Is Moral Outrage over Sex Abuse Creating Intellectual Vigilantism?

By Anne Barrowclough
The Australian
March 7, 2015

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/index.html?sourceCode=TAWEB_WRE170_a&mode=premium&dest=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/is-moral-outrage-over-sex-abuse-creating-intellectual-vigilantism/story-e6frg6z6-1227251913235&memtype=anonymous

WHEN I was an 11-year-old schoolgirl, one of my teachers was known for inappropriately touching his pubescent pupils. The parents all seemed to be aware of the teacher’s proclivities, but rather than going to the police they simply warned us that we should try never to be left alone with him.

I don’t recall being mishandled by the teacher and although friends have more unpleasant memories of him, none of us thought it was worth raising with the grown-ups. We just got on with our young lives.

Through the years I’ve hardly given that teacher a thought until this week, when a young woman called Lucy Perry told the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that 25 years ago she had been indecently assaulted by Ian Paterson, former headmaster of Sydney boys school Knox Grammar.

Perry claims that, when she was a 16-year-old schoolgirl rehearsing for a scene in a school musical, Paterson put his hand on her bottom and touched her genitals.

She reported the alleged indecent assault to police in 2009, when five teachers at Knox were arrested, and later convicted, but she didn’t want to bring charges.

Had it not been for the royal commission, her claims against Paterson might have stayed locked away in a police notebook forever. Instead, they have been aired before a national audience and, while she didn’t lay charges, will her evidence to the inquiry succeed in criminalising Paterson in our eyes? He has strenuously denied the allegations, but how many of us will ignore those denials and condemn him regardless?