SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
ABC News Online
By Louise Milligan
A man who was raped and beaten by priests and brothers as a 12-year-old says he felt like a beggar when he asked the Catholic Church for money to pay for medical bills for treatment of the mental and physical illness he suffered as a result of his abuse.
Russell Clark is just one of many survivors of abuse who signed deeds of release, which prevent them from taking further legal action or requesting more compensation.
He was repeatedly raped and knocked unconscious as a schoolboy by priests and brothers at Salesian College in Adelaide in the 1960s.
“You’d go to bed at night crying and scared, you lived in terror,” Mr Clark told 7.30.
“Because you knew that if you said anything, they’d just beat you up.”
Catholic Church bodies are under fire for sticking to this and other historic settlements, signed with survivors of clergy child abuse for “pathetic” compensation sums despite the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses To Child Abuse and the church’s own bodies recommending they be scrapped in light of changes to the law.
“People in the past, hundreds of thousands of them, have had to sign these deeds for pathetic amounts of money — $20,000, $30,000, $40,000,” lawyer Judy Courtin, who represents dozens of clergy abuse survivors including Mr Clark, told 7.30.
By contrast, in 2015 the Victorian Supreme Court awarded its largest ever damages payout to a survivor of institutional abuse — in this case, in an Orthodox Jewish school — for $1.2 million.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.