AUSTRALIA
Peninsula Weekly
Victims of child sexual abuse in government and church institutions have finally been given the chance to tell their stories at two major inquiries. LEE OPITZ looks at two men’s experiences at a Mt Eliza boys’ home in the 1960s.
MORE than 5000 victims of child sexual abuse in institutions, or those who bore witness or knew of cover-ups of abuse in institutions, are expected to give evidence to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse over the next year.
While an interim report is expected in June next year, it will be years before the inquiry is complete. But no matter how long it takes, victims say it is time that those who abused them, and through their silence those who abandoned them, are brought to justice.
“There is a quote that I heard somewhere: ‘Go forth, speak the truth, and fear nobody’. And that’s what I have to do,” says Len, a victim of institutional abuse in the 1960s and ’70s.
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