AUSTRALIA
The Age
May 20, 2015
Konrad Marshall
Senior writer
The stories being heard in Ballarat are gruesome and humiliating and raw, and have been described by one victim as “the unseen carnage.”
But that characterisation is not true for everyone – and certainly not for the front-line workers who deal with sexual abuse in this community every day, all year long.
Definitely not for Shireen Gunn, manager of the Centre Against Sexual Assault in Ballarat.
Gunn has listened to the first two days of testimony at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse, and the sadness is all too real – and sadly all too familiar.
“This is what we have witnessed for the last 20 years. They are survivors of war – of abuse they could not escape,” she says. “This inquiry is the external realisation of what we already know. But the fact that these guys can get up and give these graphic details and tell their stories – it’s just a huge achievement.”
Gunn grew up here in a large Catholic family. Her dad was a horse trainer, and her mum a mother to seven children. The girls went to Mary’s Mount and the boys to St Patrick’s. She started her career as a primary school teacher.
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