AUSTRALIA
Sydney Morning Herald
December 10, 2013
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
Three decades after the chaplain of her Brisbane convent school sexually abused her, Joan Isaacs saw him on a beach with a young woman and child. She felt “really traumatised” to see that Father Francis Derriman was “still interested in young women”. She had “terrible thoughts” about the future of the child he was with. So she decided, at last, in 1996, to take action.
This was the man who stalked her in her teenage years. He stole her innocence, and her promise. He told her he was dying and she had to have sex with him first or he’d kill himself. He read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita to her to “soften me up for sexual contact”. He called her to the presbytery to pack his underpants in his suitcase for hospital.
He “took me to isolated and unsafe places so he could molest me”, and stalked her when she tried to break away from him. He molested her “in my home, my bedroom, his car and the presbytery”, when she was 14 and 15. He molested her friends, too, and got one of them pregnant at 17.
In 1998 Derriman was convicted of indecently assaulting Mrs Isaacs. He served eight months of a one-year sentence. Then she turned to the church to which she’d stayed loyal, despite her awful experiences. She sought an apology, compensation and counselling through its Towards Healing process, set up for people just like her.
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