"No Justice" in Towards Healing Response
By Catherine Armitage
Three decades after the chaplain of her Brisbane convent school sexually abused her, Joan Isaacs saw him on a beach with a young woman and child. She felt “really traumatised” to see that Father Francis Derriman was “still interested in young women”. She had “terrible thoughts” about the future of the child he was with. So she decided, at last, in 1996, to take action. This was the man who stalked her in her teenage years. He stole her innocence, and her promise. He told her he was dying and she had to have sex with him first or he'd kill himself. He read Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to her to “soften me up for sexual contact”. He called her to the presbytery to pack his underpants in his suitcase for hospital. He “took me to isolated and unsafe places so he could molest me”, and stalked her when she tried to break away from him. He molested her “in my home, my bedroom, his car and the presbytery”, when she was 14 and 15. He molested her friends, too, and got one of them pregnant at 17.
In 1998 Derriman was convicted of indecently assaulting Mrs Isaacs. He served eight months of a one-year sentence. Then she turned to the church to which she'd stayed loyal, despite her awful experiences. She sought an apology, compensation and counselling through its Towards Healing process, set up for people just like her. Victims should be given “such assistance as demanded by justice and compassion” the Towards Healing guidelines said. But the church's facilitator in Mrs Isaacs' case admitted at the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse Tuesday that the process for her amounted to “re-abuse”, lacking in both justice and compassion. Mrs Isaacs had her “Towards Healing” meeting with church representatives in April 1999. After two years of fraught negotiations she got $30,000, most of it wiped out by costs. She got 10 sessions with a psychologist but had to repeatedly chase up the Brisbane archdiocese to get the bill paid. The protracted negotiations “had the effect of re-abusing Mrs Isaacs and it was certainly not a compassionate response”, admitted Mary Rogers, now director of the Catholic Church's Queensland professional standards office who facilitated the April 1999 meeting for the Brisbane archdiocese. Mrs Isaacs wept quietly in the hearing room at these words, comforted by her husband, Ian. Ms Rogers also agreed that there was no “justice” in Towards Healing in any legal sense. “The word justice is difficult to fit into this protocol," she said. The church's approach to Mrs Isaacs was dictated by its insurer, Catholic Church Insurances, the commission has heard. A letter from the insurer to Bishop John Gerry before the meeting said any apology should be in the form of “expressing sorrow” only and “avoid any suggestions the Archdiocese is itself responsible for the action of the priest”. Mrs Isaacs had been advised by a church representative to bring a lawyer to the meeting, although she had not planned to. The insurer's letter to the bishop said “It should be remembered that if Mrs Isaacs resorts to legal representation, she forfeits the right to your continuing to offer pastoral communication”. The insurer also dictated what to say if the question arose as to why the church's delegate at the meeting, Reverend Adrian Farrelly, had no authority to negotiate compensation. They were to “refer to the principle that the monies held by the Archdiocese are the property of the Catholic community, held in trust” with “formal procedures” governing their disbursement. The hearing continues.
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