Royal Commission: Survivors Flee Hearing in Tears

By Catherine Armitage
The Sydney Morning Herald
December 10, 2013

http://www.smh.com.au/national/royal-commission-survivors-flee-hearing-in-tears-20131209-2z0ru.html

Les Johnson, 72, from Sydney, who grew up in orphanages in the Newcastle and Gosford area in the 1950s is pictured among protesters outside the Royal Commission.

Eyvette Parr comforts survivor of abuse Trish Charter (right), who was at St Joseph's Orphanage in Goulburn, outside the Royal Commission.

Barrister Peter Gray.

[with video]

“Let the little children come to me; do not stop them: for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs”.

At these opening words from the Bible, spoken by the Catholic Church’s barrister Peter Gray, SC, the hearing room at the royal commission into child sexual abuse erupted in anguish and anger.

Some cried out: “What an insult”, “What a joke” and “Good Lord”. Some walked out. Outside the room, sobbing and wailing could be heard.

Many, once small children, are now damaged adults because of  abuse at the hands of brothers and priests who were meant to be caring for them in Catholic schools and orphanages. They had come to see for themselves what Mr Gray said was a watershed in church and Australian history.

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In the church’s first appearances at the commission, Mr Gray acknowledged children had been abused;  that the crimes had been  covered up;  wrongdoers  protected and victims  disbelieved or treated coldly. He used words  and phrases like “indefensible”, “disgraceful”, “deeply ashamed” and “terrible wrongs”.

 He promised the church would co-operate fully with the commission and “ensure that nothing is concealed, or covered up, in respect of what church personnel did, or failed to do”.

Survivors have heard it all before; many did not live to hear it.   

Trish Charter was one who cried out and left the room on Monday. She said she was abused between four and eight years old and had her teeth pulled out at a Goulburn orphanage run by the Sisters of Mercy. Her sister Kathleen died of heart failure aged 39, in the 1970s after several mental breakdowns.

“I am here representing her and all the little children. Some of them didn’t even reach their teens because they were so damaged. It was not our fault,” she said.

The commission’s fourth case study, which started on Monday, will examine the Towards Healing process set up by the church to deal with abuse victims’ claims from 1997 onwards.  The church has acknowledged that Towards Healing has operated inconsistently, been overly legalistic and, “on one view”, insufficiently transparent and accountable.

Outside the hearing, victims have said the program had worsened their trauma, rather than alleviated it.

Four individual cases are to be examined. The first concerns Joan Isaacs, who was abused by Father Frank Derriman, chaplain of Sacred Heart convent school in Sandgate school when she was a teenager in 1968.

The second tells the story of Jennifer Ingham, who was abused between 16 and early adulthood by a Father Brown in Lismore diocese between 1978 and 1982. Two men to give evidence under the pseudonyms DG and DK were abused by Marist Brothers; DG aged 13 in Queensland and DK as a Marist Brothers college boarder.  

Senior counsel assisting the commission Gail Furness said the hearings would be the first inquiries into the Towards Healing program.

Sad litany of decades of institutionalised abuse 

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  Incomplete church data says 1700 people had participated in Towards Healing by 2013, and had been paid a total of $43 million by church authorities. The highest known individual payment was $850,000.
  
  



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  Three-quarters of the complaints related to alleged child sexual abuse between  1950 and 1980.
  
  



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  Sixty per cent of  abuse occurred in schools or in orphanages.
  
  



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  The Christian Brothers had the most complaints of any Catholic order, followed by the Marist Brothers and the De La Salle Brothers.
  
  



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  Of all the complaints, 43 per cent concerned religious brothers;  21 per cent involved diocesan priests and 14 per cent related to religious priests.