AUSTRALIA
Broken Rites
By a Broken Rites researcher (article updated 5 January 2014)
A schoolgirl (named Joan) was sexually abused by a Catholic priest, Father Francis Edward (Frank) Derriman when she was 14 and 15. Later (when she was an adult) she was victimised again by the church’s controversial Towards Healing system. Meanwhile, this priest left his parish job and eventually gained a university position, supervising Social Work students whose careers might include (of all things!) child protection.
In December 2013, aged 60, Joan gave evidence at a public hearing of Australia’s national Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Joan explained how Towards Healing acted as a “front” for the church-owned insurance business, Catholic Church Insurances Limited.
The December 2013 hearings, which went for ten days, examined four examples in the operation of Towards Healing, and the Father Derriman case was one of these. Joan spoke forcefully from the witness box, later receiving a standing ovation from a large number of observers (including Broken Rites representatives) in the public gallery.
Joan, born in 1953, told the royal commission that, when she was aged 14 and 15 in 1967 and 1968, she was one of a group of teenage children abused by Father Frank Derriman while he was a priest of the Archdiocese of Brisbane and chaplain of the Sacred Heart Convent girls’ school at Sandgate in Brisbane. Derriman was then aged 28 and 29 years.
Father Derriman called the group the ”Brown” family after the Peanuts comic character Charlie Brown, giving each of them a new name from characters in the Peanuts comics.
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