AUSTRALIA
The Age
[with video]
Catherine Armitage
Senior Writer
We are about to learn that what we trusted was not to be trusted. That children who should have been safe were not. That what we thought was an aberration confined to a few sick individuals was – is – widespread.
As the royal commission into child sexual abuse begins public hearings on Monday, experts, victims and the commission warn the stories that will come out will generate disbelief, outrage and anger nationwide.
We will learn that child sexual abuse happens not just in churches but wherever adults come into contact with children – from charities to daycare to sports camps, but especially in residential settings such as boarding schools and hostels. (It most often happens in families, but they are outside the commission’s terms of reference.)
We will hear that it spans fiddling and fondling (common) to violent, penetrative rape, even of little children (rarer). And the “monsters” are seemingly ordinary people. Many of the stories will relate to events long ago. But it is also clear, from victim accounts in private sessions held around the country since May, that “this isn’t as in the past as people might expect”, says commission chief executive Janette Dines.
Patrick Parkinson, a law professor at the University of Sydney, a witness to the commission and author of a book on child sexual abuse in churches, says: “We will face hearing stories which will shock us, which are evil in every sense of the word.”
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