‘I was so distressed I just accepted the money’: sex abuse hearing

AUSTRALIA
WA Today

April 29, 2014

Aleisha Orr
Reporter, WA Today

Men who were victims of sexual abuse as children while in the care of the Christian Brothers have told a public hearing in Perth that they not only had to go through the trauma of abuse but also the “traumatic” process of trying to receive compensation.

On Tuesday, a man known to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse as ‘VV’ described sexual and physical abuse he experienced at Bindoon Farm School.

He said he “could not stop trembling” after the first time he was raped by one of the brothers, two weeks after arriving at Bindoon Farm School in 1954 at nine years of age.

VV said the abuse by brothers, priests and other boys continued until he left Bindoon in 1961 but he could not move on from what happened to him.

“People say you can get on with it, lift yourself above it. I tried to do this and I thought I was being successful but always… always in your mind there is the belief that you don’t deserve anything good,” he told the hearing.

VV said that he did not take part in a class action that many others took against the Catholic Church over the abuse because at the time he “just didn’t want to be involved”.

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