Sins of the Fathers Still Haunt Abuse Victims, by Martin Daly, The Age, August 5, 2011

Sins of the Fathers Still Haunt Abuse Victims

By Martin Daly
The Age
August 5, 2011

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/sins-of-the-fathers-still-haunt-abuse-victims-20110805-1ifmd.html

Sins of the fathers still haunt abuse victims

THERE'S a man walking around Ballarat with a haunted look in his eyes. His disposition is gentle but he's a tortured soul, attacked by demons he often cannot control. He sometimes cries in the streets when he sees happy children. He's also an alcoholic and dysfunctional, and he talks to the dead.

On Monday, as many in Ballarat prepare for a momentous day in their troubled lives, this man, who wants to be anonymous with the pseudonym Steven, will be talking to the dead again, moving from grave to grave in the local cemetery, whispering a message he has waited a long time to deliver.

"Please be at peace," he will say to his two brothers and his cousin. "This is the day of justice for you and for me."

Peter Curran, who took his own life after struggling for years to cope with sexual abuse inflicted by Christian Brothers.

Then he will go to a crowded and tense County Court in Melbourne where notorious paedophile Christian Brother Robert Charles Best, 70 - one of a ring of Catholic educators and a priest who sexually brutalised and terrorised many of the city's children over years - will be sentenced on 27 counts relating to sexual violence against children aged seven to 13.

The extent of the appalling child sexual abuse by Best, convicted paedophile Father Gerald Ridsdale, the then parish priest, Christian Brother Edward Dowlan, and others, largely at three local schools, may never be known. The multi-generational damage they have inflicted on families, including the spouses and children of their victims, is, however, decades later, almost palpable.

Ballarat, with its church spires and Catholic institution architecture, is a one-time bastion of Catholicism. But throughout the city there are now structural and psychological monuments to the sex abuse that has tarnished the church and damaged lives.

Convicted paedophile and Catholic Christian Brother Robert Best arriving at court. Photo: Ken Irwin

An alleged church cover-up of the crimes condemned the child victims to further torment, while more potent evidence of the abuse can be found in various graveyards where 24 young men are buried. They killed themselves, according to university researcher Detective Sergeant Kevin Carson, in the years after the abuse by Best and Ridsdale. Steven believes his brothers and cousin are among them.

Steven's life story, as with many of those who suffered at the hands of paedophile priests and religious institution educators, is a litany of self destruction. He fled Ballarat for many years because he couldn't bear the painful memories of the prolonged sexual abuse by Best and Ridsdale that started in grade 6. He was aged 10.

He started counting one day the school friends he knew from Ballarat catholic schools - St Alipius, St Paul's and St Patrick's College - he knew had been abused and who had killed themselves. He stopped at 13.

"The ripple affect [of the abuse] is huge in Ballarat … devastating," he says. In a victim's impact statement, he writes of the tears he sheds on seeing innocent and happy children because they remind him of what he has lost.

There is disdain among many for the Catholic Church because of the abuse in Ballarat. Others feel hatred. Steven is a spiritual man who believes in God. But he is no longer a Catholic. He would do almost anything to start again so he could avoid the abuse that has ruined him and he wonders what life would have been like had he been born a Protestant. "I would never have gone to that school," he says.

Stephen Woods, 50, the son of a policeman at Bungaree, just outside Ballarat, was from a very Catholic family of seven children. By the time Best, Ridsdale and Dowlan and raped and otherwise sexually abused him, he didn't want to have anything to do with the church either. When he returns to Ballarat now, he sees everywhere monuments to the abuse by violent and sadistic men. "That's where Ridsdale raped me," he points ''… over there is the school where Best got me.'' The abuse started in grade 6, when he was 11. Best once forced him and another boy to strip and fondle each other in front of him, and Ridsdale raped him when he went to talk to his priest about the abuse by others. Peter Curran's family believes the abuse from Best, Dowlan and Ridsdale that Peter suffered in Ballarat caused him to take his life with a knife. He used tell him wife, Colleen Curran, how much he hated the Catholic Church and that he wanted his children to never enter one. He started drinking at 14 and became an alcoholic and could be violent, which Colleen believed had to be linked to the abuse he suffered as a child.

He told her little about the abuse during their marriage but one night he saw a television program lauding the good deeds of Brother Edward Dowlan and, according to Colleen, ''he just went crazy", shouting at the television that Dowlan was an abuser. He immediately called police and demanded that something be done. Dowlan later received a minimum of six years' jail after pleading guilty to 16 counts of indecently assaulting 11 students under 16 between March 1971 and July 1982 at St Alipius, St Thomas's College, Forrest Hill, at St Patrick's College, Ballarat, and at Cathedral College, East Melbourne.

Peter was already on a downhill trajectory and the Dowlan television incident only made him worse. He drank continuously, but fought for the sex abusers, particularly his tormentor, Best, to be brought to justice. He had also been abused by Ridsdale.

Colleen learnt from Peter - who went to St Paul's, St Alipius and St Pat's - that he had fought back against his abusers, but the "men of God" then beat him up. He told her he had been beaten, aged nine, at home and accused of lying when he told his family what had happened at school. As an adult, he used go out at night with a sledge hammer to destroy church property and did damage at St Patrick's College and at St Alipius primary school.

Colleen Curran will not go to court on Monday to hear the judge sentence Best, described in the legal proceedings as evil, a bully and a pervert. Instead, she will tell her dead husband: "They got the bastard, finally."