AUSTRALIA
ABC News
By Peter Gunders
Child protection advocates hope a film dealing with one young woman’s battle to fight institutional cover up of abuse in Toowoomba will inspire others to tell their stories.
“I was brought up in an era where children had to be seen and not heard,” said author and lawyer Stephen Roche, for whom Don’t Tell is an intensely personal story.
Based on Mr Roche’s book of the same name, the film is the story of a Toowoomba school student, known only as Lyndal, her experience of abuse while a boarder at a prestigious Anglican school in the 1990s, and the legal proceedings that followed 11 years later.
“I think it’s a film about justice,” Mr Roche said.
The high-profile case has been credited by Bravehearts founder Hetty Johnston as an important step leading to the Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sex Abuse.
“If she wasn’t such a courageous girl all those years ago, we wouldn’t know what had occurred at this place,” Mr Roche said.
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