AUSTRALIA
ABC – The Drum
OPINION
By Judy Courtin
Decades after the crimes, the victims of sexual abuse by clergy in Ballarat continue to suffer at the hands of the Church, the law and the federal parliament, writes Judy Courtin.
The Royal Commission into institutional child sexual abuse has completed its first week of public hearings in Ballarat. They have been heartbreaking, harrowing and revealing. The hearings are focusing on the Catholic Church’s responses to allegations of child sexual abuse and the impacts on the survivors, their families and the broader Ballarat community. The commission’s brief is vast.
The evidence from 17 survivors, as well as testimony from the mother of a young man who committed suicide following sex crimes by a Catholic priest, has exhibited a period of time in the 1970s and beyond in Ballarat that is memorialised as evil. Witness after witness painfully described the brutal bashings and sex crimes they experienced as young boys by trusted and respected Catholic clergymen.
Most of these children were raped by up to three paedophiles. These children were wittingly shared around by a bunch of depraved criminals. But more was to come – when these children tried to tell of their horrors, they were not believed and were severely punished for speaking so reprehensively about God’s holy representatives on earth.
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