AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Erin Parke
David Francis is not bitter, nor angry. He is simply sad for those who suffered abuse, and are still too scared to talk about it.
“It’s a pretty hard thing to deal with,” he said.
“When you start going back and talking about things, you’re going to bring up your past again, so what happens is it can affect your mental stability. It’s a hard thing to talk about.”
At the age of seven, Mr Francis was made a ward of the state and sent to the Beagle Bay mission, north of Broome.
There he says he was abused.
“Sexual abuse happened on the mission pretty common. Especially in the dormitories, there was sexual abuse going on there,” he said.
The 51-year-old plans to tell his story to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse.
But he is one of only a handful of people from the Kimberley who have expressed interest in doing so. …
Catholic church influence still strong
He says adding to the wall of silence is the huge influence the Catholic Church still exerts over Aboriginal communities in the north, with many retaining a genuine affection and loyalty to the nuns that cared for them.
In other cases, he says it is something more akin to Stockholm Syndrome, where people have a blind loyalty to the Church they grew up with no matter what.
“The people that have spoken out about abuse in the past, sometimes their own family would turn on them, ‘you can’t say that about the Church, be quiet’,” he said.
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