AUSTRALIA
The Canberra Times
June 20, 2014
Jack Waterford
Editor-at-large, The Canberra Times
It’s been a humiliating week for the Marist Brothers and the Royal Australian Navy, each associated with terrible abuse of young people in their charge, and forced, in public, to confront the fact that all too little was done about it, whether at the time, or after its existence became clear and the devastating effects were obvious.
The shame washes over more than the perpetrators. It also goes on those, including myself, who had some inklings of what was going on and did all too little about it. Who played some role in cultures of denial, or who, in relation to physical abuse, sometimes even pretended that it was character-forming or bonding.
The royal commission into child sexual abuse has provided an opportunity for many victims to describe what happened and to give witness to their suffering. But its focus has been equally on how abuse became to a degree institutionalised, and how, sometimes, even ordinarily good men and women were in denial of the problem or its impact, covered up to protect the reputations or assets of the agencies concerned, treated victims as enemies, and, often, unwittingly or otherwise, allowed known violators the scope to carry on violating more and more victims.
In the cold light of day, it often emerges that perpetrators were themselves victims of just such abuse as they later inflicted upon others, or that there were aspects of their physical, social and moral development that help explain, without excusing, the enormities of their behaviour. It was sometimes embarrassing, over recent weeks, to hear authority figures from the Marist Brothers seem abysmally ignorant of matters sexual, and completely inept in discussing or dealing with it. Some of this seemed like prevarication and probably was, because that order, like others, behaved for a while shamefully. But, I suspect, some of the institutional deafness, blindness and silence arose from religious cultures simply unable to cope with and confront human sexual imperfection, however much it was inured and experienced at dealing with other aspects of the growth and development of children and adolescents.
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