Sexual Abuse Victims Want Their Voices Heard

By Rob Hulls
Brisbane Times
August 22, 2014

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/comment/sexual-abuse-victims-want-their-voices-heard-20140821-106ohx.html

This week the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse turned its attention to the Melbourne Response - a process established by the city's Catholic Archdiocese to address the sexual abuse complaints accumulating against the church. Like much of the evidence presented to the Commission, the hearings included stories of lives and trust destroyed – shattered not only by individual perpetrators, but by the obfuscation and bellicose approach of the responsible institution.

Witnesses spoke of being discouraged from reporting to police; and of the distress of having their allegations accepted for the purposes of compensation offers, yet being told that these same allegations would be strenuously defended should they seek instead to go to court. Certainly, sexual assault complainants are often met with a theatre of evasion – from denial to legalistic defences which trivialise the complaint or disparage the complainant; from responses framed only in terms of compensation, to settlements which prevent victims from speaking out.

Startlingly, however, this week's hearings also revealed that the Catholic Church has spent around $17 million on administering this process – an equivalent sum to the total it has paid out to approximately 350 victims whose complaints it has accepted. These payments have averaged a modest $30,000, with a cap at $50,000 (more recently raised to $75,000), yet the Independent Counsel who determined the complaints has been paid $7 million since being engaged in 1996.

This approach is obviously out of kilter with the community's expectations – with as much invested in shielding the church's reputation as in supporting those who seek its help. Yet too often this is the case in the wider adversarial process – the elaborate series of hoops which any claimant must jump through obscuring the advantages of bringing the claim. This means that, although Archbishop Denis Hart is now considering a further review of the Melbourne Response's compensation cap, as well as whether past cases should be re-examined, we need to ask whether tinkering at the edges of institutional responses is ever sufficient.

Victims of institutional abuse need more than this, particularly as they can rarely rely on the criminal justice system for an adequate response. In fact, estimates suggest that less than one per cent of all incidents of sexual assault result in a successful prosecution in Victoria, the lapse of time and private settings in which these crimes occur making convictions scarce. The civil court process, meanwhile – though involving the potential for significant damages awards – has restrictive time limits, baroque procedure and vast expense attached, founded on a combative approach which locks parties out of genuine resolution.

As it examines the benefits and pitfalls of various redress schemes, it is therefore my hope that the Royal Commission is contemplating an entirely new regime – one which throws off the constraints of legalism and offers a framework which facilitates the restoration of lives and the prevention of future harm instead. In other words, systemic wrongs need a systemic response, with the processes which attempt to address this wrong as restorative as their potential results.

This means that a best practice abuse response framework must be victim-focused; independent of the relevant institution's internal processes; transparent and reviewable; non-legalistic; and, crucially, multi-faceted - with avenues for referral to police and prosecution agencies, disciplinary procedures, payment of reparations, provision of support services, and the potential for restorative engagement. Importantly, it must be properly funded and not be exclusive of other avenues of redress, such as existing formal mechanisms.

More than anything, it must recognise the rights and humanity of the complainants – attempting to repair the damage caused and to restore victims to a place of agency and control. Certainly, the Centre for Innovative Justice's work regarding restorative responses to sexual offending in the criminal justice sphere emphasises how important victims find it to have their experiences acknowledged, while the Defence Abuse Response Taskforce has also observed that one of the most worthwhile aspects of its Restorative Engagement Program involves the shifting of the victim's status from someone who has been marginalised by the institution, to one who is recognised and valued.

Giving evidence about his own experience with the Melbourne Response, Paul Hersbach explained that what he wanted was purely for his existence and suffering to be acknowledged – for the Church to show compassion, and for someone to call and say "Hi Paul …how are you and your family these days? Can I do anything to help?" This simple gesture may have enabled the Melbourne Response to indicate the legitimacy of its concern - that it was prepared to keep listening and to go the extra mile. Regrettably, the architect of this process, Cardinal George Pell, seems to have been prevented from making an equivalent gesture - giving his own evidence from the enclave of the Vatican, rather than appearing before the Royal Commission himself. Though we may look with hope to future innovation, then, it seems that - for now - that extra mile may have to wait.