When Trust Is Broken: Two Innocent Teens Lured into a Terrifying Web of Abuse
By Janet Fife-yeomans
ONE was lured into a sex cult formed by her parish priest and school chaplain. The other was sexually abused for years by her local priest who paid for her to fly to his church residence for sex. Joan Isaacs and Jennifer Ingham were both women from religious families who grew up in the Catholic Church. They were teenagers, in that vulnerable stage of life. More importantly, they had put their faith and trust in the priests who had taught them passages from the Bible as they were growing up, such as: "Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such of these that the kingdom of God belongs.'' To their abusers, the combination of trust and innocence made them the perfect victims. Last week, both women found an inner strength behind their tears to speak publicly for the first time about how that trust was betrayed as they told their stories to the royal commission into institutionalised responses to child sex abuse sitting in Sydney. Isaacs, 60, was drawn into a cult which her Brisbane parish priest Father Frank Derriman built around himself, giving his young victims the surname Brown after the Peanuts comic hero
Charlie Brown and telling his "family'' that he was suffering from a fatal lung infection and had to have sex with them before he died. He is still alive. He not only fathered a child by one of the teenagers, but married one of his victims and went on to get a job as a social worker in Ballarat, Victoria, the commission was told. Ingham's sexual abuse by alcoholic Lismore priest Father Rex Brown, who was convicted in 1996 of possessing child pornography, began in the classroom and continued after she left school when he flew her from Sydney to his church residence in Tweed Heads for sex. Such was the extent of his "grooming'' of her that he even officiated at her first wedding. Royal commission head Justice Peter McClellan said last week that one of the questions he ultimately has to answer is: "Why?''
What caused sexual abuse in the Catholic Church - and indeed other institutions? Why did it happen? Why was it covered up? An emotional Ingham, 51, summed it up eloquently. "Why in the diocese of Lismore, then across all of Australia, then the world, why not one good fearless person could have stepped out against the depravities and wrongs that existed, including turning a blind eye to the abusers and moving the clergy from town to town to protect them and the church from being discovered,'' she said. The royal commission's current hearings are into how the church's controversial Towards Healing process worked, a supposedly-pastoral way to help victims but dogged by lawyers and the church's insurer, Catholic Church Insurance, who would block the extent of "apologies'' and silence the victims with secrecy clauses.
Both women went through the process, with differing results, but it was their bravery in telling their personal stories that attracted applause in the commission room and gratitude from survivors of child abuse like them around the country. It was the 1960s, 70s and early 80s, when sexual abuse was still secretive, when society did not want to believe it went on and the churches kept it quiet. Quietly spoken, Isaacs said she was 14 in 1967 and never wanted to turn 16 when Derriman lured her into his "Brown'' family along with another three girls. "He told me that he could have sex with me once I attained the age of 16, so I was terrified of turning 16 to the point of being suicidal,'' she said. Wiping tears from her eyes, she said that she didn't know it then, but today she realised that what he was doing was grooming his "family" when he talked about sex in the confessional, stroked her face and put his finger in her mouth when he gave her holy communion, got her to read the book Lolita and even had her attend the presbytery and pack his white Y-front underpants in a suitcase because he said he was going to hospital because "the end was near". He told her that if she loved God, it was OK to have sex with him because he was God's representative, she told the commission. Despite being convicted of indecently assaulting Isaacs in 1998 and jailed for 12 months - of which he served just four months - Derriman remains technically a priest and it was not until less than two years ago that the new Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, began moves to have him defrocked. Isaacs said that behind her motivation to report him to the police 30 years after the abuse was that she began work as a schoolteacher in the Brisbane archdiocese and discovered that Father Ron McKeirnan was deputy director of Catholic education and she knew he had sexually abused a number of children at the Sacred Heart Presbytery, including a friend of hers. In 1998, McKeirnan was convicted of child sexual assault, the commission was told. Then in 1996, she had seen Derriman for the first time in 30 years on the beach with a young woman and a child. "I felt traumatised by knowing that nothing had changed in his life and he was still interested in young women,'' Isaacs said. "I started to have terrible thoughts of my abuse and of the future of the child who was with him.'' But after going through the Towards Healing process, she felt traumatised all over again after reluctantly signing a confidentiality agreement for a $30,000 settlement, of which most went on legal costs, leaving her enough to buy $5000 worth of Coles-Myer shares and a sewing machine. Ingham said that she felt guilty because she had received a $265,000 settlement and puzzled over why there was such disparity. Her story was no less distressing. She said that she was just lucky to be alive after battling bulimia and depression, which Brown had known about. At times, she said it was difficult for her to speak because she had several operations on her face and mouth as a consequence of bulimia. Brown held her "captive'' for four years from 1978 to 1982, when she was aged 16 and 20. After she left school, he organised a waitressing job for her in Sydney and arranged for them to meet regularly at Sydney University Hotel in Glebe. He paid for her flights from Sydney to Tweed Heads. Talking about it at all had been tough, she said, with her brother sitting next to her in the witness box. "It is hard to expose yourself so intimately. I do need closure," she said. "I have come out of this process where Father Brown no longer rents a space in my head and I truly forgive myself with a real knowing it was not my fault."
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