SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
The Guardian Australia
September 8, 2017
By Calla Wahlquist
[Note: See the Royal Commission’s Redress and Civil Litigation Report.]
The woman’s ‘extremely difficult’ 13-month ordeal to receive a payout adds weight to calls for an independent redress scheme, says her lawyer
A Victorian woman who was sexually abused as a teenager says the process of getting compensation from the Catholic church was “unnecessarily agonising” and sent her to “an absolute state of unwellness”.
The woman’s revelation adds weight to calls for an independent redress scheme, the final framework of which is expected to be released in the coming weeks, following a proposal put forward by the federal government last year.
Therase Lawless (not her real name) was 14 when she was first approached by a teacher at her school in northern Victoria in the 1980s, who conducted a sexually abusive relationship with her from the ages of 15 to 17.
Lawless, now 50, did not acknowledge her experience as being sexual abuse until she was diagnosed with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder at 35.
“I had no idea that there was even such a notion of sexual abuse,” she said. “I was groomed by him to believe that I was a mature woman from the age of 15 … I did know that he was being horribly, horribly manipulative and abusive, and it was absolutely awful at the time, torturously awful at the time, but I believed it was my choice and I’d invited it and I was in an adult world. This was what an adult world was like.”
The man was investigated after being referred to Victoria police on the basis of Lawless’s evidence to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse in 2014, but the investigation was shelved without charge. He is still employed as a teacher.
Lawless said she sought redress under the church’s Towards Healing scheme as the last available avenue to seek justice and a formal acknowledgement of her abuse.
After a 13-month investigation, she was granted $110,000 in compensation on the grounds that the church did not accept any fault or acknowledge any wrongdoing.
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