AUSTRALIA
Border Mail
Nov. 15, 2013
DENNIS Hayes doubts child sexual abuse victims will ever get over the horror.
The recent public scrutiny of institutionalised child sexual abuse, he said, would at least give them a degree of normality.
A big part of that process was the apology — four years ago tomorrow — from then prime minister Kevin Rudd to the “Forgotten Australians”.
These are the roughly 500,000 children who found themselves in orphanages or church-run or state homes between 1930 and 1970.
Mr Hayes does not want to reveal his own story, aside to say that growing up in 11 different institutions qualified him as one of “the forgotten”.
The apology, the federal government’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and the Victorian Parliament’s inquiry into clergy child sexual abuse were important steps in helping victims, he said.
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