AUSTRALIA
Eureka Street
Chris McGillion and Damian Grace | 22 July 2014
‘Reckoning’ by Chris McGillionIt is widely assumed that rules are the solution to transgressions such as those being investigated by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Rules without doubt are useful. They can be framed to aid compliance and deter wrongdoing. It is no argument against them to say that people will still offend, but if rules are more legal requirements than the expression of genuine morality, they will have limited effectiveness.
The most desirable form of social control is self-restraint — the work of morality. For a minority of people, morals do not have this effect, but pathologising normal conduct because we are fearful that deviants are impervious to morality and law is no way for free people to live. Indeed, moral counsel and tighter regulation are wasted because they do not work on the very people at whom they are directed. Instead, barriers are raised to protect children that distort normal responses and have their own abusive aspect.
When teachers in New South Wales, for instance, were forbidden to touch children, even to comfort them, because a few teachers had abused their office, it was the children who bore the consequences. The lesson teachers took from this regulation was that they were not sufficiently trusted to comfort distressed children. Because of an aberrant few, all teachers were regarded as suspect, and distressed children lost the comfort of a responsible adult.
This response was disproportionate and eventually came to be seen as such by the authorities.
Trust was nonetheless eroded not only by the actions of abusers but also by those seeking to protect children from abuse. Representing formal accountability as more reliable than personal trust actually destroys trust, first by making it very much a second best option when a system of checkable procedures is available, and then, as a consequence, suggesting trust is less safe than documented dealings.
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