SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
The Australian
September 30, 2017
By Richard Guilliatt
[To download the counselling guidelines discussed in this article, visit the Blue Knot Foundation. The Royal Commission reports mentioned in the article are Empirical Guidance on the Effects of Child Sexual Abuse on Memory and Complainants’ Evidence and Redress and Civil Litigation. This article also references ‘I hated myself for the things I’d done as part of the abuse’, by Tim Elliott, The Sydney Morning Herald, November 19, 2012. See also our cache of this article: ‘Those events never happened’.]
She’s a highly influential activist for childhood trauma survivors. But questions are being asked about Cathy Kezelman’s own shocking story of abuse.
For Dr Cathy Kezelman, the past two decades have been tumultuous indeed. In late 1998, at the age of 44, she abandoned her demanding career as a Sydney GP after suffering a shattering breakdown following the death of her 18-year-old niece in a car accident. In the years that followed, her mental state seesawed wildly between bedridden clinical depression, terrifying panic attacks and flights of mania so severe that she once frenziedly hacked her garden to pieces with a saw and secateurs. At her lowest ebb, Kezelman would drive repeatedly from her home in the city’s affluent eastern suburbs to the nearby sandstone clifftops of The Gap, a notorious suicide spot that looms high above the Tasman Sea, where she would stand for hours at the safety rail “pondering my demise”.
In 2010, Kezelman revealed the source of her anguish: in a memoir entitled Innocence Revisited she wrote that she had been violently sexually abused from early childhood by her father, a former Brisbane schoolteacher, and by a group of sadistic paedophiles led by her paternal grandmother. The abuse was so traumatic, she wrote, that her mind had fragmented into multiple personalities, a condition that had been cured with the help of a gifted and patient psychologist. In numerous interviews to promote Innocence Revisited, and in her role as head of the advocacy organisation Adults Surviving Child Abuse (ASCA), Kezelman emerged as a compelling figurehead for survivors of childhood trauma. The NSW prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC hailed her courage, and the noted child development expert Professor Freda Briggs lauded her book as “a testament to human resilience”.
Today Kezelman is the most influential child abuse activist in the country. Her organisation, now called the Blue Knot Foundation, is regarded as the peak body representing adult abuse victims, and her work there has earned her an Order of Australia. Justice Peter McClellan, head of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, calls her an “old friend”, and the commission has strongly endorsed Blue Knot’s work. In her roles as a director of the Mental Health Co-ordinating Council of NSW and president of Blue Knot, she co-wrote the counselling guidelines that are being used to train thousands of staff in sexual assault clinics, mental health wards and counselling centres around the country. Most recently she was appointed to the panel that will administer the proposed $4 billion redress scheme to compensate victims of institutional abuse.
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