ISRAEL
Haaretz
Aimee Amiga Apr 06, 2016
The well-known advocate for child sex abuse victims in Australia recently moved to Israel. He talks to Haaretz about continuing his mission here.
Manny Waks has shared his personal story of being sexually abused as a child so many times that he appears almost numb to the trauma. He is well-known in Australia, especially within the Jewish community, as a resilient survivor and an outspoken advocate for victims who has brought the issue of pedophilia to national attention.
But the poise with which he crusades on behalf of others belies his own lingering demons. As the number of people who confide in him grows, he says, it gets harder to make peace with his own past.
“It’s destructive,” Waks, 39, tells Haaretz in Ramat Hasharon, the central Israeli city where he and his family have lived since November, after being forced to leave Australia. “It’s literally destructive to deal with these things on a daily basis. There are days when I’m paralyzed, when I cannot work.”
When that’s not the case, Waks runs Kol V’Oz, an organization he launched here in Israel that serves as an umbrella group for institutions worldwide dealing with child sexual abuse in the Jewish community. It plans to offer training, best-practice materials, advocacy and research, to map the prevalence of child sexual abuse across global Jewish communities and the services currently available to victims, among other things.
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