AUSTRALIA
Telegraph
JANET FIFE-YEOMANS THE DAILY TELEGRAPH DECEMBER 13, 2013
ONE was lured into a sex cult formed by her parish priest and school chaplain. The other was sexually abused for years by her local priest who paid for her to fly to his church residence for sex.
Joan Isaacs and Jennifer Ingham were both women from religious families who grew up in the Catholic Church. They were teenagers, in that vulnerable stage of life. More importantly, they had put their faith and trust in the priests who had taught them passages from the Bible as they were growing up, such as: “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such of these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
To their abusers, the combination of trust and innocence made them the perfect victims.
Last week, both women found an inner strength behind their tears to speak publicly for the first time about how that trust was betrayed as they told their stories to the royal commission into institutionalised responses to child sex abuse sitting in Sydney.
Isaacs, 60, was drawn into a cult which her Brisbane parish priest Father Frank Derriman built around himself, giving his young victims the surname Brown after the Peanuts comic hero.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.