Opinion: Leading Way for Justice
By Joanne McCarthy
ONE year ago exactly, on September 16, hundreds of people gathered in Newcastle and called for a royal commission into child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and other institutions. They stood outside Panthers up to an hour before the meeting started. They carried in extra chairs to cope with the numbers. They supported the family of John Pirona, whose suicide in July last year after "too much pain" from being sexually abused as a child by Hunter priest John Denham was the catalyst for the Newcastle Herald's Shine the Light campaign for a royal commission. They cried as Mr Pirona's widow Tracey and father Lou laid bare their grief. They cheered as Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox sent a message to NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell - that police alone could not achieve justice for Australian victims of historic child sexual abuse. And two months later the hundreds at Panthers on that day, the thousands more who supported the Herald's campaign, and the tens of thousands across the country who echoed the Hunter's rallying cry, achieved that goal. When Australia's first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, announced a royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse on November 12 it made history. A poll taken a few days later returned 95 per cent support for the broad national inquiry, despite the considerable cost. Today Justice Peter McClellan will open the first public hearings of the royal commission, only the second such national inquiry in the world. Sadly, but fittingly, it will feature a Hunter case. The royal commission will investigate how adults have failed children - the perpetrators, the people who knew, should have known or who turned a blind eye to crimes against some of the most vulnerable and powerless in the community. It will investigate ugly cultures within institutions which professed love and human compassion, but permitted appalling sexual, physical and emotional abuse. The institutions investigated will include churches, schools, community organisations, government departments and agencies, charities and organisations across the country. Painful truths will be exposed. But the royal commission, like the Victorian parliamentary inquiry and the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into Hunter child sex cases, is necessary. The Herald acknowledges the majority of child sex abuse cases are still committed within families, and by perpetrators known to their victims. To people who continue to raise that point as a criticism of the royal commission I say this: the sexual abuse of any child, anywhere, at any time - whether today, six months ago or five decades ago - is an appalling abuse by the powerful against the powerless, which happens to take a sexual form. It should not happen, ever. Children are entitled to feel safe, loved and respected, yet that doesn't happen in too many homes. What this royal commission will do is expose the lifelong damage caused by offences against children, and how that damage contributes to some of our most troubling social problems - crime, alcohol, drugs and problem gambling. It will send a message to children being sexually abused today - in their homes and at the hands of people they should be able to trust - that if they speak people will listen and respond, because even offenders from decades ago are being held to account. It will end for all time the idea that children should be seen but not heard - the ideal cover for perpetrators either within families or institutions. The Hunter Region can feel proud of its lead role on this issue. Victims and their families, many who have not survived to see this day, are entitled to justice, acknowledgement and the truth.
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