AUSTRALIA
Canberra Times
March 2, 2014
Jack Waterford
Editor-at-large, The Canberra Times
MY BROTHER, he’s got religion
He’s saving young ladies from sin
He’ll save you a blonde for a dollar
My God, how the money rolls in.”
Australians could hardly help but be shocked and appalled by recent evidence coming before the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse.
The incompetence, negligence and, sometimes effective enabling of abusing teachers in schools is bad enough, casting fundamental doubts about the stewards, the managers or the overseers. But how much more horrible to think that children in obvious need of the state’s tender care and protection – such as orphans in Salvation Army homes, and children made state wards because they were thought to be neglected and abused – being handed over, by our representatives to people who would neglect, and abuse them, physically and sexually, even more.
Thank heavens this could not happen today! Now we know about the risks and temptations of sexual abuse. We know about duty of care. We, or our modern representatives, would never put vulnerable people at risk. Enlightened people run our churches, parliaments, bureaucracies, and institutions. We can be sure the horrible epidemics are no more.
Or can we? It is of the essence of the horrors in the institutions that they represented the best practice of the days in question, endorsed at the time by the whole establishment. This is not to suggest consciousness of abuse – though many players were not so naive as to dismiss the possibility – but a certain blind eye. The sort, for example, some Australians have about conditions in our concentration camps.
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