AUSTRALIA
Brisbane Times
May 24, 2015
Warwick McFadyen
How odious they are. How pernicious their intent. They were not murderers, but surely they killed something precious in their victims. Something unique to each of their victims was crushed and in that horrible devastation of body and spirit came an unwanted bond with others: links in the chain of a callous cruelty and nonchalant indifference disposed and imposed on them.
They are the priests of Ballarat, of Maitland, of points far and wide, who snuffed out the light innocence of youth and the implicit trust the young have in adults. In its place grew, in many cases, a dark and nightmarish pit. From such depths these boys had to pull themselves out and go into adulthood and make a life for themselves. The boys became survivors of a casual monstrosity of perversion.
This past week the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Sex Abuse has been sitting in Ballarat. It will do so for the next two weeks. Last week victims gave the distressing details of the abuse they suffered and endured while school children. During the victims’ stories and from the evidence it became clear that survival had morphed into a relative term.
One abuse survivor, Philip Nagle, had attended St Alipius Primary School, and of the 33 boys in the grade four picture of his class from the early ’70s a dozen had died. Mr Nagle believed they had all killed themselves. The school “was a place where there was true evil”.
Another survivor spoke of a Christian Brother giving him a choice when he was 12 or 13, “the strap or sex education and I always chose the latter because I didn’t want to get belted. I should have taken the beltings”.
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