AUSTRALIA
The Australian
Dan Box
From: The Australian
November 18, 2013
EMILY was eight days short of her third birthday when she was taken from her parents by a magistrate in Bowral, in the NSW Southern Highlands, and “committed to the care” of the state government, court records show.
Despite her parents’ desperate attempts to get her back, and her own struggles to tell government workers what was happening, Emily (not her real name) was placed with a foster father who raped her repeatedly for years.
At the time, she feels, nobody listened. “The pain never really goes away,” says the 54-year-old, who now lives in Innisfail, in far north Queensland. ” Recently I have been told that I have a meeting with the royal commission. I felt relief, sheer relief someone is going to take notice.”
GRAPHIC: Scale of the task
Today, the federal Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse begins the first of two major public hearings, not into Emily’s case itself, but into the thing she says later saved her life – the church.
Many within the two denominations facing investigation, Anglican and Catholic, expect the evidence to be an ordeal. Indeed, they say, it needs to be if these institutions are to find redemption after what has taken place.
Explicitly, no one organisation will be the focus of the royal commission’s work. At the time it was established, last November, the then prime minister Julia Gillard said: “This is a royal commission that would be looking across religious organisations, as well as state-based care and into the not-for-profit sector.”
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