Child Abuse As Serious As Murder: Victims

news.com.au
February 9, 2015

http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/yeshivah-evidence-continues-at-vic-hearing/story-e6frfku9-1227214087922

A victim of sexual abuse will continue to give evidence to a royal commission hearing in Melbourne. Source: AAP

A CHILD sex abuse victim says the perpetrator has never apologised, and the Jewish community continues to endorse the convicted man.

THE victim, referred to only as AVB, has likened sex abuse of children within that community to murder.

"We have heard evidence from multiple rabbis that the perpetration of abuse is akin to murder," he said while giving evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse on Tuesday.

"So if we accept that the murdering of Jews is a crime and we never, never forget it ... we need to accept and hold up that the murdering of children through sexual abuse by our own is also a crime.

"Those individuals need to be - I'm not sure if the word is banished - but they need to be held in that regard as having perpetrated murder."

AVB told the inquiry his convicted abuser - Daniel Hayman - had yet to offer an apology.

Hayman had also continued to have the support of senior rabbis, despite some co-operating with the commission, AVB said.

"They continue to endorse him. This is no more than a coat of paint on a rotten building," AVB said.

Hayman was a camp chaperone at Yeshiva school, in Sydney, in the 1980s when he sexually abused AVB, who was then a young teenager.

He was convicted in mid-2014, and given a suspended prison term.

Less than a month later, Hayman's name was included on a list of sponsors at an important Jewish event.

"The honouring of Hayman was not limited to honouring him at that function, but the rabbis had rallied around him as the so-called victim in this process," AVB said.

An email chain including several rabbis also labelled AVB a "moser" - an insult for informers who betray the Jewish people.

AVB also said that since reporting his abuse, his family had been shunned and bullied by many in the community, and that this was continuing.

"It only reinforces the view that there is a fundamental cultural dynamic that hasn't been addressed ... the foundation is rotten to its core," AVB said.

AVB said there was a Jewish principle of avoiding negative comments that could damage the community, and this contributed to the lack of acknowledgment of child sexual abuse and suppression of those seeking to speak out.

The royal commission is in a second week of public hearings in Melbourne.