGRAPH SEPTEMBER 18, 2013
IN the lavish corporate environment of a brand new, no-expenses-spared federal bureaucracy on the 17th floor of one of the city’s most prestigious office buildings, the harsh reality of child abuse seems even more surreal.
This is the setting of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse which began its first days of hearings in Sydney this week.
The clear voice of the first witness rang out in the hushed hearing room like a whipcrack from another world, in which pedophile monsters prey on helpless children while cowardice, uncertainty, or something else prevents the adults in charge from stepping in.
Witness AA told of being sexually assaulted by pedophile Scoutmaster Steven Larkins at age 12 in 1992. He suffers depression, bipolar disorder, and sexual dysfuntion as a result. Witness AC became Larkins’ victim at 11, and became a hard, angry person who trusts nobody, “a shell of the person I was.”
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